Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
medium.com
medium.com
This is an alternative to setting up a neutral party for the purpose, such as the Bank for International Settlements or Depository Trust Corporation. Those organizations are expensive to run. It's a real shared ledger, but it's no more than that.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-banks/six-big-...
The exact same functionality could be accomplished with a git repository they each pull/rebase/push between themselves... or with any of a number of append-only databases with WALs and synchronous replication, where each of them runs a replica.
And since there are only banks can join the network, I doubt it can technically prevent the fraud among banks because unlike public cryptocurrencies, it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network. So any banks allowed to join can put enough computation power than other banks combined and succeed the attack.
> "they can do the job more efficiently"
They ARE doing the job more efficiently by not using proof of work, and instead most likely going with a quorum approach based on public keys.
> it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network
Right, because it doesn't use proof of work, it uses a quorum vote. The banks would still need to form a cartel in order to get a (super)majority of the vote.
And I have never understood one part of it. How are contentious settlements are resolved? Today for any disputes people can approach BIS or DTC and once issue is resolved everything can be rolled back. Who acts as the "watcher" in this case? Surely, going by what majority says is not a solution.
What I didn't understand from the article was the point about membership. If the contributing banks are the only ones using it, why is it giving information about what _I_ could do with one of these USCs - apparently nothing because I won't be able to join the chain
Wouldn’t it just amplify it? Right now, central banks just set up swap facilities between each other. It’s akin to opening a bank account with one another. Crediting, debuting and undoing anything nefarious is cheap and easy.
Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
The ones that do use Blockchain often mean today actual crypto currency or a settlemen token a good example of a “real world” implementation would be Royal Mint Gold which is a crypto token offered by the Royal Mint which is pegged to gold.
> Banks want to use Blockchain as a more reliable alternative to SWIFT it won’t be doing actual account settlements which in your case you mentioned corresponding banking.
> That said many of the more progressive institutions stopped calling it Blockchain a while ago they all are talking about distributed ledgers, hyper ledger and the likes are being either used or piloted by many institutions.
This is a major issue for something like Bitcoin, but a small speed bump for banks utilizing agreed upon blockchain tech.. It's at least interesting to consider the benefits of centralized(exclusive?) guidance coupled with distributed execution.
Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better.
The problem isn't the technology but the problems around legality and implementation and who it disrupts.
There is however plenty of usages for blockchain just off the top of my head.
Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market, digital art certification, tracking of how money for NGO's are being spent and of course as a gold standard for important deals done between large organization and of course as a truly international wiretransfer system.
All these things will happen with new generations growing up and finding natural uses for them.
The immediate problem is that an "automatic" contract circumvents the regular legal system and thus is going to be ... not-legal. The larger problem is that this is how things should be.
That the regular system isn't automatic but rather includes considerations of intentions and individuals involves is not a bug but a feature, an extremely important feature (the non-enforceability of unconscionable contracts is pretty important today [1]). Unbreakable contracts open the door for unlimited abuses (how does an automatic contract system prevent contracts for illegal activity? Given legality is going to continue to depend on intentions, etc).
The Etherium Fork illustrated all this and essentially discredited the approach.
Also, it can take a while for successful tech to be successful. But there's also the tech that people spend years trying to get going without success.
Sure everything can fall apart, nothing is perfect. But it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.
The blockchain is, directly and indirectly, undermining nation states so I am under no illusion that it will be easy peasy spread.
But why should that ever be a bigger problem than spending millions of dollars on all sorts of foundational research that never goes anywhere?
Opportunity cost.
None of these are realistic examples. Do you think Nintendo won't want a piece of that digital trading market? Or Amazon, for ebooks?
Digital assets aren't going to be decentralized. Never. Corporations are going to maintain their walled garden platform, and make sure all transactions are conducted within that platform so they scrape off a few dollars here and there. You don't need all the complexity of a blockchain when a centralized architecture works just fine.
This sounds a lot like arguing in 1995 that people wouldn't buy stuff online because entrenched retail stores are where everyone does their shopping. Its so simple to buy stuff in a store why add the complexity of online shopping?
There are undoubtedly benefits for consumers when you have a decentralized marketplace/ architecture. As the technology matures it should become easier to build these kinds of architectures
Amazon has a to
I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is the idea that corporations are willing to give up that much control over their copyright so that consumers get some false impression that they "own" a Pikachu.
