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has there been any useful application of this outside of bitcoin as currency? Seems like a solid technical idea with lots of woo-woo on top of it.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
Which part? Blockchain in general?
- coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
  Blockchain and smart contracts.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
    There's certainly application outside of currencies. Bluesky/atproto for example is built on DIDs (decentralised IDs) and IPLD (the data format/standard of IPFS). Both are very heavily rooted in cryptocurrency tech. There's a joke in the atproto community that it's a blockchain but without the currency because of this.
    - dboreham 11mo ago
      Neither DID nor IPLD have anything to do with cryptocurrency from a technical perspective. At least no more than do X.509 and ssh.
      - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
        IPLD is literally a merkle tree data structure format standardised by IPFS which is heavily rooted in cryptocurrency and in fact has its own cryptocurrency created by the IPFS devs: Filecoin. DIDs were created by cryptocurrency orgs. The standard was created by a bunch of cryptocurrency groups working with the W3C and the entire time it was being developed, it was derided by non-cryptocurrency people as just another way for cryptocurrency to scam people. It doesn't stop being related to cryptocurrency once you realise it's useful.
dollylambda 11mo ago
You could argue the useful application has been that of a time-stamping service, which is what you need to order a transaction history.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
  Yeah at it's core a blockchain based cryptocurrency is a consensus system and decentralised resource market where the resource in question is space in the blocks within some time bound and verifiable proof of the time and state they were accepted in. That core feature of "providing a total ordering for state changes and events with formal trust bounds" turns out to have a lot of potential uses. Now of course truly providing correct timestamps or really any clock mechanism in a trustless way turns out to be massively difficult. And not just in a blockchain but really in any decentralised/distributed system. It's a famously unsolved problem. There's some research[1] on how to go about providing a "global time"/"global clock" for cryptocurrencies without external trust assumptions but it's extraordinarily academic and most if not all systems just assume trusted time within some bound and hope for the best. 1. Permissionless Clock Synchronization with Public Setup - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220 https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220
  - dollylambda 11mo ago
    In a sense, a POW blockchain such as bitcoin can convey global time/global clock if all participants understand the average block propagation is 10 "minutes"? Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter but converges to 10 minutes in aggregate. Over great distances this breaks down given limits on the speeds of transmition (speed of light), however, if transmission was instantaneous (quantum entanglement?), that would solve the dilemma of what does "now" mean light-years away given our relativistic idea of time between here and there.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
      Oh yeah. Sorry I misspoke a bit. I should have said that global time/clocks are an unsolved problem in non-proof-of-work systems. Proof of work does a decent job approximating a monotonic clock but that only works when you are expending obscene amounts of energy on a global scale. And like you said it breaks down over longer distances (however luckily we don't have to deal with that too much now). But in any non-PoW system, a "trustless" global clock is extremely non-trivial.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago

Which part? Blockchain in general?

coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
Blockchain and smart contracts.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
  There's certainly application outside of currencies. Bluesky/atproto for example is built on DIDs (decentralised IDs) and IPLD (the data format/standard of IPFS). Both are very heavily rooted in cryptocurrency tech. There's a joke in the atproto community that it's a blockchain but without the currency because of this.
  - dboreham 11mo ago
    Neither DID nor IPLD have anything to do with cryptocurrency from a technical perspective. At least no more than do X.509 and ssh.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
      IPLD is literally a merkle tree data structure format standardised by IPFS which is heavily rooted in cryptocurrency and in fact has its own cryptocurrency created by the IPFS devs: Filecoin. DIDs were created by cryptocurrency orgs. The standard was created by a bunch of cryptocurrency groups working with the W3C and the entire time it was being developed, it was derided by non-cryptocurrency people as just another way for cryptocurrency to scam people. It doesn't stop being related to cryptocurrency once you realise it's useful.

dollylambda 11mo ago

You could argue the useful application has been that of a time-stamping service, which is what you need to order a transaction history.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
Yeah at it's core a blockchain based cryptocurrency is a consensus system and decentralised resource market where the resource in question is space in the blocks within some time bound and verifiable proof of the time and state they were accepted in. That core feature of "providing a total ordering for state changes and events with formal trust bounds" turns out to have a lot of potential uses. Now of course truly providing correct timestamps or really any clock mechanism in a trustless way turns out to be massively difficult. And not just in a blockchain but really in any decentralised/distributed system. It's a famously unsolved problem. There's some research[1] on how to go about providing a "global time"/"global clock" for cryptocurrencies without external trust assumptions but it's extraordinarily academic and most if not all systems just assume trusted time within some bound and hope for the best. 1. Permissionless Clock Synchronization with Public Setup - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220 https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220
- dollylambda 11mo ago
  In a sense, a POW blockchain such as bitcoin can convey global time/global clock if all participants understand the average block propagation is 10 "minutes"? Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter but converges to 10 minutes in aggregate. Over great distances this breaks down given limits on the speeds of transmition (speed of light), however, if transmission was instantaneous (quantum entanglement?), that would solve the dilemma of what does "now" mean light-years away given our relativistic idea of time between here and there.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
    Oh yeah. Sorry I misspoke a bit. I should have said that global time/clocks are an unsolved problem in non-proof-of-work systems. Proof of work does a decent job approximating a monotonic clock but that only works when you are expending obscene amounts of energy on a global scale. And like you said it breaks down over longer distances (however luckily we don't have to deal with that too much now). But in any non-PoW system, a "trustless" global clock is extremely non-trivial.