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Comment by aqsheehy | Hacker News Reader

What are some non-speculative use cases for ethereum that wouldn't be better served by just using aws?

Educational transcripts, patent filings, farmland ownership transactions, small-supply-chain records, lab reports, government transparency reports... Pretty much any records where the total amount of data is fairly small, but you want to share it publicly in a place that's long-lived and extremely tamper-resistant, so others will trust it. Smart contracts (computer programs) can do more, of course.

Patent filings / Farmland ownership transactions: There is a reason these aren't already bearer assets.

Educational transcript / lab reports / gov transp.: How is it an efficiency for this to be on a blockchain. Do we now not trust archive.org?

You didn't get the memo. We don't trust anyone now.

How do you tie non-physical things to a blockchain? You can't, without trusting some non-blockchain entity.

And if you do end up trusting some non-blockchain entity, then the whole effort is pointless. (You might just as well directly trust them with your patent filings, reports, etc instead).

Non-physical things (i.e. pure information) are the one thing you can tie to a blockchain. Maybe there are enough valuable pure information things for it to work.

Sorry, dumb mistake on my part, I meant non-digital things.

Wouldn't IPFS be a better fit for storing data than the Ethereum blockchain?

The ethereum blockchain cures all that ails you. It is an undertaking of great advantage.

One idea I heard was you would just store the IPFS hash address on the Ethereum blockchain, so you can store basically anything in there without blowing up the size.

What about the ETH blockchain is needed to fulfill this requirement? Bitcoin's blockchain can be used in the exact same way.

All of those are speculative uses. What are the non-speculative uses?

Do you think they had non-speculative use cases in mind when creating Ethereum? I don't think so. There are way better ways to create decentralized applications. Without the coins part.

I can't think of one that doesn't involve flouting regulations. Though we have truly awful regulations. Prediction markets are the only reason I am interested.

What inefficiencies are closed by using ethereum for prediction markets?

Having to pay for taxes, employees, hosting, ddos protection, lawyers, etc.

Your app does not rely on a counterparty anymore. You have access to the blockchain, you have access to the prediction market. Think of all the countries where prediction markets (aka betting) is forbidden.

Of course, this is not exclusive to ethereum, but they seem to be the blockchain which is both highly adopted and the one with the most features (I think they'll be the first to offer a turing complete language for programming smart contracts)

You need an oracle for prediction markets to function. Voting on the truth doesn't work, you will be sybil attacked into oblivion. Is there an oracle present in these contracts? If there is, why wouldn't basic multi-sig work just as well?

Yes, the Oracle problem is the elephant in the room. Augur tries to make it work by creating a new reputation token that accrues to oracles that provide true information (so effectively paying people to be honest), but I'm not sure where development is it - it seems pretty slow.

TruthCoin style oracles look like they might work. I think they are worth trying but wouldn't be surprised if they failed.

Company ownership/equity, smart contract based profit sharing to equity holders. I wonder how long that is going to last before regulators step in though

I agree: it seems the only efficiency Ethereum facilitates is to act as the platform to create unregulated securities. I'm sure the SEC loves that.

A service that coordinates interventions with sex workers to try to find people who are sex trafficking victims and get them help.

A service for coordinating resistance against central american drug cartels.

These kinds of things are liable to get you killed if you attach your name to them. Better to just write the recipe and let the network do the administration.

Decentralized DNS.

Why would you want bearer assets for that? What inefficiency is there in the current system that would be solved with more decentralization? Why ethereum instead of something like namecoin or counterparty?

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