You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
blog.smartdec.net
blog.smartdec.net
Edit: To clarify what I mean by "a database and a contract": I mean the way the world does business, and as been for as long as society exists. There's trust between parties, and there's a multi-layered system in place to resolve disputes, starting from the customer support call center, reviews, bad publicity, and going all the way to the courts.
Guys, this works. It's literally how the world works.
Not exactly. It's anything for which the legal system is not effective.
For example, you can have a perfectly legal contract, but the other party is in a corrupt foreign jurisdiction that would never find in your favor in the event of a breach. Then you can't contract with them because they have no incentive not to breach, without an alternative method of ensuring compliance that doesn't rely on their corrupt government.
You may also have jurisdictions (like the US) where the process may be more fair, but it's unreasonably expensive, so if you're transacting with parties with a high probability of getting into disputes, something that can resolve them programmatically without litigation is an advantage.
Then there are the false positives. You're not a criminal, but you have bad credit or are from a disreputable country etc., so you're treated as one by the government or the rules targeting actual criminals cause companies to not want to do business with you, and you thereby need some alternative way to engage in your legitimate activities.
What you're arguing is that a perfect system of government removes the need for any alternative. But we haven't got a perfect system of government.
The difficult to resolve problem is enforcing what the contract is trying to measure. It doesn't magically authenticate the state of the real world or objects within it. It can't do things like answer the question: "Did the occupant cause harm or ware beyond normal to a rented unit?" It's very good at enforcing things like regular and timely payment, but can't help resolve things such as "Did the land lord fix plumbing issues when notified?".
It also can't fix things like the biased nature of arbitration (is which relate to the above and in particular relate to the inherent disadvantage of both not knowing and finding it difficult to ascertain the state of the real world at any given time), or the cost involved with performing such observations. Nor can it handle bad actors on the side of renters, either by lack of training/documentation on how to properly use things or direct acts of malice.
Suppose you have someone designated to identify plumbers, call him Bob. Bob has a public key, and if a plumber, call her Alice, comes to him and proves in the usual meatspace ways that she's a licensed plumber, Bob signs the plumber's public key, along with their name and license number and the date, signature good for a year. Maybe Bob works for the government, maybe he doesn't, but in either case he's a trustworthy guy who genuinely only identifies real plumbers and both the landlords and tenants trust him to do that.
Now the contract says that if the tenant identifies a plumbing issue, the landlord will provide a plumber identified by Bob to have a look at it. So the tenant can sign a statement declaring a plumbing issue and if the landlord doesn't get a signature by an identified plumber saying it's resolved within a given time, the landlord is in breach, verifiable with math. But if the plumber comes and signs a statement that there wasn't a plumbing issue, the errant tenant has to pay their fee for showing up, again verifiable with math.
Then the remaining issue is corrupt plumbers. But you can't solve every problem all at once, so you rely on the state to revoke licenses in demonstrated cases of corruption. Or on Bob to stop authorizing them.
Revoke how? Does the state, or anyone else besides Bob, have the authority to unilaterally modify the blockchain? If so, why don't they just use a central database, since you are forced to trust them anyway?
But as the author points out so well (I really like his "Blockchain is not IOT" mantra) once you're dealing with real-world objects, you are relying on an oracle that you must trust.
I did it guys. I'm finally enlightened.
International trade has perfectly good mechanisms for dealing with this at present. See: Letters of Credit.
> You may also have jurisdictions (like the US) where the process may be more fair, but it's unreasonably expensive, so if you're transacting with parties with a high probability of getting into disputes, something that can resolve them programmatically without litigation is an advantage.
The easy workaround to this is just to factor in additional costs for doing business...
> You're not a criminal, but you have bad credit or are from a disreputable country etc., so you're treated as one by the government or the rules targeting actual criminals cause companies to not want to do business with you, and you thereby need some alternative way to engage in your legitimate activities.
Probably still illegal to do business with you if the government has outlawed work with specific sanctioned countries, etc. Also, letters of credit.
> Probably still illegal to do business with you if the government has outlawed work with specific sanctioned countries, etc.
The whole point is the cases where it's not.
Many banks and payment processors won't do business with you when your business isn't worth the effort of verifying you. That doesn't mean it's necessarily illegal for the bank, much less the seller of whatever you're buying, to do business with you. But you can't do the perfectly legal transaction if the customer has no way of paying.
So your argument is that blockchain is only useful for international trade with tiny businesses?
> Even for higher margin transactions, higher overhead is no advantage.
Most people consider low corruption, high rule of law countries ideal places for business, with the higher overhead...
This works until you deal with a subject matter that (some) banks don't like or with people that (some) financial institutions don't like. It's entirely possible to be banned from Visa and MasterCard's services and this can sometimes mean that banks simply won't do business with you. Sometimes it's the subject matter you're dealing with that can be banned, eg certain types of (legal) porn.
>Probably still illegal to do business with you if the government has outlawed work with specific sanctioned countries, etc. Also, letters of credit.
He didn't say that the government has outlawed doing business with the country. He said that the government treats people from that country much more harshly. This would mean that businesses wouldn't want to do business with people from that country. Letters of credit don't work if the other country's banks aren't interested in dealing with businesses from your country.
Yeah, but maybe something like bitcoin is a cancer on an imperfect system.
If you asked a tumor, maybe it would say, well, the infrastructure of the body I'm living in sucks! There are all these use cases that the immune system and the circulatory system and so on don't handle!
People wouldn't be so interested in Bitcoin if the existing financial system didn't fail so many people. You don't get the cancer without the defects that cause it.
It shouldn't be possible to deny someone the ability to send or receive money. It sounds like a good idea (down with the bad guys), until you also push for a cashless society, at which point it's equivalent to demanding that they starve to death under a bridge because they have no way to buy food or pay rent. That's how to turn people at the margin into violent criminals.
It should be possible to electronically spend $100 anonymously. It isn't anybody's business what kind of books you want to read, or whether you want to donate to the EFF or your church or Planned Parenthood. Your sex life should be between you and your partner, not you, your partner, Paypal, Mastercard and Bank of America.
The existing system gets things like this wrong, which drives people to alternatives. If you don't like the alternatives, remove the demand for them by satisfying it within the existing system.
can you give a concrete example? this requires a smart contract does it not? what is an example contract (specifically) where this is useful?
Suppose you make a loan to someone in an untrustworthy jurisdiction. The contract says you provide X amount in Bitcoin today and get paid back with interest in five years.
The borrower is a real estate developer who has a separate contract with a local buyer to purchase the property in five years, so they can use the smart contract for the real estate purchase to commit the portion of the purchase price to you equal to the loan principal plus interest.
If the borrower breaches by not building the property then you still get paid and the dispute is between the developer and the buyer over the separate contract, but they're both local which means the local courts would be fair to them (and if they're not it's still not your problem).
Using an escrow service doesn't work because the chronology of the loan requires you to release the money to them to build the property five years before they receive the money to pay you back with.
The blockchain can't fulfill the agreement.
All the blockchain does is memorialize the agreement -- which is what a contract does.
Both parties just need to agree on the "Swiss Bank" 3rd party to escrow the funds (and of course, the contract terms).
Blockchain and smart contracts seemed well suited to this task, initially. But I'd agree with the OP that low value assets (LVA) with sensors are easily spoofed and the cost of electricity isn't worth the time to miners.
High value assets (HVA) are just better served with human escrow brokers.
Will blockchain fix it? doubt it. but a lot of people are trying.
Depending on your location, the MAXIMUM damages for small-claims court is $5000 to $10,000. The whole system is designed so that smaller issues can be resolved quickly.
> And many contract provisions are often not honored in bankruptcy
That's literally the point of bankruptcy. The courts say "X has paid enough to its debtors and no longer needs to pay any more". You can't squeeze blood out of a stone. If the defendant doesn't have any money left, it doesn't make sense to sue them.
