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Comment by dozzie | Hacker News Reader

> To me it seems that every alleged application of blockchain technology can be done by having a trusted organization maintaining a reliable database.

Congratulations, you have just discovered that every application of a decentralized service can be implemented with an appropriate centralized service without changing much of the protocol running on top of that service. You do know that this is an obvious result, right?

Blockchain is the first cryptographic protocol for document timestamping that does not need the trusted third party to run. This alone is a significant technical success.

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I guess my point was more that any application on such technology would need a trusted organization to maintain the blockchain to gain the trust of the users.

I wouldn’t want, eg my health records stored on a system that isn’t trusted. This is one often cited application of blockchain.

Note that storing health records is a very dumb try of using blockchain. No wonder that you have trouble seeing how blockchain would be of any help, though probably for reasons different than the proper ones.

Blockchain is a service that adds a (cryptographic) timestamp to documents, so everybody can tell which of the two related documents was issued earlier. Blockchain doesn't do absolutely anything else! If a specific use case is not made easier when you can tell which of the two documents was earlier, then using blockchain is pointless.

let me rephrase: give me one good use where the majority of potential users would be OK with storing timestamped documents on a system not maintained by a trusted organization.

Ownership transfer contracts are one such example. We assume here that the signatures under a contract cannot be forged and the contract itself cannot be modified without the consent of the involved parties, but digital signatures used in (on top of) blockchain satisfy this requirement.

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