Where are you going to see that Pikachu? Through officially-licensed Nintendo software. Not through third party apps and websites. They will get hit with the DMCA hammer.
There is no benefit of the blockchain, when all representation of that data is centralized. Nintendo won't do it because, who cares. Other than a buzzword, the blockchain is irrelevant. That's like caring about whether a website is running on Ruby or Node, or some other stack. It doesn't matter. It's an implementation detail.
Implementation details are not what's relevant here.
There are plenty of opensourced games out there and plenty of opensource projects and there will only be more in the future.
Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't. It's cool with me that you don't understand it, but it's already happening while you say it never will.
I legitimately can't tell if this is trolling or sarcastic.
Regardless, the fact that something else seemed ridiculous but ended up not being so has no bearing.
People can predict arbitrary things and will only remember the ones that turned out right; for every thing that seemed wrong but succeeded, there are a million things which seemed wrong and were wrong.
Just because there are examples of things succeeding in spite of predictions of failure doesn't mean predictions of failure are signs of success.
"Every new generation growing up is a new generation who will be affected by other things than the previous generation.
Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games."
The point is that looking at your own generation is not a good indicator of where things will go. Look at those younger generations which haven't yet been affected by what is right or wrong.
That was my argument. Girls will grow up knowing what it takes to be good at a computer game it won't just be something nerds do, but something they themselves do.
The point here is to understand what allows progress.
Sure something might or might not come to fruition but this one my predictions were based on understanding what it would take for it to be popular.
I am not trolling but 100% serious.
Not to mention that Cryptokitties is "backdoored" by CEO/CFO/COO functions. Which means the company has full control over the contract, even if the contract itself is "decentralized" (more like externalized, if anything). They can halt trading of the assets any time they desire.
> Everyone also laughed when I in the 90'ies said you would one day be able to score girls from being good at playing computer games.
I have no idea where you're going with this. Are you talking about e-Sports? This is the first I've heard of anyone "scoring girls" with computer games.
You are missing the larger point because you focus on the smaller technical details.
Things don't have to be perfect to be successful.
Again. Either you understand the larger perspective of cryptocurrencies, blockchain and tokens or you don't.
It's like investing in the TCP/IP protocol.
Interesting. So you have an original piece of digital art and the owner of the art is verified on the blockchain? How would that work? Can't I just take a screenshot or something of the art and have a copy? What's the advantage of having one "true" piece of digital art and is it feasable?
Genuinely curious how this would work. It's a very intriguing idea.
The "problem" with digital art is that if you get a hold of the source code you could just reproduce it and "double spend" and thus it has diminishing value.
If you use the blockchain to verify you have the original you make it possible for the value to follow the owner.
Same thing with ebooks. You could be buying the version of a book that Eminem owned and it could increase in value.
Many people misunderstand what value can be. Sometimes it's the actual "thing" (ex. the chair) but often, very often, it's the idea of the thing.
The whole art scene is based on this principle.
"Verisart is the world's leading platform to certify and verify artworks and collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain. Since its launch in 2015, Verisart has provided contemporary artists including Shepard Fairey with a free and easy way to generate permanent certificates of authenticity and reduce the scope for fraudulent activity. Verisart combines museum certification standards, distributed ledger technology and image recognition to its provenance and registry services. The company is headed by Robert Norton, formerly CEO & co-founder of Saatchi Online & Sedition Art and its Board Advisers include Peter Todd, Bitcoin core developer and Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of the Art & Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University."
Makes sense if you think of art as an asset, which is kind of a philistine thing to do...
Are you kidding? So the big use of the blockchain is to take things that have zero marginal cost of production, and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?
I have a lot more reading to do, but that is what I understand from what I have read so far. Cryptokitties is blowing my mind.
Yes, that is the entire point of this blockchain stuff, isn't it? You get ownership of large natural numbers (coins) that would be trivial to copy otherwise.
Just don't claim that you are somehow making an arugment against it cause you aren't for reasons already outlined.
There is nothing new about the types of businesses which can be created on top of the blockchain other than that they can be digital. But as a value system they are as solid as physical items.
From a value perspective, it's an upside just ask the art-scene.
Oh, and cause global warming and destroy the planet. That way humans will have to come up with a non-government backed currency.
• Technology in the lab (t=0)
• Technology in the first company (t=2–10 years post-lab)
• Technology in the first successful company (t=5–20 years post-lab)
• Technology acceptance (t=10–25 years post-lab)
Source:
https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf
In these slides, Richard gives several examples that match this model and includes several additional explanations.
