Ask HN: Blockchain success stories that did need to be decentralised? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Blockchain success stories that did need to be decentralised?

23 pointstablatom55 comments

The HN crowd seems to be pretty down on the utility of blockchain, beyond the obvious making money through speculation. So am I, but I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

With all the activity, you'd think by now there would be some famous, impressive solutions to real-world problems that could not have been solved "the old way" (i.e. trusting a central body).

NFTs are obviously hugely successful, in some way, but that seems to be largely a variation on the same old speculation game.

I realise there are serious uses of cryptocurrency beyond speculation, such as international money transfer or bypassing unstable fiat currencies, but I am more interested in the revolution in distributed apps and online services that we are supposed to be seeing.

Where is it? Do I just not know where to look?

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I find the render network's ambition to be very compelling, and think the decentralized approach to rendering is necessary. Could something similar be accomplished with a centralized model? Theoretically yes definitely. Practically though, my stance is this can't happen soon with open standards.

IMO the project aims to solve a couple fundamental problems:

- Graphical computing power is prohibitively expensive

- Graphical computing power is inherently scarce and inaccessible, while most graphics resources are in reality sitting idle.

- Thermal/power constraints are incompatible with a mass-market form factor for VR/AR/XR.

Looking past the shilling in this tweetstorm I think it's the best summary of the core concepts I've seen: https://twitter.com/arbvision/status/1460774216136024071

[edit: appended "open standards" above]

Rendering-as-a-service already exists, even in a fairly distributed form.

Certainly -- rendering services are great. I just think a decentralized approach wins on cost, accessibility, compatibility, and quality of service in certain instances. And I think the margin it wins by enables a whole new class of products.

Arguably (actually probably) decentralization overhead costs more than centralized farm.

To clarify for everyone else (building on top of parent comment) - distributed does not necessarily mean decentralized.

> decentralization overhead costs more than centralized farm.

Say more :)

Definitely with you distributed doesn't mandate decentralized and the two are easy to conflate.

What else should I say? I think existing (centralized) render farms just work well. Although there's the $RNDR token which seems more like hype to me than actual improvement and again, arguably (probably) worse.

How does it win? Can you step through in a concrete fashion how this would work in one instance you refer to? Highly distributed render farms exist, and they work under a central control. How does a blockchain do anything to reduce cost, increase compatibility or quality of service v existing solutions?

For the record I wouldn't argue "blockchain" is the only possible means of decentralization/distribution for offloading graphics compute.

With that said, an example would be a solo artist making CGI in C4D for a client/hobby (this is a small subset of potential use cases, but most relatable today).

Typical workflow costs would look like: - Local Workstation ($4K w/ 2 high end nvda gpus) - Render 2000 frames at 4K resolution for final render (need a better figure here but let's call it $500) - Time spent on workflow rendering - 5 hours - Time spent on final rendering - 10 hours

In a decentralized render situation: - Local computer ($500 - in theory no discrete graphics necessary) - Render 2000 frames at 4K resolution ($100) - Time spent on workflow rendering - 1 hour - Time spent on final rendering - 2 hours

I'm not trying to handwave at the data here btw, I just have a day job and want to answer promptly. RNDR is far and away cheaper at the moment than local or render farm compute: https://twitter.com/rsquires/status/1466599124451487744

Here are the main reasons why it's cheaper: - Most decentralized GPU operators are "running at a loss" -- people who own GPUs don't expect a return so any dollars earned while they're idle is good with them. - No "datacenter tax". Server GPUs are objectively more expensive than the network's GPU's which bias towards consumer. - In terms of time, rendering is one of the most parallelizable workloads. 2000 frames rendered sequentially on a cloud instance is just slower than 2000 frames rendered in parallel on 50 cloud instances.

For QoS, because it's so much cheaper, redundancy is much more justifiable to add to the system.

On compatibility, an SDK would allow people to build their own products that leverage the compute of the network. That's not something there is a high incentive for centralized render farms to offer.

