Comment by tomputer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomputer | Hacker News Reader

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> You're missing the forest for the trees. Bitcoin is broken and will never be more than a speculative asset with no intrinsic value.

I disagree. It's off-topic so I'm not going start an endless discussion about intrinsic value.

> Decentralisation can quickly become federation. Example: a global id system where the "miners" are countries. It removes the need of physical passports and their associated costs and delays.

As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data. Actually, cheating is a nice feature if you need double passports for diplomats, spies or informants. The result is a blockchain with permanent records with data you can not fully trust because the data did not exist on the blockchain in the first place.

I'm all for a digital solution instead of physical passports but I do believe this can be solved with distributed systems and international standards, instead of permanent records on a decentralized blockchain.

> As long as humans submit the external data to the blockchain someone can cheat with the data.

I am glad to see someone else who realizes this point. When people were all excited about supply chain blockchains (for example, a blockchain to verify a piece of fruit is picked in a certain place at a certain time, that the transportation truck maintains a certain temperature) I kept asking what stops someone from lying and putting in bad data or tampering with any sensors along the way? There seemed to be this idea that what was on a blockchain was automatically truth just because it was on a blockchain.

I think the only good case is with KSI, but that's not actually a blockchain even if they use the name in marketing.

In their case, they limit themselves to verifiable timestamped witness. Someone can still submit bad data, but now you have a log that at time T entity E submitted document D, and if it turns out to be fraudulent you can't backdate or put a different one for it (could be also used to detect tampering with sensors if you receive something that shouldn't pass a sensor that worked correctly yet you obviously have it)

I'm thinking of a blockchain where the ledger is public read (for verifications) and write-constrained. How can you verify the.legitimacy of the introduced data? Probably some other tool. But it being federated across countries would have the nice property of non-gatekeeping. There are politics in play, but if the UN is possible, só is such a system.

This is all just my theoretical assessment, anyway. And I agree that other standards and toolchain is necessary to add value. Blockchains don't do KYC nor identity verification and a lot of other things.

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