For example:
• First window system: Stanford/SRI/Xerox PARC ~1975, MIT ~1976
• First commercial use: Symbolics (1979), LMI (1979), Xerox Star (~1980), Apple Lisa (~1982), Apple Macintosh (1984)
• First use by a successful company: Microsoft (~1989)
• Technology acceptance: Microsoft (~1995)
Spreadsheets are another example that is given in the slides. In fact, 25 years for acceptance are quite common in software. Sometimes, it also takes much longer.
Either you understand this perspective or you don't.
We are talking about blockchain not one of the ways it can be realized, bitcoin.
Furthermore, I gave a couple of examples of how the blockchain can be used no one is being scammed with that. In fact it allows for things that have never been possible before because you will not see nation-states work together in any meaningful way to solve these problems.
Did you diversify into other crypto currencies? You are only worth anything once you actually cash out into USD
However, in addition to any counterarguments, please describe why standard tech and/or a 3rd_party is insufficient for your proposed use-cases. This is HackerNews after all, and we desire the deeply technical discussion and context, not propaganda.
Any counterargument I can construct boils down to a difference of opinion & values. The author trusts his bank and his government to (a) handle his money in the way that he thinks is responsible and (b) handle disputes in a way that benefits him. On the other hand, I trust myself to handle my money responsibly, and I view my government as a great uncertainty because I don't understand the limits of their power (in the least nefarious, but relevant point, who can predict by how much my government will increase the monetary supply and deflate my purchasing power over the next decades? More nefarious, if I dissent, government can trivially lock most of my digital assets that aren't cryptocurrencies - e.g. bank account or investment funds).
Same is true for crypte-currencies. If some hacker manages to steal a big amount of money then (almost) everybody agrees to make a hardfork and the hacker looses his money. It is more decentralized and the hacker could keep some part of the money if there is a side chain.
Hacker scenario already happend. But there is no need for a crime to happen to cause a tokens redistribution. If 80% of all token holders (miners for bitcoin?) are poor what stops them from redistributing the tokens of the rich token holders?
You can bet that Edward Snowden had all his US assets seized, for example. But if he had any cryptocurrency, he may have been able to take those with him.
Say I'm someone like Ed Snowden (again). I own a house, a car, the clothes on my back, and Bitcoin. I up and leave one day to share government secrets with the press and hide in a different country.
Did the car aid in the crime? Probably, to some degree - it let me physically make my way to the airport, and on to journalists to whom I shared secrets. Did the house aid the crime? Did the clothes on my back aid the crime? Both of those allowed me to live a safe and comfortable life. I wouldn't have made it past airport security without my clothes, after all.
Did the Bitcoin aid the crime? Only in the same sense that a treadmill and a good diet aids a bank robber by making it easier for him to leave the scene in a hurry.
So I think the claim that having bitcoin in your possession when committing a crime necessarily enables that crime (to a greater deal than any other everyday thing) is a bit nebulous. It didn't facilitate the crime, it just lessened the punishment. Possession of $USD cash provides a similar thing in the form of being used to pay bail.
All of them CAN produce auditable records for the consumer, but they don't, blockchains force the issue.
Cryptocurrencies are forcing govts to reexamine regulations that I argue are generally favorable to massive institutions/ high net worth individuals and unfavorable to the small timers
Right now it's the exact opposite. There's nothing less bullet-proof (eg in the US) than investing into an ICO, outside of perhaps junk penny stocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhXncTVOzA
Whether or not it will be a successful project or not is up for debate.
That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.
Furthermore, the poorest people generally aren't the ones looking to evade hyperinflation, because they lack savings in the first place. Venezuela had a middle class once upon a time, though.
I'm unsure what you mean by this. "The bottom line" is just a manner of expression.
> I made claims about the potential for use, not that it was actually used
And I stated why I believe this to be a dubious claim; crypto-tokens are totally impractical. Your allusion to advancements in medicine and internet connectivity is a red herring argument that hand waves away the reality of using crypo-tokens in the real world.
> You seem to be operating on the assumption that third world = mud huts and subsistence farming, which is very untrue.
