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Comment by jamemuraca | Hacker News Reader

I think a great use case is for distributed storage and control of home automation products, with an open protocol on top of it. When I have lock in to one vendor and they go bankrupt, device has lost control but also my historical data. If this was all via a distributed model, I could grant access to a new app/company to take over control. Even if they don't close up, I could still give access to other integration partners to gain see my historical data for some kind of processing.

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There is no <explicative deleted> way I’d put my home automation in a public ledger. We have enough problems as a society with cloud enabled security cameras being used as bot nets and to harass people. A permanent ledger of what happened in your home is a mind bogglingly awful idea.

Why do you need a blockchain for this? This just sounds like a shared data format.

seems like you could just do this with some sort of open source or shared standard that different providers use

Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit?

With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietary standard are better (in merit) than the entire marketplace that implements the blockchain standard.

but why would they agree to that blockchain standard in the first place? it’s the same issue

You could do that with any widely-adopted standard. No blockchain required. Remember that even IBM at their late-1980s juggernaut status couldn't put the genie of the ISA bus back in the bottle.

I think the trick to lasting open standards is to provide only a MVP ecosystem at launch. No one vendor is strong enough to close the platform behind them. Again, like the IBM PC, their product both needed and spawned a galaxy of add-on and compatible products, providing enough of a force to protect the open standard.

Buy home automation products with local control and no internet communications at all. Ideally with an open protocol, and open source control software.

Same protection against vendor death/depreciation/etc, and on top of that your data is more secure, the system survives internet outages, and you don't have to mess with the immense complexity blockchain adds.

Remote access, if you even need it, can be done through a thousand other methods (direct IP address, tunneling proxy, VPN, etc etc).

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