If you want to go deep I highly recommend recent podcast with CEO of OTOY and the two hosts of the Mograph podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRtOMF4JKd4

Why is a blockchain useful here though? For example, here is how it could work without a blockchain:

I could create "Distributed Render Service" application - you register your machine with my service. My service runs on a pretty standard set up on AWS. I keep the details in a sql database. There is a client you download to your machine which basically figures when the GPU isn't in use and makes a call to my service for a "job". The client pulls down the relevant data, completes the job on your GPU and sends the data back. My service credits your account. On the flip side I have a place for people who need said rendering done. They upload "jobs". My central service figures which jobs to send where.

Where does a blockchain make it cheaper, more compatible or improve service? I understand that you state that a blockchain isn't the only possible means - but the key difference in question is central, trusted control v not. My service has a central, trusted control. Blockchains are created to avoid a central, trusted control. So even if we avoid blockchain - what would be the scenario where you can concretely avoid central, trusted control and it would be beneficial on the dimensions stated?

Fwiw, I believe you are making these statements in good faith, and they aren't argumentative for their own sake. Like the original poster, I just struggle to see the value in 99% of the situations people propose involving blockchains (or avoiding central/trusted control).

Totally, appreciate the discourse btw! Here are my thoughts for where the blockchain buzzword is useful:

- Consensus around asset ownership -- every render to the network automatically ascribes authorship of the final render via a minting process a la NFT.

- Authorship/ownership graph -- Similar to above, in my mind the end game is an asset graph that tracks combinations of assets and their owners used to create final renders or assets. Piracy in digital assets is rampant and having a distributed source graph of "what assets are made of" isn't something tractable for a central body to take on but would reward impactful creators more meritocratically.

- From the above, a blockchain setup could bake in the direct monetization of IP, copyright, permissions, etc.

- Supply side incentives -- for all the misplaced hype, blockchain can actually nail financializing "sharing economy" primitives in a trustless way. I'm sure there are many people who don't want to trust running VMs on a closed network. Adding "liquidity" to the compute market here may be the biggest benefit IMO. Technically speaking it's doable without blockchain but I'm not aware of for-profit success stories, though happy to be proven wrong.

- Open source data -- The market doesn't incentivize open source data for a highly technical (and niche atm) segment like this. Intellectual property management and law could actually be much simpler if open was the standard.

- Licensing -- I have to think the service you suggest would be cease and desisted by a number of large incumbents on legal grounds of running a business without each node contributor having the right licensing permissions as well as the central body. IANAL but there's a sharing economy argument (similar to Uber & Airbnb) somewhere in here that brings the blockchain approach more into the legislative grey area in a way that makes the market more efficient.

Btw, it's not lost on me that these useful aspects present new classes of integrity, security, privacy challenges. Just trying to discuss in good faith as you mentioned. I think the blockchain aspect isn't super interesting on it's own right but brings the barriers for entry of a system like this way down.

From your link, I found this a bit odd:

> As video games get more photo realistic (...) the demand for rendering is going to grow immensely.

I don't see what a decentralized render farm has to do with video games, it's never going to render at real-time rates.

Agreed that is one of the hairier challenges a concept like this faces. I do think that argument is worth unpacking though. Would a render node in your neighborhood have acceptable latency? IIRC they have demoed "real-time" NFT's based on an Unreal Engine node streaming frames at acceptable e2e latency.

Personally I'd think a bit broader than frame-streaming for achieving "console in the room" levels of video game fidelity.

The primary issue wouldn't be latency. It'd be access to assets (which can easily be tens to hundreds of gigabytes for a modern game) and upstream bandwidth (which is often as little as 5 Mbps for residential users).

These aren't problems that a blockchain can solve. In fact, I'll go a step further and say: distributed graphics rendering, or other computation, isn't a problem which is made any easier at all by the application of a blockchain. It's yet another case of cryptocurrency enthusiasts taking a problem that people seem interested in and claiming, without justification, that The Blockchain Solves This.

There is no problem that cannot be solved with a trusted central body that could be solved by using a blockchain. People fundamentally misunderstand - a blockchain doesn't mean you don't have trust, it just means you're trusting something else.

A hypothetical, un-compromisable entity would be more effective than any blockchain simply because the entity wouldn't be beholden by the inherent inefficiency of maintaining decentralized consensus.

For me definitely decentralized exchanges. Look at uniswap.