Wow. I illustrated concerns surrounding limited accessibility to internet in the developing world and you disingenuously twisted it into an insult to the citizens of the developing world. You don't even have to venture into a 3rd world country to see the impracticality of crypo-tokens in the real world, they're barley usable even in the developed world, and at the first sign of trouble they are useless, e.g. see how far crypo-tokens take you on the ground in Puerto Rico. Jumbling around private keys, trying to coordinate meet-ups to trade crypto for money, managing all the technical issues surrounding wallet management, insane volatility, transaction fees, the concept of confirmations, client versioning, security best practices, staying abreast of blockchain politics surrounding forks and protocol changes that impact security, price, usability... it's a quagmire of impracticality.
So what? Every technology starts off slow and impractical including the ones that fail.
Your comment mostly applies to rural areas in 3rd countries.
The only way to go with the concept you're suggesting, is to buy actual gold (coins or similar). With something like gold coins, you'll still suffer a discount on a need-to-sell, but it won't be nearly so bad. Do not think under any circumstances that jewelry holds its value in a resale, it holds a small fraction of its value (unless we're talking a million dollar extraordinary specimen (equivalent to art in the jewelry world), but that's a super rare context, and you'll still sell it at a hefty discount in a crunch).
It’s not about the single solutions themselves, it’s about the ecosystem of solutions that you can integrate relatively painlessly. Same reason why standards are important.
What do you consider standard tech btw?
Several countries outside the west are moving to do registration of land ownership on blockchain tech because their bureaucratic system is corrupt.
Banks have moved to cryptocurrencies for transfers. Sure it's not the unregulated ones, but it's still block chain.
In government in Scandinavia we're doing various proofs of concepts on blockchain. Because it cuts out the need for a legal "middle man" it has huge potential even in less corrupt parts of the world. Everything from simple paperwork to lock/key systems in elder apartments (don't know the English word sorry) is being tested.
Blockchain is certainly full of scams, but it actually offers tremendous value in enterprise, especially when you do any form of bureaucracy. The thing is though, in this world 10 years is nothing. Just look at RPA, it's a tech from before the internet and it's only now beginning to be applied in real world situations that isn't cheating in a video game.
Speaking as a citizen of such country[1]. The problem is not in ledger/registry. The problem is that you can get a fake shareholders notice, a court order from corrupt judge, etc. and change the ownership in the registry. I don't see how blockchain solves anything that a simple publication of all changes wouldn't.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/ukraine-t...
Do you have a source for this? I can't imagine how it might work.
In fact, this particular use is one of the few that blockchain is actually good for (because it was designed as document timestamping), unlike stuff like voting or databases.
Wrong. In selling land to somebody else, authorities -- corrupt or not -- have nothing to say. The only thing authorities are needed for is to put an official stamp on the sale document.
This official stamp is generally a good thing; land is too valuable, so such transactions need some friction, like public notary's involvement, so one cannot sell a property by merely clicking "accept" under EULA. Corrupt authorities, as I understand, can delay the process of stamping the sale for indefinite time, so what blockchain is supposed to do here is to do away with authorities altogether.
The whole idea here is distributed trust
And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override things.
Land titles are worthless if they are not enforced by courts, and courts will not enforce land titles in a database that has illegal entries.
It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership.
This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it might as well have been done through blockchain and in 20 years I imagine that it will.
No. Yes, you can do it online, great. And yes, no other private person can fraudulently do it in your name, also great. But it does not follow that it's impossible to do it without your key; it is possible, and it must be possible, for the authorities.
Should the database be public for reading? Yes, absolutely. But you don't need a blockchain for that.
Progress is generally on the exponential (or sigmoid) curve, so it’s slow at first, but explosive later.
You should remember this then, from 1994:
"It's not only going to revolutionize the Net, it will change the global economy."
https://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/
And this, from 1999:
"The next internet revolution will put central bankers out of business."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1999/nov/04/onlinesup...
But internet right now is undeniable. Block chain will be the same.
All that stuff still need some more development obviously. We're still in the early days.
[1] https://www.cryptomathic.com/news-events/blog/how-digital-si... [2] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
Moreover, what even is a "blockchain"? The most basic definition would be an inversely linked list with an added hash in each node. That's not much of an innovation. On the other end of the spectrum we have something like Bitcoin with a distributed network of "miners" who compete against each other by wasting energy, because the participants do not trust one another. This is not something most people would want or need. In most use cases we probably have trusted agents, but then we don't even need a mechanism like PoW/PoS to facilitate trust. This means we're really just left with a distributed database.
Not really true that it depends on the government. And even if it is, you only need like one government supporting it for it to be valuable.
Why couldn’t your argument be used to say the internet won’t work?