> Litigation is an unwieldy tool and preferably avoided where possible.
How does Blockchain stop litigation?
* If your Ethereum smart-contract says you owe your Car (or House) to somebody, but you don't give it to them... they'll be forced to go through the court system anyway to force you to give them the promised goods.
* If you fraudulently reported to the smart-contract the temperature of goods or... otherwise tricked the sensors on "smart contract temperature sensors", you have to be taken to court.
* If you put 20 BTC into an exchange (in promise for 550 ETH or whatever), but the exchange goes bankrupt... you lose both your BTC and your ETH. You have to go through the courts to try to get your money back.
This is such a US-centric answer it hurts. Small claims court doesn't mean anything when the other entity isn't even in your country. If you and I make a contract and you flake on it then I have no reasonable legal recourse because an international lawsuit is way too expensive for me.
Okay. And if the same is said about a smart contract, like The DAO, what happens?
https://medium.com/@MyPaoG/explaining-the-dao-exploit-for-be...
That's actually solvable with atomic swaps [1]. They anable you to trustlessly exchange crypto currencies at an agreed on price.
Unfortunately, it doesn't generalize to BTC / USD (or other fiat currency), which is probably the bigger exchange that most people use.
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The second issue is that BTC / ETH prices can change dramatically. Set your timer too long: and your opponent can use time to take advantage of the trade... only executing it when the BTC/ETH exchange floats towards their favor.
Because BTC / ETH prices vary dramatically on a day-to-day basis, "gaming" the exchange price is going to be trickier. With a traditional exchange, you either market order (always get a price, immediately), or limit-order (get the price as soon as the threshold is reached).
That's the problem right there- defining "objectively measured completion" in such a way that the contract can act on.
“A database and a contract”... but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data?
Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems.
I agree 100% with the article in that blockchain is being ‘applied’ to a whole bunch of places that don’t need it. That doesn’t mean that it can’t work well in many other (legal!) scenarios.
> Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems.
What problems? I mean your arguing like something like public transportation is an impossibility without blockchain backing because: "Who owns the stations, who enforces the schedules and who owns the actual busses?"
Those are not problems. They are all just questions that are always insanely easy to answer in the specific case.
With your banking credits, who owns the database? the bank, who enforces the contracts? the legal system? And who owns the actual data? Depending on law, there's ownership relations between yourself and the bank.
You an way to many crypto proponents are arguing like ownership rights, legal systems and databases don't exist outside of blockchain based solutions.
If you own a house, where's the record? The title is with an insurance company. Why? Because your ownership of this house can be questioned at any time since there's no equivocal record. It's recorded in a bunch of "databases", some of which you and your insurance company may not know exist.
I cannot understand how at the same time lots of people are worried about "superintelligent machines eating the world" and proposing to remove humans from all important decisions in our lives.
Next step is to build a social graph on blockchain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Worldwide_Interban...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_House_Interbank_Payme...
All the big players have got real-time feeds they're sharing with each other to keep track of who's made what transactions, and they're constantly reconciling them against each other, to make sure that everyone's looking at the same picture. There are also daily reports summarizing the previous day's activity, and they are also reconciled as a second check. The proactive parties work together to sort out any discrepancies they find as soon as they find them.
None of this is strictly necessary, because there is a central source of truth that you can rely on. But it tends to operate much too slowly for a lot of people's needs, and mistakes do happen, and they can be costly, so it pays to be proactive. Meaning that, in general, nobody's actually relying on the central authority to keep this organized.
The actual real-time feeds are log-structured: You can add new records, but not delete old ones. If you want to reverse a transaction, you just add a new entry to the ledger to back it out.
In that sense, it works a lot like how a blockchain would work. The only difference is, nobody's bothering with all that crypto stuff, because all it would do is make the whole thing more expensive. Like, literally, that's the only impact I can see. It won't help with preventing errors - when mistakes happen, it's invariably because of an error at the boundary of the system, and fiddling around with hashes of the previous message when sending new ones does nothing to guard against that. All it would do is slow both the throughput and latency of transactions by introducing more spots where synchronization must occur together with a bunch of ancillary computational load.
In a world where time is money, that sure sounds to me like a $100 solution to a 1¢ problem.
Ain't no judge gonna throw up is hands and go "well, the smart contract says so, my hands are tied!". Blockchain doesn't solve anything where there is a functioning legal framework.
You can't use technology to solve a problem that isn't a technology problem.
Central bank?
> Why should the other bank trust that database?
Because if that database fails, it is likely that the failure is one of the smaller problems of the bank?
Goodwill is an asset that companies care about.
No, it doesn't, not if the contract touches on anything outside the blockchain. At the very least this includes anything physical (physical objects or physical services) and currencies not based on that particalur blockchain.
Because, if a court decides that a transaction was illegal and orders you to reverse it, answering, "But the blockchain. . . !" is a great way to land yourself in jail.
Which, granted, plenty of anarchists and criminals have moral or practical reasons why they would rather operate in an extra-legal environment. But here we come to the reason why skipping the "as a..." line in your user stories is such an anti-practice: Those are two very specific user profiles. Most the rest of us would like to see QuadrigaCX's clients get their money back.
Sort of:
> who owns the database?
Whoever has the most computational resources, in most implementations.
> who enforces the contract?
Depends on the contract. If I sell my house via a blockchain contract, a computer isn't going to come and evict me. If I sell you some heroin, or an action figure, or a rare in-game skin, it's still not going to help.
> who owns the actual data?
Nobody, and that's a problem when data needs to be removed.
I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
You say that, and then look at the number of companies selling blockchain based services promising exactly that, and enterprises paying for projects...
It's understandable why as well. Pure "digital world" businesses that blockchain can deliver like provably actuarially fair gambling exist, but they're pretty niche.
I'd question whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world - what gives money relatively stable value is the real world enforcement of contracts, debt obligations and taxes. Take those away and whilst your blockchain can validate the integrity of some numbers you hold, you can't guarantee anyone actually exchanges it for anything actually useful in future.
The comment above says that the blockchain provides a satisfactory answer to enforcement of contracts. People really do seem to think that contracts made on the blockchain will magically enforce themselves in the real world.
But it still adds new problems. Electricity use, the irrecoverability of data/auth if you lose a key, the inability to erase problematic data.
So what you're saying is, blockchains can't determine whether or not you really have skin in the game?
:-)
A trusted authority with legal obligations of honesty.
> And who enforces the contract?
The court system.
> And who owns the actual data?
Ownership of data is a very ill-defined concept and not well-specified by a blockchain system either.
It doesn't even need to be that trusted. You can stipulate in the contract that they must stream the log to you and then scream bloody murder if they try to monkey with anything. A blockchain is just a trendy write-ahead-log.
You could do this on pretty much any database I know of, but it's a kind of dumb idea.
The answer is the same to all three questions: the Chinese government.
Lawyers and judges enforce the contracts.
Data ownership is stipulated by statute or contract.
Why do you (and others) call the technology itself 'blockchain', singular? The Bitcoin blockchain and the Ethereum blockchain are fully separate so to describe a set containing both I'd say 'blockchains'. If someone asked my what technology they used, I'd say 'a blockchain'. But my usage is not what I see from advocates.
How about corporate stock?
You know how many third parties are involved with the markets and the added costs of those third parties? Even with a corporation with a stock ledger, stock trusts who own them, banks/brokers who handle all the buying/selling of stock...things don’t work.
Take the Dole case where the corporation had almost double the number of stock issued as actually existed.
Whereas every corporation could memorialize their stock on the Blockchain and each sale of stock would be completed via smart contract. Instant settlement, no stock trusts, no banks, no brokers...a peer to peer market. Stocks are a particular use case because unlike the authors examples of “real world counter parts” (supply chain, authorship, land registry) shares in a company can be represented entirely digitally allowing the peer to peer and trustless system (at least for purposes of transaction settlement).
