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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

Please enlighten us: what are real-world applications of blockchain technology that provide a benefit to anyone in any sector?

Please remember that there are over 7 billion people in the world that want to potentially use it, so Bitcoin (or similar) are not working as a payment system.

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This is my exact problem. I haven't been able to use any of these cryptocurrencies to do actual work so far.

Everything has existed on the plane of theory and whitepapers so far.

Nearly a decade after BTC's release and nearly half a decade after's ETH, shouldn't there be a few mainstream applications using them?

I don't think they have to be mainstream enough for you to have actual value.

I run a CBD store and it's extremely hard for CBD companies to get banking without exorbitant fees. For example, it costs ~2.5% for normal companies to process a credit card payment through stripe. For us, it costs >7%. Many of my competitors and suppliers are turning to cryptocurrencies for the lower fees and guaranteed certainty of payment.

The impact of crypto is yet to be fully estimated but it seems as if there isn't any existing system crypto cannot replicate and there are many systems enabled by crypto that existing systems will fail to create.

Are you in the US? I think that's a particular limitation of your country's payment systems, with its over-reliance on credit cards. In most other places you can use payment systems which are less vulnerable to fraud (since they use a push-style system, not pull) and much harder to chargeback.

Cryptocurrencies might have an edge for a while, but don't count on it long-term.

I am in the US. Is there a form of internet commerce that doesn't depend on credit cards?

Absolutely. Here in Portugal they don't even appear in the top 3, and in many other EU countries they're not the first. Many of them are developed by the local banking system (like iDEAL[1]), but SEPA transfers are used too, since they're usually free.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of these local options.

So your argument is since not all 7 billion people cannot use it it's not working as a payment system and therefore it does not provide any benefit to anyone in any sector?

Geez.

No, you didn't comprehend what I said. I said that it doesn't work as a payment system, so they should name something else where it's good at. Can you name another application in any sector?

It works well as a payment system.

Some other applications: provably fair gambling, decentralized voting and an uncensorable twitter (ex memo.cash).

Payment system: The corresponding blockchain would nearly instantly overload and reach data sizes beyond good and evil for everyone to handle. The result would be middlemen (aka banks) that are able to save the whole blockchain and handle your trust requirements. Today's light wallets require trust as well and every user of those can potentially be fed fraudulent blocks without them noticing.

Gambling: why is that better than a non-blockchain, regulated solution? The results have to come from somewhere, so that is a centralized point of trust you inevitably need. Unless you mean that the odds are decided "fairly" then I question why you would bet your money at a place where you can't trust the odds, or why you don't bet elsewhere where the odds are more in your favor.

Decentralized voting: I don't know why anybody would want that. If you don't control who votes, you end up with rigged votes. Unless you mean that only the block producers (miners) vote, then you will end up in an oligarchy.

Uncensorable Twitter: If by "uncensorable" you mean immutable: nobody sane wants that. Once somebody posts child pornography to the blockchain, you will have to explain to the police why you have child pornography on your computer.

I like how you easily you dismiss any counterpoints or examples.

Even with full 100MB blocks you're only looking at ~5TB of storage for a whole year. This is easily attainable for many people, including myself, today. The point isn't to have everyone run full nodes you know, some trust is acceptable.

The fact is cryptocurrencies work very well as a payment system today.

> then I question why you would bet your money at a place where you can't trust the odds

Obviously here you wouldn't need to trust the odds as they are verifiable.

> I don't know why anybody would want that. If you don't control who votes, you end up with rigged votes.

You can have a voting scheme where you give out unique votes, centrally, which you can then yourself without trust verify that your vote is correctly counted. Why anyone would want that should be clear.

> you mean immutable: nobody sane wants that

Many people would want that. There are of course drawbacks.

You can also store hashes of content which you can store elsewhere which you can verify. Like many torrent sites work.

My mother will be very pleased to hear that she needs to buy terabytes of disks every year instead of using her credit card. Very user friendly.

You missed the point about gambling. Please re-read what I said about the odds. You need to trust the service anyways to input the correct result.

Voting requires anonymity. By giving out unique votes, you jeopardized this.

Storing content elsewhere doesn't require a blockchain because it doesn't guarantee that it will still be there. Thus it's not censorship resistant.

Why exactly does your mother need to run a full node? You imply incorrectly that to perform a Bitcoin transaction, one needs to have run a full node.

Because if you don't run a full node you need trust and if you need trust, you can simply use a credit card. This whole crypto currency thing is so stupid because nobody can answer me these very basic questions.

You could also do some basic research. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

You really don't need to run a full node, that's just decentralization fetishism.

Decentralization is just a means to an end: permissionless p2p digital payments. You don't need to personally run a full node for that.

In the case of Bitcoin it's incredibly slow and had high transaction fees. It's an outright terrible payment system.

Yes, luckily Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency.

For example Bitcoin Cash is a great payment system.

And in reality not actually used as a payment system at scale. Genuine payments are the edge case of all crypto currency.

Bitcoin as a settlement system would work just fine at that scale.

It wouldn't. At that scale it would cost hundreds of dollars and several days per settlement.

Bitcoin is every day making absolutely sure it scales less, costs more, is more dependent on centralization and alienates more people.

It's not even funny. Go for ETH, BCH, Dash, or whatever, Bitcoin is proud to continually shoot themselves in the foot.

The current real world application is a test to see how money or forms of value can be coordinated among distributed decentralized networks. Just the experimentation is a value and benefit for humanity. One should remove the idea that Bitcoin will be the winner as a payment system. It could be Bitcoin with its Lightning Network implementation, or it could be something better. As it seems scalability is your specific gripe here, there are competing distributed ledger technologies that are working towards or already have solved this to an extent better than Bitcoin. Understand that this goal of scalable, decentralized multi-nodal coordination is not an easy and simple problem, but it is a problem that market participants are working towards, and solutions are necessarily constantly evolving, because is that not what markets do?

It's a very costly and potentially ruining way to do experimentation though.

And out of that experiment are coming other experiments that work to solve for the issues.

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