This is true! But databases don't have that magic "blockchain" tech.
David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain touches on the ridiculousness of this idea, actually. And, yes, it's ridiculousness, but it's what some people are trying to sell.
So should I take it that you're one of the people who thinks blockchains have little applications outside of currency?
If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.
An extrinsic reward doesn't have to be financial though, it's anything that you want to get out of an activity that isn't part of the activity itself.
If the blockchain ledger was a part of a greater whole and the client software of which it forms a part was somehow intrinsically fun, useful or needed, the token itself wouldn't be necessary.
Just imagine it's 1893 and no one can see how big cars are going to be. Well this gizmo XYZ is just like cars were then! You'll wanna get in on this now! And so this gets internalized and repeated to friends and family regardless of objective merit. Because it sounds "truthy".
The parallels between blockchain and the Internet are similarly contrived. They are different phenomenon and the line "X is like Y thus what happened to X will happen to Y" doesn't have objective merit in this case near as I can tell. (Apologies to the half a dozen or more posters who have probably posted something to this effect on the thread).
The _potential_ uses for blockchain are much more limited than potential uses for the Internet for instance. (And there are a number of other differences).
That being said I have no doubt there are uses for blockchain technology. Making people rich with cryptocurrency for one. And hey, I'm all in favor. Let's just don't get carried away with the parallels.
The thesis is that huge amounts of capital is tied up in invoice settlement all along the supply chain. (And supply chain refers to every thing from the dirt -- grown or mined -- all the way to the end consumer.) Settling invoices on the blockchain would eliminate a huge amount of friction and open the possibility of immediate low interest (or even no interest) loans on a substantial amount of outstanding invoices.
I understand the difference between a distributed ledger and a database, but in all use cases I've heard mentioned as ripe for blockchain derived innovation, not once has a blockchain really been necessary or even an improvement over a traditional database based solution.
To give you an idea of how buzzwordy this all is, my friend works in venture capital and was trying to explain to me how blockchain was going to change the world after he got back from a blockchain conference, saying that it would "revolutionize VR/AR, AI, etc...", technologies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I just laughed.
A database under control of any one entity is prone to undue influence by hacking or bribing or other leverage. An append-only database that is controlled by consensus of all club members is safe from malfeasance on the part of a minority. There is value in that. Of course this has nothing to do with mining coins and stuff.
Now you can argue the society already solved these problems with rigorous administrative processes around existing databases. I would reply that blockchain-based process may end up being cheaper and/or faster to settle and reconcile. In the same way the computing previously done by humans was turned over to machines. It may have looked like the problem is under control and there is nothing to solve here, but it turned out there was a lot to be gained from dramatically increased computational power.
We'll definitely see blockchain become dominant in a some or multiple fields of business. When? Perhaps not for 20 years. Internet as we know it took decades for it to fully develop and take off. We could get a crash before this succes happens, the word "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency" might become toxic for a while. Thinking of the 2000 IT bubble, so much money poured into any crazy business proposal with "web" in it; and suddenly the music stopped. Billions evaporated.
All the while I'll just be grabbing popcorn and hoping to sell my coins on time ;-)
There are coke traces on something like 90% of US cash.
I will die on this hill if I have to.
Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works.
The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it.
I had friends at the time that got rich in the process, and I have friends today that have gotten rich with bitcoins(they have already sold all of them).
At the end of course Internet was the future, but not "that Internet", it has evolved a lot and will continue evolving.
With blockchain the same is happening: we have a tremendous bubble right now that will be painful when it pops. But it will continue evolving into something extremely useful in my opinion.
It will be no bitcoin, it will something else be easier to mine, with more transactions, and so on...it will evolve over time learning from its errors, like anything in the History of mankind.
There's already multiple solutions to these problems. Take a look at RaiBlocks (raiblocks.net) for example, which has instantaneous zero-fee transactions with very high throughput (hardware limited) without losing decentralization or other security properties (not proven atm). RaiBlocks uses delegated proof-of-stake with a block-lattice architecture.
Another example would be Cardano, which has the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol with same security guarantees as Bitcoin, and is also secure in a scalable setting with blockchain sharding (as is planned in Ethereum too). Proof-of-stake doesn't require energy to mine blocks and can be scalable but is very hard to secure.
There's multiple other solutions as well, such as IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares and others which might be more centralized and less secure to achieve scalability. Then there is Bitcoin Lightning Network almost ready, and also MimbleWimble coming out soon (http://grin-tech.org/). Lots of things are certainly happening faster than you can anticipate.
