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It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Block

by csomar 4y ago

It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will shine: - Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments. - Healthcare records. - Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable. - Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects". - Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process. - Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss. - Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects. Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this. It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.

throw827474737 4y ago
Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??
- csomar 4y ago
  Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable. Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
  - orobinson 4y ago
    I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Healthcare records frequently need to be modified (e.g. a test was done incorrectly and needs to be voided). Sure, you can stick another entry in there saying "modify this other entry", but then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain. All the caching/indexing optimizations I can think of to make this not a complete nightmare also break all the data privacy and RTBF protections patients have. There's also a lot of healthcare data. Is there any blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a year per facility/organization?
    - everfree 4y ago
      > then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        The scales are completely different orders of magnitude. Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of those in the US every single day and probably billions or trillions of other little things being logged. You can store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things again and b. Probably violating patient data privacy.
        everfree 4y ago
        Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways), it would definitely be technically feasible.
dilyevsky 4y ago
> Distributed DNS As opposed to normal DNS?
- csomar 4y ago
  Edited to decentralized.
  - fabianfabian 4y ago
    DNS is already decentralized, it's one of the most decentralized projects on the internet. And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. If you want decentralized domains you need to champion for alternative DNS roots because all the technology is already there, just change the config file and get the people to do the same. Which is less effort than creating a whole new "blockchain" based system that does the same but slower.
    - everfree 4y ago
      > And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. For what it's worth as an example, Ethereum's name system (ENS) is also standardized and protocol based. And it eliminates the requirement of centralized registry corporations.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
Garbage in, garbage out. Tracking shipments only works if you have proof that the shipment wasn't tampered with. Tracking shipments is only as reliable as the carrier not mucking with it, and we already have tamper-proof tape for solving that one. It doesn't prove anything, though. It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. If someone along the chain is lying, their blockchain record is no more meaningful than any other document they'd produce. Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage. All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...
- everfree 4y ago
  > It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. That makes it a useful tool, no? > people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be under that same centralized service's control, yet are written to the same protocol standard. > All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them. Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping, something that cryptography itself cannot provide. Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.
fabian2k 4y ago
From the blog post: > They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.” > And that was about that.
runeks 4y ago
No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works. For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".
- EFreethought 4y ago
  Is there a double spend problem in fiat currencies? Honestly, I do not think there is. So what is the point of cryptocurrency?
  - fabianfabian 4y ago
    yes, the entire reason a bank is needed in all online transactions is because nobody trusts YOU to not double spend, but they do trust the bank to make sure they don't let you spend your money twice.
    - EFreethought 4y ago
      Then the banks have solved the double-spending problem, so in effect there isn't one. I was asking the question because if double-spending has been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?
      - fabianfabian 4y ago
kilburn 4y ago
What I see missing in most of those is that decentralized immutable storage is the only part solved by blockchain technologies, and: - Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them. - Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that). - Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever. - Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there. These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).
fabianfabian 4y ago
This guy is exactly what's wrong with the crypto space. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blockchains. Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!” Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed. Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties. Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.
chinathrow 4y ago
> Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments. People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.
DebtDeflation 4y ago
>Tracking shipments across countries. This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.

by csomar 4y ago

throw827474737 4y ago

Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??

csomar 4y ago
Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable. Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.
- orobinson 4y ago
  I would imagine the complexities of building and rolling out such a system would not be technical. Imagine trying to get 200+ countries to agree and implement a standard to store healthcare records, blockchain or no blockchain.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Healthcare records frequently need to be modified (e.g. a test was done incorrectly and needs to be voided). Sure, you can stick another entry in there saying "modify this other entry", but then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain. All the caching/indexing optimizations I can think of to make this not a complete nightmare also break all the data privacy and RTBF protections patients have. There's also a lot of healthcare data. Is there any blockchain that scales to literally petabytes of data a year per facility/organization?
  - everfree 4y ago
    > then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      The scales are completely different orders of magnitude. Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of those in the US every single day and probably billions or trillions of other little things being logged. You can store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things again and b. Probably violating patient data privacy.
      - everfree 4y ago
        Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways), it would definitely be technically feasible.

dilyevsky 4y ago

> Distributed DNS As opposed to normal DNS?

csomar 4y ago
Edited to decentralized.
- fabianfabian 4y ago
  DNS is already decentralized, it's one of the most decentralized projects on the internet. And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. If you want decentralized domains you need to champion for alternative DNS roots because all the technology is already there, just change the config file and get the people to do the same. Which is less effort than creating a whole new "blockchain" based system that does the same but slower.
  - everfree 4y ago
    > And while domains (not DNS) are less decentralized, it's all standardised and protocol based. For what it's worth as an example, Ethereum's name system (ENS) is also standardized and protocol based. And it eliminates the requirement of centralized registry corporations.

