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Comment by 0x4f3759df | Hacker News Reader

Why use a blockchain instead of a database? Because multiple organizations are involved and each wants to control the database.

If a thing moves across multiple organizations then you can make a case for a blockchain application, logistics is an obvious example, but there are others like asset (expensive paintings / vintage wine) provenance.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/ups-bets-on-blockchain-as-...

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This is a solved problem. All interested parties form an independent business entity and assign ownership to that.

All problems related to inter-company collaboration are people and organizational problems not technical problems. Blockchain solves nothing in this space.

The main benefit of blockchain is that it is trustless and censorship-resistant. You don't need to trust any business entities. You can transact with someone in a zero trust environment on the other side of the world

Just because you use a blockchain doesn't make your implementation trustless, nor censorship resistant.

Actually, according to the original definition - https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... - it does, since blockchain is bitcoin (and vice-versa), and as far as anyone can tell, currently it is indeed trustless and censorship resistant.

The problem is that some people adopted blockchain as some kind of weird gimmick to wrap extraordinary claims such as the ones in the original post and promote scams (altcoins, appcoins, whatever).

Not sure about censorship-resistance. Bitcoin transactions can be traced back to some identity, especially if the payer's Bitcoins were originally funded with fiat currency that came from the banking system.

That does not say anything about censorship resistance, because it does not mean the transactions can be reversed (on the contrary).

That's a problem of anonymity (or lack thereof).

Yes, but wouldn't the fact that it's not totally anonymous discourage people from saying whatever they want? Like, self-directed censorship.

it cost on average around $1 USD to perform an average blockchain transaction and millions of transaction are made a day, the demand is transparent and the data is available for everyone to see. If it was a solved problem I would expect the demand for decentralized ledgers to be a lot lower

You are confounding the demand for decentralized ledgers with the demand for currency that's recorded on the ledgers.

Sure. But this has been going on for awhile, what's the example of someone actually doing any of these things in a way that creates real efficiency?

I feel like you are moving the goalpost.

edit: If UPS doesn't count then nothing is going to count.

The guy said it seems interesting in theory but asked where the actual value was. You replied with some theoretical examples.

Lots of things are interesting in theory. Bitcoin is about to end its first decade though. Asking where the actual value comes from seems on topic to me.

I don't know about so called blockchain projects like ethereum, but bitcoin has value because it has inelastic demand. There are a lot of underserved people out there that need bitcoin, regardless of its value, in their daily lives because they can't use fiat currency for things like buying quality drugs online, getting rid of ransomware, laundering money, etc.

Hell, if these don't pass the ideological test, just ask someone from Venezuela why do they need bitcoin.

I'll bite. Why does someone from Venezuela need Bitcoin?

You have some good answers here: https://apnews.com/f7ccc4ea283746f28b261cabeaf8f0c5

It's not clear that the Venezuelan case is due to inherent property of Bitcoin, or merely that Bitcoin just has good timing and is the most conveniently available alternative to cash out of a tanking currency.

Basically, saying that bitcoin can (at the moment) function as a better currency than one that is completely failing is valid and interesting, but not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Don't think so. You said $x is great for $y. He asked you to show an example of $x actually solving $y.

> We are now about eight years into block chain and beyond its one core use cases there is almost nothing. Whatever value has been delivered seems extremely minor compared to the vast sums of money being spent, making this perhaps the worst ROI I've ever seen.

> Can someone provide a counter example? What are people doing in the real world with this stuff?

What? Where did they move the goalpost.

Exactly, scalability is a moving target. You can't expect to match VISA transactions the first day

Some progress in eight years would be good, though!

That won't happen in a substantial way until scaling issues are fixed. On Ethereum, there are at least half a dozen projects that tackle different aspects of the problem. The first phase of sharding, for example, should be good for a 100X improvement; there's a published spec, a testnet is on the way, and it can be rolled out without a fork, so there's a good chance it'll happen this year.

Some other chains are working the problem in their own ways, I'm just less familiar with them.

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