Additionally, there's projects like Enigma and Aion, which add scalability, privacy and interoperability on top of existing blockchains. This territory starts to get a bit complex for me.
Because my reputation has direct monetary value I would be hesitant to mess it up by being a dick, unless for a very big gain. The counter-parties will know the value of my reputation as well as the total value of outstanding liabilities against my reputation, so they will not give me any resources worth more than my current reputation capacity.
This has nothing to do with mining or coins, just an immutable public ledger. For all I care every notary public will be given a right to sign a block in the ledger, and collectively they will establish consensus.
Yelp on steroids, basically.
If you can track reputation fairly then every time you make a transaction you don't have to go to court because its expensive and time consuming.
Some example usage: When people register to vote, assist them with setting a key pair and allow them to enter their public key with their registration. They could then verify how their vote was counted after the election.
Not sure if it would be superior to paper voting still as it could then be used to buy votes, but maybe there are some narrow applications, or a multi-sig approach where someone could know, but not prove it is their vote without the help of a third party. It is still better than current electronic-voting in this scenario.
As a side note, there is definitely a use for public key registration associated with government identification as it would solve ID theft for good.
2. It could also be used for public records and secure/lower cost for chain of custody applications.
Inefficiency in voting technology is a feature, not a bug. Pencil on paper is the best system we have for precisely this reason.
Https://hydrachain.io/
New site coming soon with examples and a demo.
It’s a generic asset management platform - so one current use case is tracking the movement of goods through a supply chain, and also recording transactional history in an industry that is currently full of corruption and tax avoiders. Having an immutable transaction record that’s publicly visible is the correct usage of blockchain and it solves this problem very well. We are talking about amounts that are so large, this system will likely be regulated by the government.
Another current use case is tracking physical (and very valuable) assets - again the use case is an immutable pubic record.
The immutability is key - sure you could Store this data in a database, but the problems we are solving are the fact that when you have a single entity running a database then at a certain level of wealth you’re practically guaranteed corruption or unethical behaviour. This is the reason we use blockchain - blockchain has a good use case for avoiding the corruption that massive centralised systems are often plagued with
Fundamentally, this technology implements distributed trust. You can put some information there and it will remain, forever. Everyone can see that this data (and hence, some event in the world) is there, was created at particular time by a particular person. You can tell someone: "Hey, I did X and you can see it here".
Sure, it's slow as hell now, but look forward 10 years.
What if people in year e.g. 1000CE suddenly got telepathy (internet) and ability to persist each other's thoughts? How would that change their society?
Even the Internet was criticized by some after 10 years for failing to live up to “change everything” hype, and it’s true it hadn’t really close to doing so at the time. Some companies like Blockbuster Video weren’t a bit concerned for quite a while.
To me the current state of blockchain applications doesn’t tell us much about what it’s ultimate utility will end up being.
While that might be true, that doesn't mean that a lack of success actually indicates success. That'd be a useless tautology.
More importantly, earlier innovations that took their time usually at least had a clear proposition of value. When electricity was introduced it took decades before businesses had adjusted their manufacturing and supply lines to the new technology, but everybody could trivially see that powering things remotely and sending information over long distances is pretty darn useful.
There is no such hypothetical justification for blockchain technology, or at least there isn't in many cases were people rabidly keep advocating for it.
As the author points out, in many fields the blockhain technology is less energy efficient, slower, and provides the opposite of what most customers want.
That is
Just saying it’s not unprecedented as other concepts have, however unlikely, eventually found success, and there are maybe a few parallels with basic research. Some computer science has come out of all of this already, some of which might be pieces to a puzzle we can’t entirely see yet.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ [2] https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/blockchain
Pretty simple idea, you hash a any document and you get a blockchained stamp of that hash.
Now you can prove to anyone that the document (eg contract) existed at that time.
I have no idea how blockchain technologies can apply to social impact projects; all I could come up with was verifying that my donated can of soup made it into the hands of Homeless Joe via a verifiable route, but I don't know how much I'd need that. I trust that the soup kitchen [or whatever] directly feeds people, and if I didn't I'd be volunteering up front as well or not even bother at all.
Perhaps again I just haven't applied my imagination to it.
1) email: it will never replace the post-office. You can only send text. Oh, ok, they've added images now, well, its' too slow for most people to download them, and now I've got all this spam. We use it in our company, but it isn't really for consumers. Oh, then hotmail...