Would blockchain have solved that? It's centralized in that there is one ledger. But natively resolving and publishing transactions at high speed is not a feature of blockchains yet. A centrally managed ledger without distributed calculations would be way faster.
Also worth noting that Dole was a weird enough case to be news-worthy, and that it was ultimately resolved. I think it takes more than a few edge cases to justify completely rebuilding the entire basis for a major part of the global financial ecosystem.
Right which will never occur in the current system because each middleman needs to justify their place to keep their piece of the pie.
Like I said it’s a system with tons of middlemen (who don’t add value) who could be ripped out and replaced with Blockchain.
Dole was “ultimately resolved” only after complex class action litigation that costs millions of dollars and resulted in the party who took dole private having to pay an extra ~$2.50 x ~36.8M shares. It’s clear from any public company that goes private this is a serious issue...Dole is not an edge case.
There exist many cases in which something is not illegal but is inefficient, unjust, lacks sufficient trust to reach a contract or lacks sufficient incentives to comply with a contract. There exist many other cases in which people cannot afford to hire a lawyer to enforce a contract, or cannot afford to hire as many lawyers of as high a calibre as the other party.
So presenting blockchains as a) databases that are b) only good for illegal activity is doubly incorrect.
There are also many bad and unnecessary uses of databases and contracts...
The blockchain is a self-sustaining PKI network. It eliminates MITM attacks and facilitates the use of PKI technology by making it trivial for nodes to read/write/verify information that is sent over the network. On the economic layer, the fact that it pays its own way eliminates the ability for network operators to create information-layer monopolies (i.e. App Store).
If you think about blockchain as a database, you'll be stuck thinking about the use cases that involve a database. If you think about blockchain as smart contracts, you'll be stuck comparing them to real world contracts. Start thinking of decentralized app stores (which cannot impose constraints on the revenue models of their hosted apps) or advertising networks which let users put advertisements on any webpage. There are tons of reasons to pay a small fee to send information across a secure and tamper-proof network.
Second, legality is subjective around the world. It is currently illegal in the US to gamble online, for some reason, even though casinos and lotteries are a thing.
It is illegal in many countries to transfer a certain amount of money out of the country, for some reason.
Certain sexualities are illegal in quite a few countries.
Illegal != bad
I'm saying: you need the blockchain if and only if you are doing things that are illegal in your country. It's a decision criteria for when you need the blockchain.
I'm making no moral judgement. And there are very good reasons to want to do things that your government deems illegal (for example, donating to a political organization that has been blacklisted)
That's an improvement over the existing system. I don't have to trust anyone in between to get my money to him.
How would that be as possible and as "trustless" without blockchain?
Right now Coinbase is charging me $59 to buy 1 BTC, and I don't know how much more it would be to sell exchange that back to JPY.
You can send $4000 (about 1 BTC) to someone in Japan for $30.14 with TransferWise.
And guess what? Last time I had to send money to my family in Europe, that's exactly what I did.
2. Regarding trust:
> don't have to trust anyone in between to get my money to him.
Yes you do. Both your friend and you need to trust your Bitcoin exchange. Which sometimes, cannot be trusted. Remember Mt Gox?
You can send money to Japan using moneygram, or transferwise, or a number of other services for a lower all in cost.
At some point, miners aren't going to be paying for themselves by inflating the monetary supply, and then the cost of what they are doing is going to rise to be more than a centralised database tracking everything. Because the mining process for bitcoin is so expensive relative to updating a database controlled by trusted entities, ie, banks. And that will manifest in transaction fees.
In case it wasn't clear, the usecases i mentioned above (gambling, getting around capital controls) exist and are live in crypto right now.
This is, at face value, simply false.
I want to send $5 to a poor African family. I'll even relax my criteria - I'm willing to wait _up to 3 business days_ for this African family to receive my $5. I live in California.
Could you please point me towards the non-blockchain way to do this?
https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/send-money/app/start?SrcC...
If not WU, there's probably some other remittance company operating in their area. The fees might be pretty exorbitant though, especially for small amounts.
(1) Since the African nation in question doesn't accept either dollars or bitcoin, you're going to have to convert the currency one way or another. Buying BTC is not cheap, you pay ~1%+ to Coinbase, so that's 5 cents right there. Transaction fees on Bitcoin are $0.36 right now. Then you're going to have to convert it to something they can spend in their local country, and good luck to you. That second transaction is going to cost them another $0.36, and so is any other transaction they may be wanting to spend the BTC in. If they're making purchases of just $1, thats a THIRTY SIX PERCENT transaction fee.
(2) Does this poor African family have a phone, laptop or computer, and access to get to their nearest BTC exchange/ATM? Are there any in your country in question?
(3) WU is $1. Other services exist and are priced competitively. Have you looked into M-PESA?
This is not only not a mystery, but common, and individual remittances from emigrant relatives are a major consideration in the economies of some underdeveloped countries.
That's the only industry blockhain could disrupt, and it completely disrupted it. (I'm not sure about money laundering as I've never really know much about it).
So the world works perfectly in your opinion?
The good thing about blockchain is it lowers the cost bar for crazy expensive business legalize. It of course needs more work but a proper smart contract setup placed in front of a judge leaves little need for a dozen lawyers and business consultants to see the intent of the contract.
The main issue is that the current very expensive and inefficient setup benefits middle men that produce very little value. Transitioning away from that will eventually happen and that will be the reason blockchain and smart contracts explode in value and usefulness.
And if your contract is only the code, you've got a big problem in making your case that tampering with the oracle or sending an empty box is an act of bad faith on the other party's part, and much more expensive lawyers to interpret it...
Just an FYI, from the context of the next sentence I believe you mean "legalese". "Legalese" is convoluted legal jargon; "legalize" is a verb meaning to make something legal.
Do you believe that this is a permanent state, or a temporary one? Is there a potential blockchain-like thing that could exist which would be better than a database and a contract?
Because to me, the current system leaves room for improvement:
- resolving conflicts across jurisdictions is extremely expensive
- resolving conflicts even within one jurisdiction is more expensive than many transactions are worth
Current blockchains are expensive and slow, but I think that we will see improvements over time which will eventually make blockchains (or something blockchain-like) look like appealing solutions.
I still think that making some common classes of dispute impossible is highly valuable.
I can imagine a blockchain-like thing that would be able to shift the default action, so that I get $1000 or maybe each of us gets $500. I can't imagine a blockchain-like thing that could, without an oracle both of us trust, actually reach into the real world and arbitrate the dispute. (If there is an oracle both of us trust, there's no need for a blockchain; the $1000 can just go directly into escrow with that oracle before I start working.)
There's no question that it works. The question that blockchain-like solutions seek to explore, is whether it works better than a technological solution which can eliminate most of the layers you describe.
The world is deeply complex, more complex than any single human can understand. If operating in the world can be simplified to the point of being understandable by individuals, or if the size of the foundations you have to trust or rely on can be made significantly smaller, that could be worth it.
These institutions exist because division of labour and trusted institutions are a way to handle complexity and to pool risk. If my lawyer screws up or the court screws up there's an institution I can go to. If I make an error in my smart contract because I work eight hours a day and know nothing about contracts then I'm just royally screwed.
You're not making things simpler by eliminating the institutions whose professional job it is to manage risk and trust and handing it back to everyone.
That is why all systems are centralised to some degree, because it's how we manage complexity. That's also why not everyone forks the entire blockchain and piece by piece crypto transactions move onto managed exchanges, and it's why we all work in companies where people have property rights and hierarchies rather than just run around as individuals sub-contracting each other 50 times per day.
There's no recourse for deliberate fraud, sure you could read a contract before signing it and know exactly what it does, but you can hide surprising behaviors in innocent looking code. The Underhanded C Challenge (http://www.underhanded-c.org/) proves this.
That's also why current smart contract languages are largely failures.