Really look forward for the day where I can buy stocks there. In my perspective the user experience is so much better. You own your "tkns". You don't need a broker or whatever to get access to an exchange. It works 24/7. Especially would be useful for people without bank access. By the way trading volume is already huge there.

Unregulated exchanges might be worse for the society overall. NYSE and other centralised exchanges have alot of guard rails built to protect retail investors. For ex - a circuit breaker if the price jumps/crashes too suddenly to ease panic.

Nothing similar exists on Uniswap, it's cool for people who know what they're doing, it's terrible for everyone else.

The same was said of the internet. NY Times, CNN, Fox and other centralized news sites have(had?) a lot of guard rails to 'protect' people from unsubstantiated claims. The internet was the wild-west in terms of information and blogs containing potentially harmful information. Now look at where things are.

The guard-rails can be built in the new medium, and the result may actually be better than what we had before.

Our society is being destroyed by purposeful misinformation on the internet. I don’t think this argument is what you think it is.

Fake news and misinformation was busy destroying societies since well before the internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore's eye: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-01...

Opening a brokerage account is trivial, takes a few minutes. People who don't even have a bank account really shouldn't be trading securities. They mostly have no money and terrible credit ratings. They should focus on getting their personal finances squared away first.

My problem is that in such case there is a whole food chain under my borker:

person -> brokage -> market makers (hft) -> exchange

So my point is, I think in terms of fees it may be more expensive, since you can't interact directly with the exchange. Also try to transfer your assets from one broker to an other. Not always trivial.

It is not more expensive. Transferring assets from one broker to another is easy. Your point is wrong.

Why is it better than Coinbase?

Because Coinbase can basically block you anytime. For example they updated their kyc and you need to proved them documents and so on until you can do anything with your assets. This stuff happens very often, especially in crypto.

Also you have the risk that they might get hacked (although coinbase seems to be very secure).

The core issue is that trusted, central bodies are generally already evil or will become evil, whether by their own volition or as authoritarian governments force them to use their centralized control to help them accomplish their goals.

Here is a talk I gave to Mozilla Privacy Lab back in 2017 about centralization and all of the extremely-concrete evil that has resulted, with every single example from the (long) talk directly cited (as every slide is a news article). And the sad thing is that every few days there is some new high-profile abuse of centralized power that I always feel also deserves to be in an updated version of this talk... it is a never-ending issue as people suck.

https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms

So, I feel like your very question of trying to solve things that can't be solved with centralized systems is flawed; hell: I studied decentralized systems in grad school, and I have been saying for as long as I can remember that "anything you solve with a decentralized system I can solve cheaper and faster and better with a centralized one"... but you know what I can't do? I can't solve it in a way that doesn't lead to at least some moral landmines due to my now having chosen to take those shortcuts by having centralized control of the result.

Inherently, then, I believe the reason to work on blockchain stuff is not to solve things that "can't" be solved using centralized systems... it is to figure out how to re-solve the things that people already solved using centralized systems without putting any individual or small cabal in charge of anything that would let them do evil things. And it is then to figure out how to do well enough with what results that people are willing to put up with it probably being a worse result on the surface because it is a better result for humanity.

And like, that's a nearly impossible bar, and maybe to really get there will require regulation of centralized systems to make them illegal... which I realize will probably never happen :(. But that doesn't make working on these systems dumb, the way a lot of people here seem to think: it makes it all the more noble, as everyone who isn't doing this are actively making the world a worse place to live (and in some of the more egregious examples, such as everyone who chooses to work at Apple, have pretty direct blood on their hands from issues in countries like China).

Hell... looking at your comment history, I see you recently being excited about the idea that Google could use their fleet of self-driving cars to create a mass road surveillance network capable of logging the license plates of "bad drivers" (and from thread context, "reporting them")... Google already is used as a stooge for governments (even as they push back, they still provide tons of data) but at least it is almost always about their own users: expanding their charge into watching other people is just evil and will lead to unprecedented ways to abuse this information stockpile :(.

It's not a flawed question - the question might be better worded, but it basically asks: where are the situations where the cost/benefit of blockchain is positive versus the centralized version. It's trivially easy for you to find examples of bad behavior, and it's trivially easy to find situations where blockchains have resulted in bad outcomes.

