Blockchain: Is it all about cryptocurrency? | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain: Is it all about cryptocurrency?

4 pointsalegeaa14 comments

Seriously, do you know of any public blockchain solution that isn't or doesnt have a currency or token related to it? Why won't blockchain engineers think beyond cryptocurrency to provide other important value in society?

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Blockchains are algorithms to create public, redundant, distributed, immutable transaction logs without a central authority or transaction processor. I've thought long, long and hard about what would benefit from this kind of algorithm and the only thing I can come up with is ownership of cryptographic keys, and the only use case I can come up with for wanting a distributed trustless public immutable ledger of the transfers of cryptographic keys -- is a cryptocurrency or other token-like scheme!

Otherwise it is a solution in search of a problem. Distributed and redundant, but with enormous inefficiency. Immutability is actually a drawback in many cases. Most proposed uses like inventory tracking or etc. are much better served with a centralized database.

Self-sovereign identity (1) has the concept of a Decentralized identifier (2) at its core and, as far as I understand it, most use cases rely on the DIDs being stored on a distributed ledger, which is generally Blockchain.

Disclaimer: not a crypto or blockchain promoter but the above is my understanding of SSI.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity

(2) https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

Adding to a public ledger needs some mechanism to deter people from junking up the system for everyone. In Bitcoin/other crypto, that's mostly represented as a flat "gas" fee that is added on top of your transaction. This is also easy to control because the only thing Bitcoin is storing is account balances. For pretty much everything that isn't solely relegated to storing numbers, moderation becomes an immediate issue since everything is immutable.

So, yeah, I think it is all about cryptocurrency. Trying to build anything other than a public bean-counter would probably prove insurmountable.

Yeah, I guess something needs to be done. Blockchain is powerful, but it seems to not be reaching its potential. Cryptocurrency seriously is denting its image. Sadly.

Cryptocurrency is the blockchain's image, though. It's the posterchild, the most dead-simple distributed system to implement. You don't need variable-width ledger entries or complicated typing schemes, you just need numbers and a distributed CSV file. All of the successful distributed technologies (I2P, Matrix, Bittorrent) have proven that blockchains are totally unnecessary for modern distributed systems.

Well, I hope I can prove them wrong. xD

I have a conviction that blockchain can do a lot more good than just cryptocurrency if implemented carefully.

How do you intend to prove that?

By building one. Still testing the hypothesis but I believe it's possible, and it will work. xD

This is a good example of a currency-less blockchain:

https://github.com/Kindelia/Kindelia

No.

Real world example: Insurance contracts minted as NFTs on the blockchain, with the aim of immediate outcome and eliminating brokers/intermediaries.

Most people don't have custody of their own tokens though, so moving insurance contracts to the blockchain literally necessitates a broker or intermediary.

Exactly. Quite interesting though.

On which blockchain is this? i.e., which project? Any links?

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