Nevertheless, having an impartial, inherently trusted computing base is a promising foundation. What you then need on top is various forms of static analysis that make smart contracts scrutable by mere humans (and preferably writable by mere humans). That's how you collapse the complexities and largely eliminate the need for centralizing risk and analysis.
Edit: it's like you're expecting people to do word processing using punch cards. That's where cryptocurrency tech is right now, and the more mature programming and UI/UX of today is where we should expect it to be in 10-20 years.
1. Is my vote anonymous? (If not perfectly, owing to low level timestamps or transaction ids that can get cross-referenced with other data sources, at least for all practical intents?)
2. Can I be sure my vote got tallied the way I voted?
3. If I'd like to verify the result, is there a tamper-proof electronic paper trail that I can use to verify the result?
It's a surprisingly hard problem in practice, and to the best my knowledge the most promising venue to guarantee 2 and 3 without compromising 1 might be a blockchain-like distributed ledger. (You can solve 2 and 3 by using a git-like hash tree and letting the voter know their commit hash. But in doing so you're basically dropping 1 and inviting vote selling.)
This kills the secret ballot. If you can verify how you voted, I can verify how someone else voted. That lets anyone pay for votes and punish people who voted "wrong".
But there's a swath of elections and voting going on (in universities, within political parties or unions, etc., but also official elections in parts of the US or in Estonia) that that use e-voting to cut costs or improve participation. They currently lack these guarantees yet those elected end up in charge of millions in budget.
In your electoral system is there a way to verify your vote was counted. Like a stamped voting slip?
I've thought that a good way in an electronic system would be to give you a vote code (maybe a single letter), and a verification code. You'd enter the verification code, the screen would show all candidates/voting options with a "vote code" and you'd verify by finding your vote code matched. The vote code prevents coercion.
Such system doesn't show your vote is included in the result, but shows the system has record of the vote you cast.
E-voting is done on a PC. After you've finished voting a QR code pops up. You can scan that QR code with your voting verification app on your phone and it'll send you the results.
Here's how the system works: https://www.valimised.ee/en/internet-voting/principles-check...
>can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties
I.e. where the majority of the world's population resides, developing countries where (sorry) Corruption Rules Everything Around Me. Or there's an appeals system where cases drag out for decades (hello Brazil!) Or where the judges are simply not sophisticated enough to adjudicate complex financial contracts.
I don't think crypto/blockchain solutions have a ton to offer the developed world, but there's an awful lot of humanity outside of those institutions. 'Our existing financial world is working just fine, thank you' is a very 1st world perspective. Kind of hilariously, a lot off the issues that crypto enthusiasts rail against (inflation, political central banks, etc.) are basically untrue for their own countries, but are true for others. I think a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar that's super-intuitive to use on mobile could achieve hockey stick growth in Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia, etc.
There were people saying the same thing as you before the wheel was invented, and in 1550, and 1800, and 1900, and 1910 (guys, horses shit on the streets and you occasionally contract dysentary. But overwhelmingly you can get from point A to B. Guys, horse-drawn carriages work. It's how the world works!) and 1950 and 1990 and...
"This is how the world works" is not a valid rejection against using a _new_ technology.
Bitcoin has been out since 2008. Over a decade later, the only thing it's been useful for is for masking illegal activity, and speculating wildly.
Just because something is new does not mean it's revolutionary. The Segway was in all likelihood a more revolutionary invention than blockchain will ever be.
That's a fairly generalized statement. So just because the world works in a certain way we shouldn't change it?
Have you or anyone else noticed that the way the world works is massively in favor of anyone that has money?
How many tenants got cheated out of $1000 deposit and didn't have legal knowledge or a support system to get the landlord to court?
How many people got fees from Wells Fargo, Sprint, Comcast, PG&E, fuck even Etsy because they had power to pull from their accounts at any time? How many of them got everything back due to them? Fairly and morally?
How many people that DON'T have a massive blogger platform, podcast and wherewithal to start an _effective_ campaign against a multi-national because they simply are not well spoken. They are still cheated by the big guy but no one cares because it's not retweeted by Ariana Grande.
AKA your main point might hold up to 5 to 10% of disputes but hardly supports the notion that it "works". I think your statement should rather be "That's how the world currently operates" and that by no means rules out creating additional ways to operate in the world.
For example, when you are dealing with multiple small transactions where a potential for fraud on the buyer side is significant.
Also, if you want to build automated systems for money management, the barrier of entry will be significant in the legacy banking system.
Or managing electronic assets (stocks etc) - blockchain significantly lowered a barrier for entry in those cases.
We already have systems that handle this issue well and have for decades. Why involve the blockchain?
>Also, if you want to build automated systems for money management, the barrier of entry will be significant in the legacy banking system.
>Or managing electronic assets (stocks etc) - blockchain significantly lowered a barrier for entry in those cases.
But the barrier for entry is high in those use cases precisely to prevent exactly the kinds of abuse and problems we've seen in the crypto space. And the blockchain doesn't magically alleviate the obligation to obey laws and regulations. You could try to design a system that circumvents them, but then you're back to the parent's point about illegality.
There are a lot of good reasons why there's a high barrier of entry to set up shop in the financial system.
Trying to sidestep financial regulations through using cryptocurrency/blockchain is at least trying to actively exploit loopholes in the law, if not actually illegal.
Perfect for blockchain.
"I've said this several times before on this site but will keep repeating it: there's exactly one use case where privacy is a superior (and, in fact, the only) solution: when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties. In other words, anything illegal".
I like to be able to buy stuff from people anonymously. Not because it's an illegal transaction, but because it's nobody's fucking business what I buy. In this age of marketing and surveillance data mining, it's better to be safe than sorry. Also, what's legal now might become illegal in a future administration.
Note that bitcoin or blockchains in general are not fully anonymous perse. Some are pseudo-anonymous (because addresses can still be linked to persons), some are almost 100% anonymous, such as Monero. See it as cash over the internet. Permissionless, tamperproof and private.
I can imagine that for many non-first world countries where people wouldn't trust things to the legal system or contracts - I wouldn't necessarily define those things as illegal.
what about transmitting value over the internet without relying on an external system? You know, like digital cash (but actually cash, not airline points that require a central actor to approve the transaction).
Except when banks are transferring money across borders. In order to have trust, they currently need what's called nostro and vostro accounts. Meaning, Bank A parks money in Bank B, and Bank B parks money in Bank A. So that if a transfer is fraudulent, there will be money to cover it.
How is that better than blockchain?
Only if that contract is reasonably enforceable and all parties involved trust the party that controls the database - if there's such a single party controlling the database at all.
The most compelling use case in terms of supply chain management doesn't necessarily involve storing data from sensors or other IoT devices. It's doing away with the paperwork (customs documents, bills of lading, for example) involved in shipping physical goods and the friction it causes: https://www.maersk.com/en/news/2018/06/29/maersk-and-ibm-int...
I'm not sure if this is still the case but some time ago I read about an example where the paperwork involved in shipping a 20 ft container from Shanghai to Rotterdam was more expensive than the actual physical shipment of the container.
A blockchain solution could potentially help with reducing that cost. A simpler, database-based solution of course could do, too. However, there are numerous parties involved in the process not all of whom necessarily trust each other. A blockchain-based infrastructure could provide a common protocol everyone can agree on.
And just like many email clients and many email servers work together, in the future, companies accounting systems will work together, and create a single-triple transaction, instead of a double entry at EACH company. You can swap out accounting systems at any time, and still participate in the standardized distributed database. Blockchains can be used to reduce redundancy in accounting. Not all blockchains need proof-of-work and fault tolerance turned up to 100%. Sometimes you can have parties that sort-of trust each other, but none of them want one of the others owning the whole system.
the participants audit each other real time, one party cant cook its books, if youre all writing one shared book. both parties agreeing to work being done and pressing "this work was done" or a camera watching for the work being done, would be a prerequisite for the task being marked as complete in the system.
things like enron/toshiba happen when companies are maintaining multiple sets of books, one they present to the public, and others hidden in private.
