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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a general purpose blockchain ledger for businesses. It seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated.

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There is a general purpose ledger for business. It's called a SQL database

And legally backed by WORM media: write once read many.

SQL database is mutable, right? One of the biggest features of blockchain tech is that it's almost completely immutable. Something happens and it happens forever and ever.

The major problem is that private solutions (like consortium chains) offer privacy but no standardized interoperability or neutral root of trust, and public solutions (like Ethereum blobs) offer interoperability and neutrality but no inbuilt privacy.

I believe this will change either when consortium chains figure out the interoperability problem (so they can bridge seamlessly with public chains) or public chains figure out the privacy problem (allowing consensus over entirely private transaction zones).

To me it seems like the latter is more likely than the former. We've finally got both featureful/performant Ethereum roll-ups and private Ethereum roll-ups. Now the trick is to combine all those properties and bundle them into a business ledger that's high-performance, with customizable privacy zones, with consensus and data availability provided by a credibly neutral setup such as the Ethereum validator set.

This seems to be the direction some firms are going, for example Ernst & Young with their Nightfall product, and more recently their OpsChain Contract Manager to try to bring it to enterprise customers.

It would only ensure entries haven't been manipulated after the fact, but not whether they were valid in the first place or if they reflect reality.

Bingo. If the human principals of a business are committed to cooking the books, no amount of technology can force them to be honest.

Auditing isn't typically about forcing people to be honest, it's about discovering when people haven't been honest and being able to attribute the fault to a specific bad actor.

Append only, immutable and signed ledgers do exist actually.

Actual businesses don’t need any trustless, decentralized storage solution, because they already heavily rely on the state monopoly on violence and state recognization of the “business” as an entity in order to function. They gain nothing from using a blockchain ledger instead of a trusted source enforced by laws and contracts.

By using a blockchain ledger, you move source of truth to a private group of people who are the best at leveraging money to buy ASICs/GPUs and run the technical infrastructure.

Ironically, where you had 1 person = 1 vote (democracy), now this system favors the ultra-rich.

And it is presented as decentralized / free, but in reality, control is in the handful of very rich people.

No surprise that Trump, Musk and others are promoting it.

Of all blockchains that have any current relevance, only Bitcoin runs on ASIC/GPU - all the rest are staked rather than mined.

Guaranteed by what mechanism? This is the fundamental problem.

>"cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated."

That is only achieved with bitcoin because of a security model that has financial value to the blocks, and a distributed system of nodes and financially-invested miners. As soon as you remove the valuable digital token from the system it all falls apart; people could just rewrite the blocks and back-date the timestamps. It's like a machine that needs all of the parts to make sense.

This assumes ideal, perfect data entry before reaching the ledger, and having immutable history doesn't prevent historical errors.

It really doesn't traditional accounting is built around the use of an immutable ledger. Historical errors are fixed with correction entries. There is also a multidimensional conception of time to support this. We capture both the date the entry is made in the ledger and also the real world date it is meant to apply to.

So if you overstate something in December 2024, you can enter a correcting transaction today for that.

The first, erroneous entry has both it's accounting and business dates in December 2024.

The second entry, correcting the first is made today and so has an accounting date of today and a business date of December 2024.

>seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated

Just because you write that you own 5 million litres of olive oil or what have you on a chain doesn't prove you actually have it.

There was BigChainDB that tried to combine blockchains with SQL database, but it failed as it was too early.

The trick is that it must be triple accounting and the counterparty needs to share the ledger, which cannot be done without PK.

I've worked on such a platform: Hyperledger from IBM et al. It was generic enough we could deploy our own "smart contract" / business logic layer via a Lisp dialect built in Go.

How would it make auditing simple? Auditors would still have to go out and count things to verify that the blockchain contents match assets and liabilities in the real world.

It’s just not an actual problem for most businesses.

Wasn't that AWS Quantum Ledger, which is closing down at the end of July?

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