2) You're not going to buy things online. The shipping costs will be too high. The logistics are all wrong. Will you trust an online shop with your credit card?? No way! This e-commerce thing is dead in the water. Sure, you point to the 'growth', but it's equal to "the proportion of US GDP comprised by toothpick sales"
3) Blogs?? Seriously. We're a news agency. We pay professional journalists to research and write compelling stories. Can you trust some random person in their basement writing a blog? Sorry, no contest. Blogs can't compete with major media companies.
4) Music downloads? Why would you spend 20 minutes downloading a song ILLEGALLY?? Where are you going to get it from. We'll stop all of this. CDs are the way forward. Oh, this internet thing has just destroyed our business model, iTunes to the rescue. But now people want to stream music. No they don't internet speed isn't fast enough to stream, and people want to own music, this music streaming thing isn't going anywhere!
5) Video? You've got to be kidding. Oh, that youtube thing is fine for weirdo's who want to make video's for their friends, but people will keep going to movies and paying for cable. The quality isn't good enough, and they don't have the great content. This internet thing isn't going anyway.
6) Rent someone's apartment online? Are you nuts! I'm not going to let some crazy person stay in my place, and I'm not going to stay in somebody else's. These internet people are crazy. Our hotel business is just fine. In fact, I think we should increase prices and start charging people hidden fees like "resort charges"...
7) Get in a stranger's car? A stranger that I found online!!??? Look, when I was a kid, my parents had two rules. Don't talk to strangers, and never get in a strangers car. Now you're telling me to go online, find a stranger and get in their car! This is madness. Just get in a cab! They'll take you where you want to go and you can trust them!
Please add your own "this is going nowhere" stories, I'm keen to see what else is out there, there are TONS.
The blockchain may use the internet as an underlying protocol, but it is as disruptive to the finance industry as Napster was to music, AirBnB to hotels, Uber/Lyft (please come to Australia Lyft) was to cabs, Amazon to retail, etc. etc.
The difference being, that blockchain is an open technology that is enabling this disruption, rather than a single company.
It goes like this: proxy (cash/cryptocurrency) -> belief -> result/other resource
e.g. Netscape, Yahoo, Nokia, Blackberry, Real Networks...
A use case that doesn't involve currency is product tracking.
I’m happy that the cartel of financial institutions can no longer shut folks out arbitrarily, looking forward to seeing what else is made possible by the blockchain.
First, private blockchains is a misleading term since they don't share the core innovation behind Bitcoin: solving (under certain assumptions) the double spend/transaction problem in a decentralized way. This is the start of a series of computer science innovations playing with game theory, cryptography, politics, and finances. The nature of public blockchains makes it difficult, if not impossible, to significantly scale and speed up them (without losing some of its original features).
Second, the core ideas behind private blockchains predates Bitcoin. Nick Szabo’s smart contracts concept is from 1994 [1] and if we go back in time we can find the AMIX project in 1988 [2][3]. The focus of these ideas is having a way to specify and plug contracts between different entities. Ad-hoc APIs are the natural solution for this problem but in the future there can be ways to quickly specify interactions and agreements with smart contracts.
Also ideas of log immutability can be traced back to a 1995 Spanish article titled “VCR y PEO, dos protocolos criptográficos simples” [4]. Bruce Schneier also published similar works in 1997 with Automatic Event-Stream Notorization Using Digital Signatures and in 1998 as “Cryptographic Support for Secure Logs on Untrusted Machines” [5].
Regarding private blockchains/distributed ledgers performance, the top achievement is 80000 tps using BFT-SMaRt consensus with an security tolerance of <50% crash faults and <33% malicious [6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract#History
[2] http://erights.org/smart-contracts/index.html
[3] http://erights.org/smart-contracts/history/index.html
[4] https://www.coresecurity.com/system/files/publications/2016/...
[5] https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-secure-lo...
Im no bitcoin fanboy either. Bail out, leave the bankers with the bill as revenge for 2008.
It was the wrong application of a brilliant idea - a democratically-distributed, obifuscated DNS replacement for secured communications like TOR seems more applicable than the whims of an unregulated currency.
But this author doesnt see food-sourcing happening. This author doesn't see banks adapting the blockchain for their own internal uses to protect sensitive info. Or anything else you might find in google.
Medium isn't a news source, any more than, say, blogspot or LiveJournal is.