It seems to me this could mean both:
1. Allowing illegal activity. (Eg when legal system can’t be used because the action in question is illegal).
2. Preventing illegal activity (Eg when legal system can’t be used because of difficulties to verify and/or execute).
As an example. 2nd-hand digital assets.
(The collapse of the dollar is the least likely financial crisis to worry about in the present day.)
With Ethereum you can build systems that are intra-national and connect for example all the real-estate records globally which cannot be done with a MySQL system. There are hundreds other examples
There’s no system built in Ethereum that provides what you cite as an example.
And all of the world’s real edtate records would probably easily fit into a non-optimized MySQL database (I’m not even talking about more powerful databases). Because there are at most a few hundred million such records. Even if there’s a billion, it’s nothing for a modern database (and would cripple any blockchain solution).
And yet you bring it up as an example of how well Ethereum might work. And claim “there are hundreds of other examples”.
So what you claimed is false, and there are no other examples. And the avility of Ethereum to provide what you claim is yet to be proven (it was nearly crippled by a friggin kitties game which could fit in its entirety on a low-powered laptop eas it not for Ethereum/blockchain).
> If you forget bias
There’s no bias in calling out a lie
You're missing the point where blockchains are much more efficient and trustworthy than a court or government institution would be.
It's pure math versus interpreted law and it's brilliant.
To start off, the reason cryptocurrencies have survived this long is probably due to the fact that the dark web thrives on it. That said it's certainly not a reason to outlaw it.
What about the situations where the legal system is questionable? Off hand I've read stories about a lot of poker players who've gotten cash confiscated when flying. What about [insert stories here]?
How about a means to store (and transfer) value, where you can be certain - given your measures of security is sound - that no one but you (or multisig) can access it? If I store cash at home I can get robbed. If I own property it can be destroyed (loopholes in insurance policies, betrayal of other forms, military state).
I remember the feeling I had a few years back when I had my own bitcoin in a paper "wallet" (actually a master seed with my personally devised cipher), protected by the (mental) measures of my choosing, it was mine. Yes, that caters well to illegal activities but likewise also empowers individual privacy, as well as removing any political, governmental or other influences. Power to the individual.
It's not the monetary system's role to regulate how people behave in society, merely to facilitate transfer of value. If that transfer method can't be trusted alternatives will spring up. On that note if there are better people on the planet the methods of value transfer matters less. If there was more trust in financial institutions there would be less need for cryptocurrencies. On HN people advocate having backups of backups, but how do you backup your money in the bank? You're trusting them.
Yes, drug lords exist and have existed in the past thanks to anonymous transactions, but... there is corruption in banking systems (offshore accounts) and whatever systems and we should/could question why there are drug lords in the world in the first place. They wouldn't have a place here if things were better organized. Either by more happy people (having less want/need for stimulants, given a bleak outlook on humanity), by giving the people the freedom to explore their minds more freely (psychedelics) or simply (as a step on the way) give the state the power to regulate as opposed to making everything illegal.
I would expect more of HN than to have this as a top comment. Let's just ban cash altogether because the only thing it's useful for is enabling illegal transactions. Sigh. Quite a naive way of looking at things. What you're suggesting is doing what they're doing in China (and US and other countries as well) with the credit ratings of everyone without any chance of living a normal life unless you're subscribed to the system in place. Add hyper surveillance à la mega corps and no one can escape. Please keep the beacon lit for at least some of the measures in place to insure personal freedom.
HN Bandwagon, Monday: "Don't you understand that courts exist to make it so no one can break a contract without penalty?"
HN Bandwagon, Tuesday: "Lol don't go to court over $5, that's stupid."
(The small fraud problem is one reason I think micro payments can't happen: you can't investigate sub-cent fraud, but if someone can automate it they can steal a lot.)
> there's a multi-layered system in place to resolve disputes, starting from the customer support call center, reviews, bad publicity, and going all the way to the courts.
So no, I don't think the plan is to go to court over every contractual dispute.
Furthermore, it reinforced my original point that it's really not all that reassuring that the (slow-moving) legal system will enforce contracts, because it's an expensive process, and you need other protocols on top of that in order for trade with untrusted parties to work.
As of the edit, the parent seems to agree. So maybe my comment wasn't as stupid as you're implying, and maybe there's a reason that commenters mark the late changes to their posts as edits.
One of my frustrations with discussions of blockchain is how quickly it diverges from reality. Most financial disputes today are resolved without a lawsuit or a prosecution, which I think you know. And transacting $5 via blockchain today will involve 3rd parties with whom you could develop a dispute, and then you'd be right back where you would be for any other $5 transaction.
>when you can't use contracts and the legal system to ensure trust between the parties
If a threat to sue over the violation of small amounts is not credible, the court system doesn't help.
Like a certain business model that currently runs into large issues because of the costs of litigating small transactions, and would be improved through block chain.
For example - banks could feasibly use blockchain for clearing trades.
Right now there is a 'single point of trust' for such things which even financial institutions want to break out of.
Blockchain could theoretically enable distributed exchanges.
The 'rule of law' is still essential in that context, but blockchain could work there.
This is only one example of 'regular real world use'.
FYI / caveat: the 'hardest part' about getting these more distributed systems going is getting large financial entities to agree on the nature of the exchange, and hammering out of the real world details. At that point, blockchain becomes a secondary and not necessarily essential component.
Re the 1st one: it's true only if the transporter doesn't risk anything if the sensor is tampered with. As soon as you introduce strong fines and/or consequences if a validating authority randomly checks your goods and discover some tampering, the system is a bit more likely to be trusted. But of course, in such a case, you might as well just host the temperature log with the validating authority (like it's done for Concrete, or in the Auto industry).
The second one is even more compelling: of course the trust chain stops when the trust chains stops ! But if every luxury Louis Vuitton handbag is tracked and you know precisely whether it's been sold or whether it's supposed to be sitting on a shop shelf somewhere, you have zero risk of double sell (or at least, within the same limits as a bitcoin double-spend).
There are several concepts related to this in other areas: provenance, catalogues raisonnés, serial numbers, title registries, pedigree registries, among others. People who make or who deal in rare or expensive things often adopt some of these mechanisms to help answer questions like: which one is this? is it genuine? who owns it? who used to own it? is it stolen?
(There are lots of different threats, but some of these mechanisms help respond to each. Properly identifying and authenticating an individual object may be the hardest problem of all here—but that's potentially less of a database issue than the others.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/arts/design/art-scholars-...
And works with supposedly excellent provenance still end up being repudiated by authentication committees:
https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2011/double-denied...
Due to the misaligned incentives in the art authentication world, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a blockchain would be a good way of tracking records in the artworld, particularly if artists register works directly on it.
By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain",
Verisart will hand wavy magic increase the trust in
art dealers and reduce fraud.
That's a pretty neat idea. A distributed public ledger of
who I have sold my art to. And, if they sell it, they have
a cryptographically signed certificate proving its
provenance. The seller can sign the certificate with their
private key to say they've sold it to the new owner of a
specific public key. Nifty!
Except… and I hate to bring the art industry into
disrepute… what if I sell a fake and keep the original in
my Underground Vault?
There's no way to permanently attach a digital certificate
to a physical work of art.
Incidentally, this is the problem with all the startups
claiming the blockchain will revolutionise the integrity
of global logistics markets. Sure, you can slap a QR code
on a crate - but nothing stops an unscrupulous middle-man
from replacing or adulterating the contents of the crate.
Let's get back to Verisart's other issue. Proving that I
am the creator or owner of a piece of artwork.
Long story short, I convinced them that I painted the Mona
Lisa.At the core of it, it is a transfer of power from larger organizations to the people.
It's not about how nice the trusted authority is. It's about the value the trusted authority provides.
