Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
11–20 of 192 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#12Double Spending
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#13Yes. Decentralized finance is coming and it's maybe the most important technology of the 21st century. If you want anything resembling autonomy and liberty in the future, and if you want to avoid ending up in a world straight out of a Black Mirror episode, I recommend supporting open-source monetary blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will be an attempt at some point by governments to centralize blockchain technology. China is already doing this. Western societies should embrace freedom and openness in finance. Besides being aligned with our core principles, it's incredibly powerful, and it can power the capital infrastructure in very innovative ways if we let it.
To your point, cryptocurrency enables reconstructing the entire financial infrastructure on blockchain. Everything from car loans (https://twitter.com/DMMDAO) to rental real estate (https://twitter.com/RealTPlatform) to interest-bearing savings accounts (https://compound.finance/) to derivatives and trading (https://www.synthetix.io/), to decentralized storage (https://sia.tech/), etc. There's hundreds of projects I follow regularly and I find new ones cropping up all the time. There's a Cambrian explosion of apps in blockchain right now.
I recommend reading https://bankless.substack.com/ and https://thedefiant.substack.com/ to stay on top of the topic. Watch some of the presentations from ETHDenver 2020 that was held 2 months ago (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgz9NU06t_FkT0Py1Vadczw)
Follow some of the thought leaders on Twitter, et al. Tons of promise in this space.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#14Some stores use it to store the production chain metadata of their products : when it was produced, by whom, etc, and make this information public. As anything stored in the blockchain can't easily be faked, it allows customers to check the authenticity of what they are buying (ie where has this product been farmed, cooked, by whom, etc).
I don’t think I get this. How does the blockchain part help this problem, over just publishing the data?
Using a (widely trusted) blockchain you could provide a mechanism for people to make sure you have not tampered with the historical records.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#15Yes. Decentralized finance is coming and it's maybe the most important technology of the 21st century. If you want anything resembling autonomy and liberty in the future, and if you want to avoid ending up in a world straight out of a Black Mirror episode, I recommend supporting open-source monetary blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will be an attempt at some point by governments to centralize block…
The OP specifically asked to leave cryptocurrencies out of it and judging by the post does not consider finance to be a 'substantial' example. Are there any concrete examples where blockchains are both useful and necessary?
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#16Assuming the only real use case is when all parties don't want to trust a central authority, the use cases do seem limited. Because once you have to trust anyone, you might as well use a simple ledger/database.
In the airline space, for example, all the airlines pay OAG to file schedules. OAG is a central authority they trust, and pay. Blockchain could replace that, and save them all some money. Hasn't happened though.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#17Bitcoin solves a real problem: It creates a permanent fix for monetary inflation, which allows people to save money without being taxed on their savings.
The rest of "cryptocurrency" is snake oil. Most of it attempts to reintroduce inflation and undermine the fix which Bitcoin introduced. While they may come up with a bunch of reasons for their decision to mint new tokens - the sole purpose of the new inflation is to enrich the creators, who intend to exchange their zero production cost tokens for some other tangible wealth before the naive buyers of the tokens realize they've been scammed.
Building on top of Bitcoin is the way to solve real problems because each development strengthens the permanent fix on inflation and enables Bitcoin to be more accessible.
A "blockchain" is just a linked list where each tail item is content addressed.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#18problem #1 - protect freedom, liberties
problem #2 - adaptation to the needs of the complex system like modern society
those are kind of ‘significant’ problems, technologies like Internet, blockchain etc, provide sequential approximations to the solution of those problems.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#19Some stores use it to store the production chain metadata of their products : when it was produced, by whom, etc, and make this information public. As anything stored in the blockchain can't easily be faked, it allows customers to check the authenticity of what they are buying (ie where has this product been farmed, cooked, by whom, etc).
This always comes up as one of the theoretical use cases or when a big company says they are doing blockchain now (which in reality is a small team evaluating if this new technology is worth it for them).
Do you have a source for where this is actually use in production and not as POC in a lab?
Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?
#20In a sense, git is “blockchain technology” that predates the buzzword: every commit is cryptographically hashed, including the hash(es) of its parent(s). This lets anyone verify all the involved commits back to the beginning of the chain, and is what enables the 3-way merge algorithm without a centralized server. What it doesn’t include is any kind of proof-of-work or proof-of-identity, which some people might consid…
The distributed operation I consider necessary for something to be called blockchain technology. Git is an example of a Merkle tree [1], which definitely is a key component of a blockchain but not enough on its own. One also need a distributed consensus mechanism.
The distributed operation is both necessary, and the key challenge for blockchains. There is a heavy cost to secure distributed operations. My personal opinion is that most people don't care so much about distribution, they're fine with a few trusted/regulated actors using more efficient centralized schemes. And this is, in a nutshell, the big challenge of blockchains IMHO. And why some people are tempted to drop the challenging part, put a centralize scheme on top of a Merkle tree and call it a blockchain to ride the hype. I don't think this is correct, both technically and ethically. It's "merklewashing" ;)