The people have voted with their wallets that buying books from Amazon is better than buying books from a bricks and mortar store. Not everyone needs to agree, but the aggregate has spoken. What is the analogy to Amazon?

DAOs, distributed autonomous organizations. Since you can script contract behavior on a blockchain, you can prefigure and automate the governance of an open organization in any way you desire: Cooperatives, worker ownership, covenants, voting by shares, etc. BBLLC (Blockchain-Based Limited Liability Corporation) laws are becoming a thing, for example Vermont recently legalized them, meaning that a DAO can now be legally binding and not just an organizational novelty.

I think that over the next decade or so this will become the greatest impact of blockchains outside of finance.

The reasonable question is - why is this better than the existing mechanisms for governing things? Corporate law allows for an almost infinite number of ways to structure organizations. And the things it doesn't allow for are mostly things which society has deemed they don't want (ie, laws/regs disallowing something).

This isn't to say DAOs aren't useful - but it would be nice to see a concrete value proposition. Like "that thing which people want to do, like in example X, can be done significantly cheaper/faster/more conveniently than the current way to do it."

Some of dOrg's projects are good examples (They're a BBLLC who consult and develop other DAO projects): https://www.dorg.tech

I think, maybe obviously, that more distributed organizations stand to benefit more immediately from being a DAO than more centralized traditional corporations do. For example if a bunch of cabbies want to run their own homebrewed clone of Uber / Lyft (As cabbies in some cities actually do), a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them. Essentially, smaller distributed organizations can be freed of the need for centralized touch points and thus the costs associated.

a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them

No. Doing anything on-chain is far more expensive than renting servers. Because there's a massive bubble going on, people are willing to work for DAOs in exchange for stock (whoops, don't call it that) but that won't last and over time salaries will equalize.

> For example if a bunch of cabbies want to run their own homebrewed clone of Uber / Lyft (As cabbies in some cities actually do), a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them.

That isn't a DAO. That's a dApp. It could in theory also be organized as a DAO, but the two aren't synonymous.

As others have mentioned, a dApp would be a spectacularly bad choice of technology for this type of application -- it's slower, dramatically more expensive to run, and would run a significant risk of permanently leaking users' PII (like their ride history) to the blockchain.

Very few organizations will willingly apply decentralization to their system when they make insane amounts of money off of their centralized assets. It's a lose-lose scenario in their eyes, so the majority of successful companies eyeing the blockchain are really just pointing and laughing. "You mean they can buy our Netflix originals and not have to pay us a monthly fee to watch them? What a joke!"

That's fine - and in the late 90's someone could have said the same about the internet. But there were already a bunch of real companies doing real things (like amazon, ebay, yahoo). They were new companies.

The post is asking - what are the real things being done. They will likely be done by new companies to be sure, but it doesn't change the question.

We are off-topic regards the original question but I haven't found many people who seem to grasp this and is the reason I am very cagey about supporting any combination of gaming and blockchain. Publishers have spent years wrestling control away from players and moving everyone into walled gardens - like Netflix - where they can control your purchase agreements, or roll their own content markets. In what universe are these organisations going to knock down their centralised control and turn it over to a blockchain? It won't happen. I know Epic have made a PR point of saying they're open to blockchain but wait until the details are made clear for all to see. I guarantee it won't be what people think.

Hard-pressed to come up with something concrete but blockchain is a way to build consensus. Mostly, it's more expensive than centralized consensus. In some cases though, it's cheaper.

For ex - Cost of consensus by the govt in a stable democracy is much lower than a failed state. Blockchain could be used there.

Prediction markets, although this is becoming less necessary as governments come around to allow sports betting. Still, there are probably many markets that will never allow legal betting.

This is an instance of "it's technology which allows you to break the law". It's true... but I think everyone is aware of that ?

Maybe it's more than breaking the law. If I want to bet on something random, say, 'if it will rain tomorrow in my hometown', it's pretty hard to do without a blockchain unless I know the other party.

A prediction market could solve that, cheaply build consensus where it would be harder to do otherwise.

Weather derivatives are a thing, traded on CME. They have a centralized clearing function. It works nicely.