If you're doing business in China, although you might not entirely trust the Chinese government, and might not like them, they'll still provide more value than a "trust-less" system. China is not a lawless state after all, and if you want to do business there you'll have to deal with them at some level.
> At the core of it, it is a transfer of power from larger organisations to the people.
It's not though, if there's no actual transfer of real power. It's naive to think that blockchain themselves do this. If people tried to circumvent the Chinese state with blockchains in any meaningful way, China would crack down on it, and they'd be very efficient at it. Because real power is about interfacing with the world in real ways, and a well-functioning state will always maintain that power.
It's possible that, through democracy or other forms of pressure, people could make the government and businesses accept, use or interface with blockchain technology. But if people do have that kind of power over these entities, people by definition have the kind of power that makes the value of blockchain tech vanishingly small.
Blockchains provide value - not when you don't have any party you trust fully - but when you don't have parties that can provide any kind of value through their trust. I.e. failed states and lawless territories basically.
Blockchains are hard to modify and as such, can act as a form of checks and balances against those trying to change history. You're kind of saying powerful entity won't allow checks and balances and somehow conclude they are unnecessary. That is ... unfounded.
In that case it is likely _mandated_ that I trust this authority regardless of my personal wants.
If strong fines were sufficient to prevent tampering then the proposed blockchain solution wouldn't even be necessary; just fine dishonest actors, period.
> if every luxury Louis Vuitton handbag is tracked and you know precisely whether it's been sold
There is no way to accomplish this though. You cannot reliably track a physical object because there is no way that a computer can automatically verify the authenticity of an object.
People say this in every blockchain related thing that pops up on HN but it excludes literally the only legitimate use case for a blockchain. That being the scenario where you don't have or don't want to rely on a trusted authority.
For example, is it likely that people don't trust Louis Vuitton to decide whether Louis Vuitton handbags are genuine? Isn't that the definition of a Louis Vuitton handbag being genuine?
In most cases where an institution is empowered to make a decision of some sort, the risk that they will later change their mind arbitrarily doesn't seem to loom very large. (I'd agree that it's great to have mechanisms for detecting this, although regular digital signatures and Merkle trees may suffice.)
There are tons of cases where groups of entities interact and don't inherently trust each other. That is basically all of trade. In all of these cases, it would be more ideal if no one party had to be a trusted authority.
As soon as it seems simpler and less expensive for blockchains to implement this behavior, they will suddenly become a useful tool for all kinds of applications.
The moment I go to an authority and file a complaint, I am trusting that authority. I might as well just use their fiat as well.
The point above is that if I cannot trust the authorities (because my transaction is illegal), then there is a use case for bitcoin.
This doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
If someone can get a 51% attack, you now have a trusted authority. If you have a cabal of developers who are implementing your blockchain (and who the overwhelming majority of users will follow if they decide to fork), you have a trusted authority.
- Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain, https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
- and the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
The land registry argument is the best example of this fallacy
>the regulatory authority can make its own record and thus rewrite yours, which means that blockchain doesn’t work.
No, the value is precisely the fact that it's the regulatory authority that forcibly changes ownership, and not you. Deed fraud [1] is a serious issue. Blockchain would protect against it completely: forging a signature or a will would be impossible. Rather than a document of dubious provenance, the will's hash would be stored along with the property record. Very likely in many cases of deed fraud the clerk changing the registry knows it's fraudulent and changes it for financial gain. That would become impossible also.
The only way to forcibly take the property would be a provide a cryptographically signed court order.
That's only for the security side of things. Tokenized real estate would make things that are currently very hard to do trivial, like using 1% of your home in country A as collateral for a rented car in country B. It's theoretically possible right now, but arranging that would require so much effort nobody does it. With a house record on the blockchain you would first tokenize it (transfer the ownership to a smart contract with tokens) and then transfer 1% of tokens to a car rental smart contract.
Same for every kind of possession. Own google stock and want to use it as collateral for X? Why not. Want to sell 1% of your rental property to an investor in another country? Easy, no paperwork needed.
Maybe it's never going to happen, but I think it's going to. The blockchain revolution would do to finance what internet did to information. Everything that's being done online was technically possible before it - theoretically, I could have written this exact post and physically mailed it to everyone who's ever going to read it.
[1] https://www.lifelock.com/learn-fraud-deed-fraud-losing-your-...
If someone hits me with a rubber hose until I give them my private key, do they get to then keep my house?
The control over the house, or majority of it, could be set to require multiple signatures, or require each transfer to have a forced delay.
[1] https://gradestack.com/CA-CPT/Transfer-of-Property/Exception... Sale by a person in possession of goods under a voidable contract
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sale_of_Goods_Act_1979#Part_II...
I agree about your first point: acknowledging only trust elimination and denying trust minimization is a simplification from my side. However, I have not seen successfull examples of "trust minimization" so far though it is always suggested in the context of blockchain. Maybe the reason is that the part on which the trust can be minimized by BC is usually not the weekest link.
I also agree that BC could prevent some percent of deed frauds. However, if you consider my argument about not decentralized example land registry BC maintenance you will agree that in many cases this may leed to a forgery, not possible in Bitcoin blockchain.
I completely disagree on a tokenization part. Unless we have a well-described and tested business model. these are more dreams and handwaving than a real use case. It is easy to say "tokenize this and that", the devil is in the detailes.
Say I have a blockchain that tracks births and deaths. Now if I see a record on there I can be assured it hasn't been tampered with. But that tells me nothing about how it was created - was the person entering the data acting with malfeasance?
All blockchain does is audit the data after its creation. It doesn't solve the issue of provenance of the original information. This seems to be where all these schemes and ideas (beyond crypto-currencies[1]) fall down when compared to current databases.
[1]slow and pointless. Money transfer is solved and current systems, while lacking the assured fidelity of the transactional data, offer so much more - fraud detction, chargebacks, etc etc
I did not miss the interface between real world and blockchain. I did not claim that the records would be 100% accurate. What I'm saying is, when audited and we discover that someone provided bad data, we know who that was.
That's how fraud claims work in general. Having a nicely packaged up list of who attested to what is nice. That's my point.
As a sidenote, burdening blockchain with solving the "truthful data" goal is pretty unfair. In many cases this is an unsolvable problem.
However, I disagree that current money systems solve the problems solved by Bitcoin, but this is completely different discussion)
Though the real world problems we're solving rarely lack a trusted third party. And even when they do, a public log a la certificate transparency logs seems to solve the issue about as well in my eyes.
(You can sort of get away with it if it's b2b only or a legal requirement to audit, but that limits the use cases further)
When I think "blockchain", I basically think of a git branch: history is verifiably immutable and using some external tools like a public rng, one can prove that a block was not created before a certain time.
When I think "distributed ledger/distributed consensus" I think of the practice of using basically properties of statistics to get a bunch of nodes to agree on the state of something.
Neither of those things really seem to make sense as the author's definition of "blockchain". What is he referring to?
1. Merkle tree or some other cryptographic append-only technology. (This is really old, by the way).
2. Proof-of-work. (This was, to my knowledge, first proposed as an anti-spam measure, which incidentally went nowhere because most spammers "borrow" other people's computers for free, and so it doesn't inconvenience them in the slightest).
3. Achieving consensus by saying that he who did the most work is right. (This, again to my knowledge, was actually the main innovation that Bitcoin brought to the table).
Many people pitch things only having the Merkle tree as being blockchain technology, because blockchain is in and Merkle trees are so 20th century technology.
Blockchains are generally defined by the original paper for bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf these would have a couple of key properties. They are trustless, distributed, and public through the use of cryptographic and computational algorithms. Most modern "blockchains" (that aren't currencies of some form) violate one of these properties.
> When I think "blockchain", I basically think of a git branch: history is verifiably immutable and using some external tools like a public rng, one can prove that a block was not created before a certain time.
