Whenever I tried to find some all I can find is proof of concepts, or new projects to evaluate the technology, but they never seem to consolidate.
I feel like there should be more tangible and clearly successful examples by now, if the technology was really promising.
It’s quite literally a distributed, unforgeable crypto-ledger of changes to common codebases that can be edited by multiple untrusted parties (open source).
On the other side, forks happen in block chains all the time and it is an illusion that a block chain is only ever a "linked-list". It's just as much of a DAG at a technical level. The "cost" mechanics create a marketplace distinction between forks (branches in the DAG) far more than any technical distinction between them can possibly exist.
I see it as similar to CBC in crypto, where the previous block’s value plays a huge role in the next block’s encrypted value. Change one and you change the entire chain after that “block”
Undoubtedly git's implementation is very similar to current blockchains but it's missing a reward function (PoS, PoW).
So I would argue it's not a blockchain because of that.
people based products need more fuzzy logic than hashes.
There needs to be some 3rd party interaction to completely believe what this chain of block hashes tells you, as someone editing history in a DB could in theory replay all other transactions and recreate the ledger from that point onwards to remove evidence of the modification.
Search for "ledger tables" and "distributed ledger" for more info. The idea pre-dates cryptocurrencies by quite some time. I've seen small scale implementations of it, and talks about MS researching the area in relation to SQL Server and similar offerings.
Edit: reading further down the comments, it looks like MS's work has recently left the research stage and is being offered as an alpha product in some Azure regions: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-sql/announcing-...
Other comments below mention similar ledger features in other products/services too.
Azure's main competition is obviously AWS. And AWS already offer a cloud-based blockchain service used by many big names.[1] Seems to me that Microsoft is just following in their footsteps with that new approach of centralising the ledger. Basically the same thing Amazon's main offering does.
Most large enterprises right now are turning to centralised cloud solutions, that's just the way the market is right now, companies just want to stick their entire businesses on hyperscalers. It's simply easier and cheaper to move an on-prem database to a cloud service than it is to create and maintain a decentralised network.
Taking the blockchain's data integrity features and adding them to existing cloud services therefore makes a lot more sense for actual enterprise use today when you want to compete with AWS and sell cloud subscriptions which Azure does.
I do believe decentralisation in general will mature over time, and certainly many arguments can be made in its favour including for enterprise. I do find it concerning that virtually every big company and even government organisations run everything on AWS, GCP, Azure. And once you have everything running in one of those bubbles there's lock-in.
I'm sure most of us would agree that's hardly ideal. But at the end of the day if you're catering to enterprise and enterprise is saying "we want to throw everything on your servers and have you manage it for us" you have to listen to the market.
History can be rewritten opaquely in non-blockchain ledger systems.
If all stakeholders can fully trust everyone involved (and their security), your point may hold, but that is not always the case.
Ah yes. As if re-writing history was the primary major concern.
Let's say I'm a malicious actor. I say I shipped 1 ton of gold bricks, and entered that on the blockchain that "provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before". Only one single brick reaches the final destination. No history was overwritten.
So, how does blockchain help?
Easy: the malicious actor has zero chance of arguing that port authority XY messed up the paperwork or that the documentation said it was 1 brick all along.
Sure, there is the oracle problem, but that's not what the blockchain (not a public BC by the way, it uses a fixed number of trusted nodes) tries to solve.
The issue is often patchy documentation and lack of traceability. BC is only one tool of many here and the major improvement is digitalisation of the entire supply chain.
I worked on a project in wholesale logistics several years ago and you wouldn't believe how many parts of the delivery system are still handled using literal paperwork. Coffee stains and manual "corrections" are daily occurrences and because of that, resolving irregularities way too often comes down to his/her words against theirs.
A fully digital supply chain with every step and update permanently recorded in a cryptographically secured manner, helps immensely with these kinds of issues.
BC is just one part of it and doesn't aim to solve everything, but it's a huge improvement. The distributed nature of the ledger provides an incentive for all participants to take part in it, because it reduces trust issues that might arise if all trust is to be put into a single party.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell whether a more conventional distributed database system would've sufficed, and what the pros and cons of either approach are in detail, but BC is a viable solution.
Sure, they don't have to, but it eliminates one possible source of malicious behavior. I'm not saying that using a blockchain will eliminate all malicious behavior, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Why is it that every single discussion about blockchain starts with "it opens up unprecedented opportunities never seen before and will disrupt eveyrthing" and ends with "well, it will maybe perhaps help in some minor way"?
In this discussion:
How it started: "irrevocable timestamps and ordering for cryptographic signatures provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before."
How it's going: "it eliminates one possible source of malicious behavior"
Color me not impressed.
That being said, "it eliminates one possible source of malicious behavior" is exactly derived from "irrevocable timestamps and ordering for cryptographic signatures provide a level of audibility and traceability that wasn't there before." so I'm not sure what your complaint is there. The auditability and traceability are exactly what eliminates that avenue of malicious behavior. Again, it's not going to revolutionize everything, but it seems useful here.
I didn't mean you specifically. It's the flow of every single discussion about blockchain.
> it eliminates one possible source of malicious behavior
> Again, it's not going to revolutionize everything, but it seems useful here.
So, in order to eliminate one source of malicious behaviour (that is even unlikely to be a major source of problems) we can of course use a very inefficient append-only distributed log that solves (maybe) only this one problem, and does nothing for everything else :)
Yeah, still not impressed :)
Because the data is entered into the blockchain by automated systems and can be verified with cryptographic keys.
You seem to have invented a strawman system in which a blockchain replaces a spreadsheet and a human can type whatever they like into it.
This is not the suggested use case for blockchains at all, not in enterprise and not anywhere else. The allure is blockchains is in automated smart contracts that don't rely on human honesty and aren't as prone to human error.
