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Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

Here's one take DLT and Blockchain: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain

TL;DR, it's gonna take a real long time to make blockchain useful, if it even is.

Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency. Everyone and their grandmothers has invested in it, or started a company or w/e. But has it actually been used to solve another problem? Blockchain was the SOLUTION to the PROBLEM of how do I make a cryptocurrency. It now seems that some folks are trying to make a PROBLEM out of a SOLUTION in every other domain.

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Blockchain is not the solution to the problem of how to make a crypto currency. Blockchain is the solution to the problem of how to cooperatively timestamp documents.

Completely agree. A true crypto-currency would not be "quasi-anonymous". Bitcoin is a government's wet dream, a near-complete map of every dark web transaction globally.

For now yes. More privacy features are on the road map though. You can always easily convert Bitcoin for a more anonymous eccentric currency and then convert it back to Bitcoin if you want to hide your trail if you need to.

co-operatively with no trusted authority.

If you are happy to have a trusted authority, then timestamp servers have been around since the dawn of PKI

> But has it actually been used to solve another problem?

Maersk is interested http://fortune.com/2017/03/05/maersk-tests-blockchain-based-...

Makes some sense freight shipments involve a lot of parties who don't completely trust one another, and they've got a lot of information to move back and forth between one another.

The article doesn't explain why a public distributed ledger such as the blockchain would make sense. A privately run ledger would probably also solve their problems, be cheaper and it would be a lot more secure against tampering.

which of the mutually untrustworthy parties will operate the ledger?

customs agents don't trust shipping companies, shipping companies don't trust their customers, shipping companies might trust most customs agents in western countries but they operate everywhere, and there are, as i understand it, a number of other middle-men involved in the process, who probably aren't trusted much either.

i don't see how a privately operated database would solve any of the problems, or appear more secure to the folks not running the database. (certainly it would be cheaper.)

So are you suggesting that shipping companies, their customers, customs and middlemen should be mining a cryptocurrency? Or that they should record their interactions on a blockchain running on a peer-to-peer network of random miners around the world?

Sorry, I just don't see that. There's laws, governments, clearing houses that have allowed untrustworthy parties to work together for... ever. And if they need a database, surely there's going to be a more pragmatic solution?

It's fairly easy to provide cryptographic signing on records. You don't need the fullblown blockchain technology for that. Not trusting other partners isn't something that was suddenly invented when the blockchain was invented. Untrustworthiness has been around as long as humanity has been. We've solved these problems a long long time ago.

The innovation of Bitcoin is combining the Proof-of-Work with a signed ledger. But Proof-of-Work is only needed because otherwise anonymous people might create new nodes from thin air and get a majority.

In this case, all the parties are well identified, so if a new node appears, it can simply be rejected by the existing participants. So there's no need for PoW, all you need is for companies to sign and publish documents to each other. The only possible fraud is publishing different documents to different parties, but that's easily fixable by having the nodes confirm each others' documents.

So yeah, that's just a signed ledger. All invoicing programs in my country had that before Bitcoin even appeared, as part of the SAF-T standard (mandated by our tax authority). It's nothing new.

> Further, I have yet to see a real production application of blockchain that isn't a crypto-currency.

- Bitcache (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcache) - in development

- Namecoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)

- Steemit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit)

- Synereo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synereo)

count? I know, formally these can be considered as a cryptocurrencies, but I would not consider this as the central purpose of existence.

If by "real production" you mean "implemented profitably by classic corporations", then you're not really getting the crypto-anarchist philosophy that espouses the view that blockchains are a generally useful tool. The long-term crypo-anarchist plan (lol) is to replace corporations with ephemeral networks of strangers who, as a group, accomplish the tasks traditionally handled by corporations and governments.

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