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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

For me, when technology trudges along it's in response to some sort of use. E.g. solid-state data storage started out being used in exotic situations like flight recorders. Later came camera usage. It evolved over the decades to become dominant in phone and laptop storage; perhaps eventually it will drive spinning-rust storage out of existence.

What are the equivalent real-world use cases for blockchain tech that are a) delivering economic value not achievable by other technologies, and b) are paying for sustained innovation?

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I’ll address the elephant in the room:

Primary use case currently: moving money/value to somewhere or someone that some centralized entity doesn’t want you to move it to.

That covers real world uses from skirting high remittance fees to the infamous dark net markets.

Thanks! I appreciate the frankness.

Regarding remittances, I don't believe any blockchain technology has made a significant dent in the market. If you have data otherwise, I'd be interested to see it. But I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of money transfer places, and all of them seem to be conventional.

As to the rest, I think we're talking about light financial crime. (Light because the heavier sort isn't big on having a permanent public record.) It's hard to know, of course, but is this usage going up or down? I had the impression that KYC/AML efforts were putting a big crimp in it. Either way, it seems self-limiting to me, in that significant success invites more attention from various authorities, which strongly discourages participation from people who would like to remain on the right side of the law.

Micropayments is a strong real-world use case. Basically, pay half a cent to each website you visit or for each news article you read. Transaction fees are too high for this to be viable with traditional payment systems, however solutions like lightning network solve for this.

Gambling is another big one, trust is a problem with online gambling but with blockchain it is possible to make it provably fair by basing randomization seeds on blockchain data. There are many sites running similar setups, and these sites cause a large number of on-chain txns, arguably already paying for sustained innovation.

Smart contracts have a lot of potential but are still in their infancy, and bugs have caused significant financial losses, however, those problems are solvable.

The few non-hyped uses for blockchain I have seen are specifically as alternatives for diverse supply chain tracking. You can in fact use other alternatives for it. They may even be cheaper in some situation but there could be other requirements that make it more or less viable like say standardization.

It should be viewed as a specialized tool and not a golden hammer like many of its proponents think.

I have not actually seen a supply-chain use case in production that doesn't involve a central authority. Have you?

It seems to me that for anything involving a central authority, there are much better technologies.

There isn't currently a huge demand for public crypto currencies but I see a lot of demand from enterprises (particularly in financial services and supply chains) for blockchain. The tech is iterating to solve for these needs.

I don't think that means public crypto has failed or will go away. It just needs time to mature as a technology.

Fwiw, I find it interesting that OP says public crypto failed because of both fundamental misunderstandings and immature tech (internet trying to compete with newspapers in the 80s). Eventually, the internet was able to compete with newspapers and I think eventually public blockchain will compete with centralized companies.

Networks can benefit from economies of scale without the rent seeking bottlenecks.

> I see a lot of demand from enterprises (particularly in financial services and supply chains) for blockchain.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I understand that's the claim. What I'm asking for is not general areas, but specific examples of where a blockchain is actually in use and delivering value.

As far as I've seen, all of the examples in those areas are at best pilot projects. Actual utility seems to be somewhere close to zero. E.g.: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/30/blockchain_study_fi...

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