(I say as prone because, obviously, as with any code, humans still have to write the smart contracts. Security audits are extremely important here especially for enterprise critical applications. But the end result is a publicly accountable ledger and that includes the smart contracts themselves too. So your hypothetical would be impossible unless you hired a black hat. Even in the worst case scenario of a malicious smart contract, however, you'd have permanent public logs of exactly what was done, how, and when, and when its code written by an employee of yours, that makes it quite easy to work out who.)
This is a bunch of words that have no relation to reality.
What is the connection between a smart contract and an actual physical good that is being transported?
How does a "smart contract" verify any of the following:
- that the goods are what they are (eco bananas, not green slime)
- that the goods are in the quantity described (1 ton of gold bricks, not 1 kilo)
- that the actual provenance of the goods as stated (that country of origin labelling required in the EU is accurate and reflects the actual country of origin)
- that the goods have actually been transported as required (refrigerated, heated, on time, within a time range etc.)
At every single point in this process you will either have people entering data manually or dozens, if not hundreds, of different systems scanning and entering data.
What works for digital products (service contracts, financial transactions, data delivery) cannot always be mapped to the physical world.
There are some interesting concepts that deal with trust and verifiability of data entry, scanning, and sensors, though. They just don't have anything to do with smart contracts or block chain per se, though they borrow some high-level ideas from it.
But this an area where block chain in general has no place and other mechanisms (simple rule-based plausibility checking, automated anomaly-detection, etc.) are much more helpful. The physical world requires different approaches.
This is basically the current trend. DApps being developed on existing blockchains instead of new blockchains being invented for each use case.
The only reason L2 blockchains are even so big (e.g. Matic) is because of Ethereum's insane gas fees and the never ending delays in rolling out Eth2. Otherwise there'd be no real need to even have L2 blockchains, you can just run your smart contract directly on the L1 blockchain if it's efficient enough to scale properly.
Handshake [1] is still very much beta but aims to replace DNS with decentralised nodes.
There are also projects like Unstoppable Domains [2] and Ethereum Name Service [3] which work right now if the browser supports them. They both use the Ethereum blockchain to sell domains as NFTs. In fact the ENS was around long before the NFT hype of today.
Also, decentralized != blockchain.
defi is recreating traditional banking. Plenty of ways to stake USD & get loans.
nfts allow artists to monetize their efforts.
bat redefines how internet monetization can work, based on swarm intelligence and micropayments.
audius is enabling musicians to share their creation.
tokenization is a way to represent any divisible effort. Perfect for sharing ownership in a company, home, etc.
There are a bunch more, way more than I'm able to keep track of.
But the biggest use case of blockchain is still, imo, p2p electronic cash.
Also oil and gas.
> Also oil and gas
What about oil and gas?
Whose servers would a non-blockchain solution run on and how could all stakeholders trust the design, implementation and operations? Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved.
With the new system, feedback times goes from weeks to minutes.
I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though.
You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic; I'm just answering the question for some examples of use-cases the technology is applied to today.
Consider distributed databases - unless you hit a certain scale or availability requirements, you could argue that a single centralized Postgres can solve anything and that they provide no value. You could have a successful and advanced career as a data engineer never having to touch one. Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler. Just because you don't see value in them does not mean that the people who do are deluded.
Ah yes, unlike with blockchain where they have to trust the design and implementation of a blockchain by some third-party.
> Blockchain makes this transparent, trustless, and auditable for everyone involved.
Until someone comes along and says "we don't like TransportBlockhain designed and implemented by IBM, we are forming a separate coalition that uses ProcurementBlockchain designed and implemented by Tencent". Then what?
> I mean, technically, the industry got by fine prior to IT as well, relying on pen and paper and telephone. Real problems are being solved, though.
Ah yes. How could I forget: there are only two steps in the evolution of industry: pen-and-paper and blockchain (where blockchain somehow equals all of IT).
> You seem a bit antagonistic/skeptic
I am. Because every single argument for blockchain immediately devolves into heavy handwaving and "this will work because blockchain", while completely ignoring all of reality.
> Yet, in certain organizations and scenarios they are a game-changer and enabler.
Why is it when you ask people how exactly they change the game and enable anything, all descriptions are, at best, "there's no info, but it works because blockchain". And any available info shows that blockchain brings literally nothing to the table and solves none of the listed problems.
The most obvious (because it's currently very well publicised) example is NFTs and the markets they're sold on through smart contracts.
I'm not making any comment on the value of NFTs themselves here, simply pointing out they have become a popular use case for blockchain technology that isn't cryptocurrency.
I've also read about blockchain managed supply chain solutions including in distribution of Covid vaccines. Currently this isn't a common use case but it seems to be one that's getting pushed hard recently.
Note I'm not trying to argue one way or another about intrinsic value or any type of moral value or any of the other unrelated tangents I often see discussions about NFTs turn into.
But objectively, as a product that exists solely on top of blockchains, NFTs are very very successful. Something that has allowed multiple individuals to auction off artworks for upwards of $60m cannot be called a failed use case.
However, I believe that the majority of people driving the popularity of NFTs fall into two overlapping camps: people who are simply trying to make money, and people who misunderstand or are otherwise oblivious to how the technology works and its limitations. To me it just seems more like a gold rush situation and does nothing to inspire confidence in the underlying technology.
Certainly there are people out there trying to leverage NFTs for more legitimate purposes - such as digital rights management and virtual items for video games - and those applications may be dubious enough by themselves. In the way they are generally being used, though, I wouldn't call NFTs a "success" any more than the South Sea Bubble was.
[0] https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/04/30/prices-nfts-dropping/
Is that really a success?
Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
And the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...