Prediction markets exist in many places with centralized exchanges/clearing houses. If there is enough volume, the market works, if there is not, it doesn't. They exist for most financial securities, commodities, sports, various weather events and probably many other things I'm unaware of.

They mostly use a central party and (i'll guess) a pretty standard sql database. Before the financial crises some of the trades were done bank to bank with (horror...) no intermediary.... like people just called each other and kept distributed records and settled up...

They work if your jurisdiction allows you to participate in them. If you live outside of the elite banking countries, you probably don't have access to these secure, liquid markets.

So it again devolves into enabling users to break the law.

Which might be a fine value proposition in a good number of jurisdictions I guess, but it's a well known one already.

Energy transfer between consumers and producers cross border

Similar to this but it's still too simplistic :

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.6711...

It also requires more data points than payments. Since the current solutions aren't better than VISA i don't think it can manage that much data.

AMM - Automated Market Makers. Probably most (liquid) money is in those.

> problems that could not have been solved "the old way" (i.e. trusting a central body).

If this is the criterion then the answer is going to be "nothing". Because anything a blockchain can do, somebody running 1 server could do. The whole point is to do things just without the central authority part.

I think the question is about what requires to be decentralised using a blockchain technology. The answer seems to be nothing.

Then it's not really a question of "what are blockchains good for?" but rather "what is decentralization good for?" And that's not a technology question.

I think it's about decentralisation and the blockchain together. Because there is plenty of decentralised success stories, they are not hard to find.

True, there were decentralized systems before blockchains. Email for example.

The reason you would use a blockchain in a decentralized system is if you need to solve a double spend problem. So money, or things with monetary value. But the reason to decentralize those things in the first place is a philosophical one.

Just to play devils advocate - email isn't a great example. In the end, it's become a very centralized service. The protocols allow for decentralization, but these days a very large chunk of email ends up just being data movements in Google's databases and storage systems.

I could go on (the internet itself is moving largely to centralized servers in one of a handful of providers) but the point is - centralization seems to always win out. Can you name a handful of services which started out decentralized and by and large stayed that way? Here are ones which didnt:

Banking, stock trading, email, the internet (defined as computers connected together over tcp/ip), podcasting, blogging, music, gambling, video...

Centralization tends to enable scale, dispute resolution, trust, ability to change. There are downsides to it, but it seems they are easily outweighed according to customers and history.

I think the reason email is now more "centralized" (in the sense that most people use a few big providers like Gmail) is because most people just don't care about decentralization (at least for email). Not because the protocol wouldn't have scaled otherwise. Gmail works well and people aren't going to drop it just on principle.

Systems that started decentralized and remained so... BitTorrent I guess? I can't think of many, honestly. Most decentralized systems don't have a monetary incentive layer to keep people running it the way a blockchain does.

Yup, totally agree with the why. Many of the examples I gave don't have scaling issues per se. It's because people don't care and there are other benefits of central services. It's kind of the point though - the vast majority of people just don't find decentralization a strong value proposition.

Agreed. I'm under no illusion that most people are fine with the status quo. It's one of the reasons this stuff has not been very well received.

I've been studying the space for a few years now and from what I gather is similar to what @saurik is saying. Blockchain-based applications are prime candidates for adversarial networks where a centralized entity will at some point be incentivized to take actions that benefit itself and not the network.

This is why I believe that these applications have little use in spaces other than finance. For example, the NYSE is governed by a central entity that acts as a market maker, buying and selling securities to "make" the market. This is all done behind closed doors in a way that the vast majority of people do not understand. A Blockchain-based market maker provides much more transparency and stability than a centralized one governed by human decisions and thus emotions.

However, very few, if any Blockchain projects are truly decentralized as they are still developed and changed by a central organization. We need more projects that are simple, efficient, financial tools that are immutable on the Blockchain that people can use and there is no incentive from a central authority to change the system in order to achieve their goals or boost their profits.

The owner of NYSE isn't a market maker. ICE provides exchange and clearing services. Some of their largest customers are market makers.

There is no evidence that a Blockchain based approach would provide more transparency or stability. In fact the opposite is likely true.

These kinds of errors - claiming an exchange is a market maker for example - seem to be minor errors. But every single argument in favor of a blockchain seems to have one or two of them which make the argument flawed.

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