Blockchain in and of itself is separate from Cryptocurrency, though many people use them interchangeably, but what are some of the real-world use cases for a shared trust model? International escrow payments?
There's this thing where there's swathes of people running around calling themselves "blockchain developers", or people wanting a "blockchain engineer", but basically nobody can describe what this actually entails. What happens in reality is that you make a bunch of handwavey statements about how this can be done better with a block chain, make a proof of concept in whatever the most hipster language that looks sort of interesting, but has nothing at all under the hood, and then move on.
For "blockchain" to be applicable, you have to acknowledge that you've no other solution to trust or maintainability than to use the most expensive key value store in-existence, with huge limitations, probabilistic integrity, and immense developmental and operational cost. When you hear of some large company replacing all of their infrastructure for tracking packages or whatever with "the blockchain", you should interpret this as an admission that they can't run a copy of postgresql safety and are looking for a hyped up brogrammer to make something flashy sounding instead.
Blockchain tech is already being used to secure logs of enterprise services. GE Predix platform, with blockchain-based integrity provided by Ericsson, is a notable example: https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2017/5/ericsson-l...
Consider a decentralized timestamping service for example. That's useful if you want to anonymously disclose a critical bug, but want the ability to prove you had knowledge beforehand (and thereby proving you were the one who disclosed it).
They also have a significant issue in that they are non-exclusive. Imagine I timestamp the following messages.
for i in {1..999999}:
print "on the 21st of Feb 2022 the Bitcoin price will be exactly $i"
You've found one of the most catastrophic bugs in Bitcoin ever, and you know that the developers are extremely skeptical of anything. The community is also divided and full of toxic people who will try to discredit anything you do.
Now, will you be satisfied with just posting a hash on IRC or on the mailing list? Are you sure people won't distrust you from posting on "the wrong IRC channel"?
I would assume you'll want as solid a proof as you can construct. Therefore you'll timestamp your message on the blockchain in addition to posting on social media somewhere.
And exactly this is what awemany did when he discovered CVE-2018–17144, one of the most catastrophic bugs in Bitcoin ever:
If these things don't hold then you still need to find a trusted way to publish your hash or encrypted message so you can get your timestamp.
For that you need to publish your encrypted message that's somehow connected with a timestamp. If you can you might be able to get it included in a journal or a newspaper (which is what Robert Hook did in 1660), or use a trusted third party that verifies your timestamp.
Embedding a hash of your message in the blockchain is another way, which is arguably easier, more secure and trustless.
Blockchains are the systematization and democratization of that strategy. And those points are what technology is all about.
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Sure, to write our next shared article we can just have our Word files and call-up each other and exchange paragraphs over WhatsApp. Yet for some reason some people nerd out on unintuitive over-engineered CRDTs. That can't be useful to anyone, can it?
Perhaps in theory, but in practice it's not really true, especially with regard to the nature of information that is worthwhile to censor; the kind of situation where the powers-that-be would hack twitter to manipulate the timestamp of a hash string are very far-fetched.
You also introduce the risk of your message getting deleted, for whatever reason.
And these ways may also break your anonymity or leak your exploit if you're not careful.
A blockchain backed timestamp is simply better.
Suppose you post your finding generally, then I see it, and post it to the blockchain timestamped as my own. Then you say, “hey, I was first”. The blockchain is bad here because it’s incomplete.
If we mandate that only the blockchain can determine truth, then, if I really want to own that claim, I can hit you with a wrench until I have the private key, and now I am the owner of truth.
Trustless societies suck. We should be trying to increase social trust.
Here's a simple walkthrough of how to do it in the Bitcoin Cash blockchain for instance:
Also it’s unclear how a separate blockchain with this sole function would work. You need the monetary incentive of bitcoin mining and proof of work to make the security model work so that the time stamp can be trusted. The security of the Bitcoin blockchain is not a computer science problem, it’s an economic one. That’s why the only application it works with is cryptocurrency, with time stamping being a nice byproduct.
Due to the UTXO design in Namecoin, you can attest that a particular record existed, but you can't ever compactly prove it exists. This distinction is important because it means that you as the client have no way of knowing if a returned result is stale and has been changed to something entirely different.
for example... the sale of the .org TLD
Document management. Once recorded in the blockchain, documents cannot be altered, removed nor replaced without leaving a trace. This is valuable in any database that deals with historic data that needs to be provably untampered: financial records, contracts, permits & licenses, etc.
Example: you might take a fingerprint of a recorded interview and save that to a block chain. When you distribute the interview the receivers can verify it hasn't been tampered with based on the fingerprint and when it was added to the chain.
This way you don't need to trust the source of the video or the person giving you a fingerprint, as that's stored immutably.
The limiting feature of blockchains is that they cannot integrate with real world (i.e. non-blockchain) data without trusting the data provider. And at that point, the key feature of blockchains (no need to trust anyone) is completely lost.
In case of a video, blockchain could be used to tamper-proof security footage. You can always manipulate the incoming data (cover the cameras etc), but once data has been recorded (whatever it may be), there's no going back and overwriting it.
I'm surprised how oblivious the HN crowd is to how huge this is for the enterprise and government sector where data like land registry or citizenship records (see Obama's birth certificate, GWB's military record) have to be kept provably untampered for up to a century.
- If we run all transactions a business makes through a blockchain with the right tooling the accounting & taxation could be massively automated, submitting P&L reports and other extremely expensive accounting processes could be completely replaced with code
- If all IPOs were run as ICOs, it would take out an entire class of banker, who are currently extracting value that could be captured elsewhere
- Any service that provides one-sided transactions. E.g. donating to charity - you could build a cheaper and more transparent service that allows people to donate to a charity, directly into their accounts (and potentially onward). Imagine going onto justgiving.com and donating directly to a recpient without any middle-men (aside from the blockchain itself)
I'm not sure how much of the blockchain trust model you specifically need for this, but if you think of blockchain technology as an open data structure and global, distributed computer the use cases start to materialize, even if we're not ready for them yet, if ever.
We have seen a lot of bullshit projects (and keep seeing many), but your affirmation shows a clear lack of knowledge about what is going on with blockchain !
Businesses don't control blockchains. They're more of a low level platform on top of which new types of businesses can grow.
I looked a lot into the technology a year or two ago, but never really got around to applying the knowledge. It has since been my personal opinion that the demand seemed to vane and the number of actual useful implementations diminish as well?
A question now may be: can this "Blockchain" Idea give rise to technology which in turn helps people to coordinate better?
Its really interesting there projects who mandate for more transparency through blockchain and then there are projects who ride on "everything" should be private.
The answer to such problems very seldom lies in extremes but in the mediation between possible options.
Many Ethereum projects but also IPFS now finally offer tangebile (beta) products. In many traditional metrics they are lagg behind mainstream projects. But since decentralization over centralization and collaboration over competition are real values interesting things begin to emerge.
Now I could be counting to 3 until the next person jumps here on and (projects his values or antagonist dreams on this) says capitalism is it and socialism was the worst thing in history!!!111
But maybe a room can grow which is neither capitalism nor socialism but yet better. So lets start to ponder , some impossible thoughts - using this blockchain thing.
Building better technology - finding better ways to coordinate with people - in the real world. Through digital technology but not only limited to or by it.
[1] https://flur.ee/ [2] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/airforce-blockchain-fluree-se...
"Blockchain" experience seems to run at distant last place to everything else.