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Comment by danielmg | Hacker News Reader

The big problem with these kind of arguments is that is misses the interface between the real world and the blockchain.

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

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That's why I said "intermediary attestations".

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.

So we completely sidestep the difficult problem of ensuring truthful data in the first place but it's okay because we've got a really complex solution for replacing simple cryptographic signatures?

I'm not aware of any cryptographic system that provides immutable timestamps as strong as public blockchain timestamps, but I'd love to hear if I'm wrong.

As a sidenote, burdening blockchain with solving the "truthful data" goal is pretty unfair. In many cases this is an unsolvable problem.

HN commenters: “Blockchains are dumb! You could do the exact same thing with a distributed Byzantine fault tolerant database with publicly auditable merkelized logs that collects transactions into blocks!”

This criticism is valid but it's not a problem blockchain is trying to solve. It merely acts as a way to have immutable records. Regardless of if you use a blockchain solution or not, the fact that real world corruption or ignorance can lead to rogue data is an issue that exists in both cases.

The question is: does it make using blockchain pointless? I don't have the answer. The thing is, the only working blockchain use case - money - does not operate with real-world (non-reliable) data.

That's right! "Even though blockchain does not allow for modification of data, it cannot ensure such data is correct. The only exception is on-chain transactions, when the system does not need the real world, with all necessary information already being within the blockchain, thus allowing the system to verify data (e.g. that an address has enough funds to proceed with a transaction)."

However, I disagree that current money systems solve the problems solved by Bitcoin, but this is completely different discussion)

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