The system you describe here involves trust. "Public RNG" implies we are talking about some sort of SSL certificate company's time server. Proof of work is stronger than that. It says it's impossible for someone to misrepresent the shared ledger unless they have more computational power than the entire system put together. And it's a fundamental part of how the ledger is structured (it's not external).
> When I think "distributed ledger/distributed consensus" I think of the practice of using basically properties of statistics to get a bunch of nodes to agree on the state of something.
Again proof of work is stronger than this. The nodes agree because the given branch is provably the strongest branch of truth. Distributed consensus is about getting the nodes to work together when you can trust they all want to, not when they are all trying to compete with each other.
> Neither of those things really seem to make sense as the author's definition of "blockchain". What is he referring to?
Because neither of your definitions fit a blockchain. Your definitions fit the broader cases of technology being passed off as "blockchain" in (the best light) an attempt to get these old companies to modernize (in a worse light) and take their money because they are idiots.
Things like distributed version control systems, distrusted consensus systems, and cryptographic ledgers are all useful, but they involve trust. And for a lot of these applications that's fine. A company putting out a cryptographic ledger (e.g. provable) for cosmetic item transactions is an improvement, but it's not a block-chain (it's not distributed or it's not trustless).
I mean the author discusses this: "Be careful! Today, digital signatures are often sold as blockchain. Perhaps a digital signature is all you really need and blockchain does not really suit your requirements." a digital signature system of arbitrary complexity (perhaps with a ledger of issued signatures, or an external time server, or agreement on which signature is the winner) is all most people in this space need.
The only reason one needs a block chain is if they are making a currency.
I agree with that. Besides, if some particular blockchain succeeds as a currency, it will inevitably host a social networking protocol where the whole network's state (e.g. who follows whom, who likes what posts etc.) is always available to anyone interested. That will let many various social networks flourish, and all of them will just present the same data differently. For prototypes check memberapp dot github dot io or memo dot cash, or peepeth dot com.
And that makes sense if you think for a minute. Social networking is the basic skill of every human, and small social networks (50-150 people) existed for hundreds of thousands years. Once we transitioned to agricultural based society, we had to develop financial technology to sustain growth and scale the society to billions of people. The basic technology needed to do finance is obviously writing, so for the past five and a half thousands years we existed in a society where we write to centralised medium, whether it is a clay table hosted by a temple or a visa datacenter. Blockchains change that, so that we can write to a shared medium to do financial transactions and eventually form more honest and opens social networks. Once social networks fuse with financial networks, that is kinda nuclear fusion. What we will have then -- let's call it civil network -- is extremely powerful technology of free expression and trade. Civil is, first of all, for civilisation, as writing is what makes civilisation possible, and new technology of writing (blockchain) is what allows civilisation to transition to a new level.
Where do we move the endless amount of unique content to, once that previously trusted party breaks down? Be it greed, bad management, economics that just won't work out or whatever. Are we just going to watch it disappear? Is that the course of action you condone and suggest? Or are we moving to the next monopoly that will ultimately fail and disappear, hoping that time won't be the one where it's all lost?
The amount of data we generate only goes up, and just throwing a dart to pick which megacorp is responsible for not losing or abusing that data is clearly unsustainable.
In my eyes, Blockchain and other decentralized approaches are the way to move forward in terms of owning your own data, and keeping things that are worth preserving from disappearing at the whim of some third party that couldn't care less.
But speaking of decentralization there are plenty of proposals like personal servers or federated co-ops that aren't blockchain related.
Can crypto projects figure out a way to build a working social platform without losing money?
...but I think that they have already found a good one: dramatically increasing the difficulty of collusion in any m-of-n scheme. Technologies which rely on m-of-n such as Shamir's Secret Sharing and Threshold Proxy Re-encryption (disclaimer: I work at NuCypher) have never found widespread use because the ease of collusion among unknown third parties is easy enough to warrant using known third parties (and once you do that, the use cases for such schemes tend to evaporate).
But look at the upcoming cohort of solid blockchain projects: many of them use smart contracts for collusion resistance.
I’ve been trying to find one and can’t, but it hasn’t stopped major corporations like IBM, who I would expect to jump on the hype train, but even AWS is embracing it to a degree with their latest announcements.
Blockchain-the-trustless-consensus-protocol has a fundamental challenge that makes it completely and utterly pointless for most applications — the oracle problem. You build up a whole system around a secure trustless chain-of-custody, but then require trust in some sort of outside entity for adding resources into the system. If you're willing to trust that entity, there's many simpler ways to sort out your chain-of-custody problems.
Cryptocurrencies "work" precisely because they don't need an oracle. They don't track anything that exists outside the chain.
One way the problem can be unsolvable is not to be literally unsolvable but philosophically unsolvable, which is why bitcoin itself is probably a legitimately good application of the idea. The anarchic ideal is to not trust anyone in particular with controlling money, and any actor who says "no trust me, I'll do it right" is probably less trustworthy for having said that, so it seems unsolvable. So a 'self-organizing' coordination is somewhat necessary, essentially for the same reasons we like democracies more than autocracies.
(uh but proof of work is evil, so, just cause it's a good usecase doesn't mean it should exist.)
Besides that, most of the 'coordination problems' that people purport to want blockchains for seem to be simple cases of glaciation and incompetence. If you can't reconcile accounts across banks / supply chains / etc efficiently, your industry just sucks technologically and needs to get it together, and it'll still suck when you have a blockchain making your IT more expensive, but at least then you don't have to reach consensus on protocols so good for you I guess?
I would love to hear of other useful cases of otherwise-unsolvable coordination problems, but I really can't remember any right now.
On the other hand, ETH-like cases are completely legitimate uses of blockchain-like things ('running code in the ether' is not something you can do any other way, basically by definition, and is also just _cool_), but they are rather different and not directly comparable.
Let's say you get meat delivered by cooling trucks and this is mirrored in a public block chain. You publicly claim that all your meat is sufficiently cooled and every single delivery is tracked. If this data is in a public block chain, there is no doubt that you didn't input this data, it was in fact the delivery company, and if they cheated with their cooling sensors, the liability is on them. With a privately hosted database under control of the corporation (you), there would be suspicion that you manipulated it.
So it doesn't actually solve the problem, but you can legitimately claim that you did as much as you could (as far as using technology goes at least) to ensure the quality of the delivered meat.
So bitcoin solves the problem of not wanting governments being able to print extra money. The sibling comment [1] about timestamping the date of birth of veal is not a good use case, because it's perfectly possible and easier to set up a central authority that the veterinarian can report to. Which, according to a response [2], is exactly what happened, and solves the problem of timestamping veal just fine.
Cross parties or even industries may be a better target.
Op says it won't help authorship since earlier real author can claim he didn't use the blockchain but it's still helpful to prove something simply existed.
All a Blockchain is, is a public, append only database. That's it.
And no, it does not require "proof of work". People have released lots of Blockchains that do not have proof of work. They might even use a central authority to sign their blockchain transactions.
Public append only databases have existed for a long time, and are quite useful.
Someone else gave the example of git. Yes git is a Blockchain. Really.
There are a lot of reasons to use a public append only database, as opposed to a private database, hidden behind a central authority.
The veterinary that comes to check it posts a validation mark on the blockchain. If you trust the veterinary, you should trust the birthdate.
The veal grows up to become a cow, and is sent for slaughter. The farmer stores an event on the blockchain and sends it to be cut into meat.
The slaughterhouse stores an event (with the weight) on the blockchain and sends it for distribution.
The butcher creates the packets of meat, with a QR-code which lets you check the whole list of events, with their dates and places, and of course, you can check that the same part of beef doesn't end up in two different shops. You have complete traceability of your meat despite all the actors not knowing each-others.
Inb4 "you're not investing, you're speculating/gambling". I'm aware.
Inb4 "blockchain is a slower database". Again, I'm aware.
Not really sure how you can back up this claim. After hundreds of interacts with blockchain enthusiasts, I have observed that most of them subscribe to at least one of false use cases listed in the article, especially #7 and very often #1-3 and #6 as well.
