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Comment by kawfey | Hacker News Reader

One perfect use case is amateur radio cloud logging. Logbook of the World[0] is the defacto standard, which implements cryptographic signing, but the database is centralized, and it's consistently broken, lagging, and needs frequent updates and downtime, and due to this it probably costs a lot of money to the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and her members. Blockchain is the perfect solution IMO.

[0]: http://www.arrl.org/logbook-of-the-world

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Based on a naïve reading of your description, it's unclear whether those problems are due to some inherent properties of a centralized database, or if they're merely implementation details of the current host. Any thoughts?

LotW is just bad engineering to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I have never used it and never will.

Ultimately a QSO is something between two people. If both people believe they made a QSO, they made a QSO. If you want to have a contest over who can make the most QSOs, you need a judge to define what their definition of a QSO is. LotW is not a judge, but rather a bunch of random antique network protocols with cargo-cult cryptography thrown in to make it as difficult as possible to use. But you can still easily lie about having made a QSO. So it solves nothing.

For those that aren't hams, enjoy: http://www.arrl.org/files/file/LoTW%20Instructions/Quick%20S...

Also, a "QSO" is basically radio contact between two parties. Most people agree a QSO has been made when the remote party understands your callsign, you understand theirs, and that you have verified the understanding. (Some people are more liberal or more conservative, however.)

I love the idea of sending data over ham radio but, outside some kind of disaster or simply making hams happy, is there a practical use?

Is there a practical use? Not really. Satellites and fibers are more reliable than hoping the ionosphere is in the right configuration for the path that you want to send messages on.

It is nice to know that you can communicate with the other side of the world using no infrastructure, but it's unlikely that it will ever be necessary.

Airplanes on oceanic routes use HF radios, which is the same idea as ham radio. I am not sure why they don't use satellites. I guess it's cheaper than buying satellites.

Might be useful during wartime, since it's likely that lots of infrastructure will be taken down.

Any additional communication skill would be handy to know about should it become necessary to use alternate communication methods in times of emergencies when normal communications are disrupted. Since the Internet controls practically everything we do, and enemy would want to disable our Internet access to cripple our communications. We would then need alternate ways to communicate voice, text and data. So a practical use would be to practice and gain experience ahead of time, and then hope you never have to use this as a last resort

A technology which incentivizes consuming all available resources and favors those with the most sounds like a perfect fit for amateur radio.

You wouldn't need mining for such a blockchain. It could easily work on proof of stake.

PoS doesn't actually work. The wastefulness of PoW mining is what keeps the network honest, without the waste there is no incentive to stay on "the main chain" (i.e. prevent an accidental or malicious fork) since it costs nothing to "mine" every possible chain.

It works for this use case. Radio contact logging is based on the honor system, and a contact is valid if both ends log it.

Currently it's a centralized database that anyone can input data into. In this use case you'd simply decentralize the DB.

Blockchains are needed in cryptocurrencies to prevent the double spend problem. There's no double spend problem in logging radio contacts. The incentives to attack are much less too, because there's no value to steal.

Hmm. I see your point.

I think Ethereum's plans for PoS penalizes people (on the main chain) people who have previously signed the wrong chain, so I don't think that's an insurmountable obstacle. It's all still a work in progress though with a lot of cases like that. I'm deeply suspicious of any projects that claim to have already figured out PoS.

Or some kind of decentralized wiki. It's not that far off from IPFS. If you want to keep history immutable, then a blockchain would do it.

i don't see how LotW requires consensus? you could have a bunch of sites which just take these signed logbook records and store them, and make them available for other sites to download. the records verify themselves by virtue of cryptographic signature.

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