Ask HN: What are some use cases of block chain? 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some use cases of block chain? 2021

8 pointslifeplusplus11 comments

it's been 10+ years since blockchain was launched... yet to best of my knowledge only 'product' made out of blockchain is that facilitates speculation.

I've seen pro blockchain cultists argue all day, but the arguments were the same 10 years ago...so no mental gymnastics..

what are some examples of some successful current uses of blockchain?

Successful = The firm abc uses blockchain to do xyz.

Not Successful = startup built another facebook "BUT ON BLOCKCHAIN"

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1. Distributed Identity - ex. https://idx.xyz

2. Registry Services - ex. ENS, Handshake

3. Decentralised Lotteries, Decentralised Betting

4. P2P communications - libp2p, https://status.im

5. Decentralised network layer - https://protcol.ai, IPFS

6. Ondemand graphics compute engine - https://golem.network

7. Decentralised, permissionless LoraWAN - https://helium.com

8. Decentralised, trustless code execution and secrets management - https://renproject.io

9. Financial applications - DEX, Swaps, Decentralised exchanges

10. Certificate issuing - https://kryptomoney.com/indias-sp-jain-college-issues-degree...

11. Instant, global, zero permission access to financial services

12. Flash loans - https://aave.com/flash-loans

13. Kafka like streams, but decentralised - https://ceramic.network/

14. P2P live streaming - https://theta.tv and Livepeer

15. Decentralised object storage - Sia, Filecoin, Storj

That being said I think we are not there yet. I doubt if there is a "destination". P2P systems trade speed and control for resilience and censorship (sorry for my dumb definition).

But 10 years is a short time span. Internet took more time than that to mature.

Bitcoin does 7 transactions per second. Anything needing higher throughput is working off-chain, at which point you're trusting a third party and would work without the blockchain complication.

Indeed. The tech is not scalable and in 10 years very little has been done to make the decentralized dream come true

None of this is widely used. The only widely used purpose of blockchain is trading.

> But 10 years is a short time span. Internet took more time than that to mature.

10 years in tech is definitely enough. Most of the biggest trend mature and get widely used in 10 years.

Smartphone from 2007 (iphone) / 2008 (android) to 2017/2018 has been having a massive adoption everywhere in the world.

Windows from 1995 to 2005 (with XP already around since 2001) has proven the same.

Cloud technology, from 2006 to 2016, definitely has still room to go but already widely used.

iPhone was launched in 2007, and it was a common object in 2018. But I don't think they started developing the iPhone in 2007. It was a dream of the 80s, limited by Moore's law.

However, it's pointless to argue. If you think it's doomed, then so be it. But your argument is not rational.

The same goes for blockchain if you want go to that extend. Blockchain is a concept of 1982. Nakamoto stated to work on the code for bitcoin in 2007 and released in 2009.

> Cryptographer David Chaum first proposed a blockchain-like protocol in his 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups."

Your argument is not rational, you cannot just throw false statements without even proposing proof of what you aim to claim.

> I don't think they started developing the iPhone in 2007

Development of what was to become the iPhone began in 2004. Just 3 years before being publicly available, which is similar to the two years of development for BTC.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

iphone was also a hardware product, not a direct comparision.

It's an example to dispute the false claim that 10 years is little time for a technology to mature. If 10 years are enough for hardware let alone software.

Another example are social media, from 2004 to 2014, they were widely used by almost everybody that has an internet connection (Facebook had more than 1 billions active users back then)

I agree, comparing hardware product growth with software product is insincere

Check out MoFi, podcast and newsletter by Kevin Rose. It covers a lot of projects and use cases: https://modern.finance

i wanted links to products that are being used widely, not crypto influencers

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