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Comment by deft | Hacker News Reader

What purpose does a company with a centralized service have for "blockchain". Apparently even tech leaders have no idea what they're talking about.

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Apparently blockchain related job titles are the modern day equivalent of "Special Projects"... a vesting, semi-working responsibility. </sarcasm>

You're assuming that "a new effort to tackle blockchain technology" (from the recode article) means "use a blockchain" rather than "surveil and monetize The Blockchain"...

How much would you bet against Facebook attempting to link Bitcoin/BitcoinCash/Etherium wallet addresses to individuals and tracking cryptocurrenct transactions as part of your profile?

https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...

> What purpose does a company with a centralized service have for "blockchain"

Platform was marketed as an open marketplace. Once it was sufficiently powerful, Facebook showed its proprietary intent and closed the gates. Same happened with Microsoft. And Twitter. And countless others. Blockchain is just the newest tool for selling proprietary systems as open utopias.

Mark pegs himself as altruistic and wants to 'change the world', he's also a proponent of guaranteed basic income... I'd like to see blockchain used as a sort of gbi dole system, but it'd need to use reputation / social network effects in order to block 'sybil attacks', ie the bigger your score the more people have 'vouched' you're a real person not a bot or spammer, the more you get out of the daily dole. They also have marketplaces/ads/etc that they could make required to use fbcoin, in order to prop up the currencies prices...

Just speculation obviously, lots of others are trying to figure out a way to do this, but the imposter thing is very real and hard to stop obviously in crypto.

Using a CA instead of proof-of-work, I could see the underlying concept being useful in chain-of-custody type applications or limiting the attack surface of a compromised server.

Right. When "Enterprise" says "blockchain", what they mean is some combination of cryptography, an immutable database, and data/control/access/ownership flow logging. Sometimes also a financial product.

I think this word is now like "hacker" or "AI". It's not completely meaningless -- it does have a kinda-sorta fuzzy meaning. But that meaning is different from what techincal experts mean when using the term and is very much audience dependent.

That's just misusing the word blockchain. Like saying "cloud server" for "hosting" when there is nothing cloud about it.

Using digital signatures in a chain is not a novel idea. Without PoW you do not need the block part, just records.

They have a lot of things they can do

1. crypto currencies and P2P payments

2. Take clues from Steemit (a decentralized social platform that runs on blockchain) and how they utilize blockchain

3. Use to combat censorship in countries that are not favorable to Facebook

4. Use BC to combat fake news

5. AI platforms

6. Streaming services

Just because they have a centralized service doesn't mean they can use some of their considerable capital and branch out into other areas and offerings. To think FB will always be a social media platform is kind of. . .myopic wouldn't you say?

    > 4. Use BC to combat fake news
    > 5. AI platforms
    > 6. Streaming services

I fail to see how any of those has anything to do with the blockchain.

This reminds me of "lets do x, except in THE CLOUD" all over again. fight censorship by putting things in THE CLOUD where it can't easily be blocked, stream video from THE CLOUD

wasn't "the cloud" supposed to do decentralization too? hmm

The "Cloud" was at least about economies of scale (switching on-prem -> cloud has some potential cost savings).

I'm not sure re-implementing on a blockchain has the same effect, unless they're farming processing out to third-party actors at no cost somehow.

They don't have anything to do with it. He's just throwing out buzzwords, no clue what he's saying.

> 4. Use BC to combat fake news

perhaps blockchains can be used to immutably timestamp events like political speeches, to create an authoritative historical record?

> 5. AI platforms

consider the following efforts:

https://pandoraboxchain.ai/

https://oceanprotocol.com/

> 6. Streaming services

perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?

also consider this lightning network related effort: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-meets-netflix-laolu-buildin...

> perhaps blockchains can be used to immutably timestamp events like political speeches, to create an authoritative historical record?

So it’s not "combat fake news" but rather "create an authoritative historical record of events’ timestamps". I’m not sure how the blockchain is in any way useful for the latter. I feel like we’re trying to force blockchain into every imaginable field without even thinking about it.

> consider the following efforts

Landings full of buzzwords are not "efforts". Like another commenter pointed out, it’s the whole "let’s do X, except in the cloud" thing all over again.

> perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?

Ditto. "let's do content rights, except in the blockchain".

This is what you think today. Tomorrow, when new apps are developed by FB via blockchain, you'd be like that seemed so obvious in the hindsight. We are early on blockchain - there are a lot of hidden use cases and apps waiting to be built.

> there are a lot of hidden use cases

Not much different from no use cases, at least from where I'm standing.

People compare this to the early 90s of the internet, except even then early internet was EXTREMELY useful, even with the limited access and content.

The early internet was extremely useful for getting credit card numbers and warez/serials/cracking tools.

It would seem we have come full circle.

Wait and watch. You will most likely have to eat your words. Most people are like you - they think they know a lot and are not open to the possibility how technology can evolve and new use cases can emerge.

If theyre hidden, how do you know they're there?

Not sure your what use cases you claim that we haven't discovered yet. Lists/Linked-Lists data structures with locks and priorities go back to the dawn of computing.

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