GauntletWizard 4y ago

Garbage in, garbage out. Tracking shipments only works if you have proof that the shipment wasn't tampered with. Tracking shipments is only as reliable as the carrier not mucking with it, and we already have tamper-proof tape for solving that one. It doesn't prove anything, though. It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. If someone along the chain is lying, their blockchain record is no more meaningful than any other document they'd produce. Registry records and title deeds and stock assets are already solved problems, and there's an important problem that blockchain is trying to solve: It is possible for the centralized services to transfer ownership without the owner's permission. This is an important feature. It is used in things like bankruptcy proceedings [1] and other law enforcement action all the time. The people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists, and decent societies lock them up, shortly before or after their crimes cause actual damage. All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure - Whether the governments doing the seizure are trustworthy is an entirely different problem with an entirely different scope of solutions, but the places that have actual anarchy going on are not typically nice places to live[2] and other governments typically do their best to insulate their population from them. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Somali...

everfree 4y ago
> It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. That makes it a useful tool, no? > people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token without the owner's permission. And that token still enjoys the benefits of being interoperable by default with other tokens and contracts that may not be under that same centralized service's control, yet are written to the same protocol standard. > All of these are reasons for actual cryptography - Signatures and Merkel Trees. Blockchains have no advantages in any of them. Blockchains provide reliable ordering and timestamping, something that cryptography itself cannot provide. Cryptographic shipment signing/tracking isn't very useful if the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one.

fabian2k 4y ago

From the blog post: > They presented some of the systems they’d built and yep, we were impressed. Then, with the startup CTO in the room, one of my fellow engineers asked the key question: “All these systems, are there any that wouldn’t work without blockchain?” The guy didn’t even hesitate: “No, not really.” > And that was about that.

runeks 4y ago

No. Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipients (and so they conflict and cannot both be included in the canonical list of transactions). A double spend is the result of the sender either (a) making a mistake, or (b) attempting fraud. In both cases the important property is that as long as only a single of these conflicting transactions is included, the systems works. For all the applications you list above, this property is not present. If I create a transaction in your "shipping blockchain" that says "shipment A moved to location X" and another, conflicting transaction that says "shipment A moved to location Y", then it's obviously important which transaction we include, since it must reflect the actual, physical location of "shipment A".

EFreethought 4y ago
Is there a double spend problem in fiat currencies? Honestly, I do not think there is. So what is the point of cryptocurrency?
- fabianfabian 4y ago
  yes, the entire reason a bank is needed in all online transactions is because nobody trusts YOU to not double spend, but they do trust the bank to make sure they don't let you spend your money twice.
  - EFreethought 4y ago
    Then the banks have solved the double-spending problem, so in effect there isn't one. I was asking the question because if double-spending has been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?
    - fabianfabian 4y ago

kilburn 4y ago

What I see missing in most of those is that decentralized immutable storage is the only part solved by blockchain technologies, and: - Storage is not the hard part of all those proposals. Standard formats and a shared ontology between all players is the actual hard part. Medical records are useless if you can't read them. - Immutable storage is not hard to do in a centralized fashion and can be made much more efficient. Do blockchain-based systems offer the bandwidth to ingest _all_ medical records produced worldwide? I'd say the required amount of records-per-second would surprise you (as well as the potential size of those records, where some are high resolution scans and stuff like that). - Usually you _don't_ want immutable records, even when it seems like you do. What happens when you want to advance the formats stored in the blockchain? You can't edit old records (to update them to the new format), so your only options become: create a new blockchain and/or keep the cruft forever. - Storing anything private via encryption poses problems in many domains: sometimes you want certain third-parties to be able to access that information (e.g.: the hospital should have access to your medical records if you get there unconscious in an ambulance). I've seen no real solution to the kind of issues that arise there. These are very serious limitations against blockchains _shining_ if you ask me. Of all your proposed use-cases the only one that I can't see hitting those issues is the company registry records one (and maybe that's because I'm not acquainted enough with that domain).

fabianfabian 4y ago

This guy is exactly what's wrong with the crypto space. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of blockchains. Putting all those things he listed on a blockchain is the perfect example of “That's not a blockchain, that's a sequence of poor engineering decisions!” Everything he listed can already be done with basic software engineering. Add a blockchain to these things makes it slow, adds unnecessary complexity and fake decentralization where its not even needed. Crypto is full of Ape NFTs and casino gambling because there is nothing useful in blockchains other than removing trusted third parties. Bitcoin added something new, crypto asked what more can we do with this? The answer is not much.

chinathrow 4y ago

> Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments. People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.

DebtDeflation 4y ago

>Tracking shipments across countries. This has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.