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Comment by skewart | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain a business use case for a blockchain-based data store? What is a situation where someone is going to say "let's use a blockchain solution instead of just replicating a traditional db across several data centers."

I think the idea of using a blockchain to store generic structured data is really interesting. I'm just not clear on exactly what advantages it has over other ways of storing data. Is this not a solution looking for a problem?

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Blockchains aren't out to replace databases, but there's a few organisations that could use them for certain use cases. Any processes where you're looking to increase the transparency of your data, or perhaps increase its security, or to try and lower the costs of data reconciliation could all benefit from using a blockchain as its underlying storage engine.

Some folks mentioned about lowering costs; I may misunderstood that context but has there been any math done by any entity on how much of a cost-saving it would be for organizations that chooses to switch to a blockchain data storage solution?

It depends on the organization, what they do with their data, and what value they place on it - so the answer varies. We've done some back of the napkin calculations this morning and at today's prices it would cost approx $1,000 to store 1MB on the Bitcoin blockchain. That's a LOT, but depending on what you want do with your data, it could be priceless. One benefit is that once that data has been encoded its available for the life of the chain at no extra cost, eliminating hosting overhead. You also get the added benefits of increased transparency, automated auditing, reduction in human error, etc.

> What is a situation where someone is going to say "let's use a blockchain solution instead of just replicating a traditional db across several data centers."

I think the difference is that putting it on the blockchain guarantees that it is immutable after it's been committed while db-across-data-centers requires you to trust the company hosting the data not to tamper with the data. So for an (admittedly contrived) example a company could store contracts they signed with other companies on the blockchain, whereas if they placed it on a data center both signatories would need to trust the data center.

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