Can you transfer value across the world without Bitcoin? Yes, you can use banks, you can use wire payments, you can stuff gold in your butt and hope it doesn't show up in Airport scanners.
Can you verify that goods have been delivered without blockchain? Yes, you can insert to write-only dbs, you can hope that everyone in the supply chain is honest, etc.
There being an alternative to blockchain for a task doesn't mean blockchain isn't highly suitable for that task.
These same anti-Cloud-hype arguments were spewed throughout the 2000s, yet look how the world has changed because of it.
The only true innovation is the decentralized public ledger. A properly decentralized public ledger is actually a horribly inefficient way to maintain a ledger, but this is necessary and by construct, because the only way you can have a secure immutabl'ish ledger (no human abstract creation is truly immutable) is to make amending it or the rules it follows highly democratic and expensive to change. The united states constution is a good analogy of a properly decentralized blockchain.
From an economic impact perspective there is only one absolutely major groundbreaking application for this: to create monetary digital vehicles immune from centralized manipulation (read mostly, from inflationary interventions). The market value for money in the world is between 100-300 tn USD equivalent depending on what you count which is ballpark equivalent to the amount of real wealth in the world (that's a coincidence). This is by orders of magnitude the killer use case of cryptocurrencies, which incidentally was Satoshi’s original vision.
After that, you can conceive of all sorts of other applications, but mostly smart contracts which can theoretically provide immutablish programmable transfers of wealth mechanisms, free of intermediaries or corrupt legal frameworks. This has tons of downsides and risks and the max valuation down the line is a fraction of the monetary use case, but it’s a thing that does get plenty of people excited and i'm sure some of it is potentially legit, especially in disfunctional countries.
In general though the second you read private and blockchain used together, you can mostly roll your eyes and move on. EG JPM coin to name but the latest example.
Some engineering solutions have purely business justifications.
For example, take a look at the Tesla Model X and its Falcon Wing Door. It is very clearly a stupid design from an engineering perspective, but is sufficiently unique to have its own name. It also very obviously draws everyones attention when used and draws attention to the product which further promotes it. So while everyone else has normal doors ... you have special doors. On top of that, the owner can say that they have an SUV without those pesky mini-van doors which obviously work better, but then you're driving a mini-van.
Similarly, while everyone else is using a vanilla database that does its job and warrants no special attention ... we're using blockchain! We're new, we're special, etc.
It's marketing, not engineering.
In 10 years when your blockchain is no longer supported by the developers and your new team has no idea how to manage it, it's showing it's age, it's breaking, you're going to be envious of people with those boring old databases.
Most of the examples given could be adapted to work with blockchain if it were to solve it's core scalability issue. The repetition of "blockchain is not IoT" is a parody of the post itself. Reminds me of "MongoDB is webscale".
We should instead be discussing how each case could work with blockchain given a few changes. For example the supply chain one would work if we put tamperproof temp sensors in with the produce rather than the truck. The desires of the produce supplier and receiver of it are aligned so trust shouldn't be put in the truck. Even a little thought sheds light on the other straw man examples.
It seems like log obfuscation is a common tactic used to cover tracks after a break in. Thus it seems like a blockchain could be used in a logging system so that a falsified log would trigger an alert.
https://lwn.net/Articles/512895/
Although here's a detail i didn't know:
The algorithm for FSS is based on "Forward Secure Pseudo Random Generators" (FSPRG), which comes from some post-doctoral research by Poettering's brother Bertram.
So that's just peachy.
A quote from the article
Blockchain, in basic terms, is a shared ledger and a consensus mechanism to reconcile transactions on the shared ledger. This is the basic structure of all blockchains.
In fact, the basic structure of blockchains can also be found in traditional distributed databases. The software industry is blissfully aware of this and some vendors have repackaged traditional distributed databases as blockchains to attract new markets.
Also, crypto guarantees cut both ways. Which is more likely, that your account will be illegally taken from you, or that you'll lose your account password? In normal banking systems, the former is very unlikely and the latter is fixable. In crypto coins, the former is impossible (assuming nobody can steal your password, which is untrue) and the latter is unfixable.
"Is it a good idea to put a hash of student diploma digitally signed by several professors on Bitcoin blockchain? Yes."
How exactly would one do that? Is the idea to send a tiny transaction to a made-up wallet, with your hash embedded in the wallet id? Seems like it would need to be pretty small, and would be somewhat of an abuse of the system. Or if that's not it, what exactly is meant by "put a hash of __ on the bitcoin blockchain"?
The hash is already signed, then so as long as you can trust the keys used to sign it (a problem not solved by blockchain), then you can get it from anywhere, any untrusted source, because the trustability is inherent in the object itself.
Disclaimer: I work for a company building a blockchain ecosystem.
It is not the silver bullet that magically solves all the problems, but it does improves few areas compare to other technologies, which are decentralization and distribution.
Distribution is a mostly solved problem as we have many distributed database available so I won't go into details about it.
Decentralization, is the core attribute of any blockchain technologies. No single entity needs to be trusted, instead the user have freedom to decide who to trust. In terms of currency, user do no need to trust a bank. He get to decide to choose which wallet app he trust (which itself is not an easy decision), which node implementation he trust, which blockchain protocol he trust. Or alternatively he may be able to create his own implementation if there are no reputable implementations available. This is not the case of banks. I am forced to use whatever mobile app the bank offers. I can't use an alternative implementation (at least no banks in my country allows). It have very limited (most of the time, zero) extensibility and customizability. I can't simply create a bank because I don't trust other banks. As a user, I don't have a choice.
Blockchain technology does not solve the trust issue (track operator can fool the sensor to make it report false information), but it provides full transparent and allow user to choose who he trusts.
No blockchain can't prevent dishonest seller make a copy of a real bottle with a token and fill with low quality wine. But user can see who issues this token and able to decide never buy wine from this sellers again. The problem is still not solved, but you cannot say blockchain does not improve the situation here. Yes centralized technology can help as well, but the user have to trust the centralized technology provider and the wine seller. In this case the centralized technology provider will have a large leverage on both the seller and customer. And we know it can be bad if a single entity have too much power (e.g. Facebook, Google).
Yes, there are too many hypes on blockchain technologies. No, blockchain technologies are not useless. It gives the power back to consumer, instead of controlled by a few large entity.
Technology does not solve political problems
Bitcoin/metanet/blacknet is needed
https://www.lawsnap.com/smart-contracts-are-set-to-transform...
The argument around “someone that doesn’t care about tokens” is weak because that applies to any authenticity solution.
The idea behind the authenticity guarantees would be that every step along the way, you add a record that the object has passed through your step. Otherwise I agree this won’t work.
If someone adds a record, but does fill the bottle with cheaper wine, the first person that catches them will blacklist that actor.
There is still the chance that someone along the way consumes the real wine or sells it (at a loss?) to someone who doesn't care about authentication, and then sells on a fake bottle with the real certificate - but:
- at least in that case there would be a well-defined chain of owners that should make it much simpler to figure out who's doing the counterfeiting.
- you can only do this once for each real bottle that you purchase, since you can't forge the certificates.
Saying that blockchain has no use cases is like saying that money has no use cases. It incentivizes, it corrupts, it buys loyalties, it buys positive news coverage - These are the most important use cases of all and blockchain is great at that. Potential value is real value, even speculative value is real value.
People should not diregard the benefits of Blockchain any more than they should disregard the benefits of VC money. They're both mechanisms of mass collaborative incentivization and corruption.
The only way to beat corruption is by democratizing it so that anyone can do it.
I'd argue that it is the opposite since you can't receive 1 bitcoin and produce 10 bitcoins through the magic of a fractional reserve system (unless, of course, you run one of the exchanges and keep the transactions local).
If you have 1 bitcoin you can only spend/loan/destroy 1 bitcoin as the blockchain prevents double spending.