6 alternative (and better) uses for blockchain | Hacker News Reader

6 alternative (and better) uses for blockchain

dtcollective.org.au

67 pointsrbanffy32 comments

For many of them you only need an append only ledger not a full blockchain. And you still have to deal with the oracle problem.

Is my Picasso real? - If I trust the entity that put it into the blockchain, then I believe so. Wait, why did I need a blockchain for that?

> If I trust the entity that put it into the blockchain, then I believe so. Wait, why did I need a blockchain for that?

99.9% of these "trust ledger" ideas have this problem.

That's why I wonder why it gets so hyped. Many of those ideas get sold as if you can guarantee correctness of everything, solve every problem once and for all. But nobody thinks about the problem that you can still manipulate the data before it is in the blockchain.

Trust isn't neccesarily the only solution that blockchains solve. Lets consider a simple example, login credentials.

Your login credentials exist on many different centralized databases, which a service provider is responsible for managing. This leads to increased possibility that one of the providers messes up (identity breach) and leads to an unnecessary amount of data replication across databases.

Why do I need credentials for every single different service? Instead why don't we store these login credentials in a blockchain so that many providers can access these IF you let them, in a cryptographically secure way.

You PROVE your identity on the blockchain without actually letting them store identity information on their database.

A blockchain is basically a shared resource pool where a user chooses who can access the data that belongs to them whether it be assets, identity, or other important data.

Service providers no longer have to be responsible for it and the user is put back in control.

This is a much saner way of storing important things on the web

Couldn't then a bad actor from obtaining >50% of computing power behind it and manipulate it?

It always seems like you have to trust someone which still begs the question - what's the point?

Im all in on dBFT, so I believe in the elected delegates maintaining said distributed database. Similarly to how governments maintain roads, I trust the elected parties to not corrupt the database.

I think complete trustlessness is a false dichotomy. Im ok with trusting certain parties in maintaining distributed "value databases" as one might call them}

Edit: false dichotomy is bad phrase, idk "chasing the wrong goal?"

The problem is that a blockchain which does not allow third party miners gains nothing from being a blockchain, because it can be a traditional database without losing anything at all. A blockchain which does allow third party miners is open to attack without obscene resource investment.

as far as I understand it miners only bootstrap the system eventually transaction fees run it.

In dBFT the attack vector is a collusion attack between elected delegates. In practice I do not see this being any more likely than a 51% hashpower attack.

However most delegated systems are still young. The only reason people believe that 51% attacks are impossible is because it has worked for 10 years. If delegated systems work for the same amount of time, I don't see why they wont get the same reputation.

I think Dan Larimer gives a good argument on the situation.

https://steemit.com/eos/@dan/response-to-vitalik-buterin-on-...

Edit: His Conclusion is something many people should consider, when outright rejecting delegated consensus.

"EOS is designed around far more realistic assumptions and logic and achieves scalability by avoiding the dogmatic fallacies promoted by Bitcoin and Ethereum maximalists."

The "elected delegates" or "trusted parties" you are describing are the Certification Authorities in a certificate chain. We have this already and we don't need blockchain for that.

Your example only works where pseudo-anonymous identities can be created at-will and you are willing to build your entire ecosystem on some kind of reputation system (how long an identity has existed, how many organisations vouch for the behaviour of that user, etc etc).

The moment you introduce a trust anchor (like an e-mail provider via e-mail address verification, or government issued id) you may as well have gone with OAuth2

What incentive do I have for mining a block on this chain? Some kind of LoginCoin?

I assume delegated consensus. You don't mine anything.

One thing I struggle with understanding for all these blockchain based solutions is the fact that the "trust" aspect fails in the face of an adversarial counterparty. For example, how do you know that the fish with id XYZ was _really_ ethically sourced? You only know that the counterparty asserts that fish XYZ was. The only advantage that I can see to the current system is that you can trace that assertion back to the originator.

What bothers me with this blockchain is, who will actually run the nodes? If only the merchants do so, then they can also counterfeit everything just as they want. In the end you rely as much on your trust to the merchant than with the classical method (i.e., a tag that reads "Product of [country]", which is way more eco[nom/log]ical.

Yeah, I mean, that's why you have to include the financial incentive of the coin to keep "disinterested" 3rd parties involved. The real-world uses give the coin value and the coin's value allows the blockchain to function. At least that's how I understand it.

Why not to use already running platforms like Ethereum where all those incentive issues are already solved?

How will you use your supermarket to use Ethereum instead of their own blockchain where they can mine as much coins as they need without wasting huge amounts of energy?

If a supplier is running its own blockchain, then it really makes little sense. But to gain real trust of its clients, supplier will actually put it on a public blockchain. Only then external experts will say: "yeah, this supplier is really trustworthy". In other words, the incentive to use a public blockchain instead of their own, private one, is to gain real trust.

I always thought storing e.g. a hash of the animal’s DNA on the blockchain would be neat. Testing would need to become faster, cheaper and more reliable, of course.

What would that accomplish?

Nothing more than a USDA database.

To compare it to. But for the tested fish verification maybe.

Wait, how do we know they actually took representative samples of fish DNA? Well, obviously we are going to need hashes of video files of the tests. Also on the blockchain. But how do we trust that video corresponds to those tests? Timestamps and GPS stamps on the blockchain? There is no problem can't be solved without enough blockchain see. But I won't be syncing a node!

In all seriousness, for now blind trust and reputation are still important and the rest is just layers designed to produce credibility. Not necessarily verification. And there is a difference. But I am in favor of more objective tools whenever possible so not to bag on blockchain efforts.

That relies on the false assumption that an animal has the same DNA in each cell.

It's trust the original supplier of the fish vs. trust the original supplier and all intermediaries. An improvement but no silver bullet.

By using such BC solution, you can be sure that you eat a fish caught by some certified supplier and not by some poachers. A certifying body is assumed to check ethical questions.

couldn't you use some kind of random audit in the system/contract?

> US company Follow My Vote hopes to employ cryptography to protect each ballot against tampering from end to end, keeping votes anonymous and immutable on a Blockchain ledger.

Or, you know, you could just vote with papers and pens. An observer can then watch the counting at each polling station, record the result, and verify it against the published results (which, at least in my country, is published for each polling station individually).

The major problem with all computer-based voting schemes is that a voting procedure cannot be considered democratic when the vast majority of constituents does not understand what the fuck is going on.

> the vast majority of constituents does not understand what the fuck is going on

Lol, this is the problem with voting in general, nothing to do with computers!

> US company Follow My Vote hopes to employ cryptography to protect each ballot against tampering from end to end, keeping votes anonymous and immutable on a Blockchain ledger.

> The idea is that each voter has a private key and a unique voter ID, which allows them to monitor and verify that their vote is correctly recorded and has been tallied.

How would this ensure anonymous voting and presented in a way an everyday person can use it, would it be any more secure over pencil and paper?

I agree it wouldn't be helpful.

It is similar to the problem of DNA evidence tests. The technique can be extremely certain, but the entire process chain must be evaluated in order to gauge trust.

How likely is it that the evidence was correctly sampled, collected, was actually on the victim etc.

For votes there is great benefit in having a paper process which can not be mass forged as easily as computer votes or tallies etc. It might take longer but it is of high importance.

bullshit

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