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Comment by gibsons77 | Hacker News Reader

This is the example I was referring to: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8358773. The problem is one where there are multiple vehicles, from different manufacturers, that must communicate with each other in real time (say at an intersection) and must make decisions based on messages being relayed to them. This is easier if they are all following the same protocol.

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There is no need to have a database replicated everywhere across a network and for all nodes in the network to be constantly engaging in a consensus protocol to agree upon the state on the ledger for some cars to communicate.

Almost always a blockchain is (i) useless or (ii) something kinda vaguely like Satoshi's blockchain but really more like Git.

I agree for this particular case, which is why I think a DAG with local consensus (something like IOTA) is more applicable for this application.

I think DAGs are possibly even more useless.

And you're of course free to have your own opinion. I'm not as quick to dismiss them simply because I acknowledge that new technologies have historically been ridiculed by experts at least initially. But healthy skepticism is always warranted.

There is an important qualifier that people keep forgetting.

You wouldn't need such a system for cars to communicate in the presence of authority or in the absence of value. The former is the case for Lyft or Uber, the latter is the case if we have an infinite supply of cars.

But if one wishes to have peer-to-peer value (and cars ain't cheap) without a central authority (and Uber is evil) a proof-of-work blockchain is better for that than Git or a server run by some guy is.

There may of course be superior social or technical forms for this use case. But once you have added the qualifier that the system should be decentralised (and for everyone making a career out of pretending not to understand what this word means: I mean here that there should be no central point of control at the point of transaction) a blockchain may make more sense than some of the alternatives.

And of course the best protocol for a real time, latency sensitive application is... using a blockchain?

Bitcoin has a throughput of about 3 tx per second. Ethereum a little better at 7 tx per second. Confirmations are on the order of minutes at best.

Why do you think this would be a good idea?

Those are blockchains which come to global consensus, which I don't think would work here. You would either need a state channel (2nd layer) or a DAG structure.

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