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Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#31

Post by paulgb »

xupybd wrote: post #24

I understand it can make for hard to tamper with historical data. For things such as temperature records of transported food and medical goods this can be very valuable. As you can have mobile record taking and storage. While having confidence that the data has not been altered.

To OP's question though, are there real-world cases of blockchain tech being used for this, or is it more of a hypothetical?

The reason I ask is that the security of Blockchain comes at a cost (both in additional complexity and, for PoW at least, energy use). Have people who need those records in the real world found the additional tamper-proofness worth the cost?

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#32

Post by Shmebulock »

xupybd wrote: post #24

I understand it can make for hard to tamper with historical data. For things such as temperature records of transported food and medical goods this can be very valuable. As you can have mobile record taking and storage. While having confidence that the data has not been altered.

While having confidence that the data has not been altered after being added to the blockchain.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#33

Post by chrisco255 »

jpmoral wrote: post #15
chrisco255 wrote: post #13

Yes. 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?

Yes I literally posted 5. The disentanglement of blockchain from cryptocurrency is senseless. The entire point of a blockchain is to serve as a distributed ledger. If it's truly decentralized, it has to be monetized somehow to incentivize the maintenance of the blockchain.

Hyperledger is a blockchain that is mainly used for these private blockchains that are used in corporate settings. However, a public chain has 100% uptime, is permissionless, and is by far the most useful application of the tech.

https://www.baseline-protocol.org/ Baseline Protocol is a collaboration between Ernst & Young and Microsoft to use Ethereum as a secure, cross-enterprise business process collaboration layer, which is powerful but you'll have to some knowledge of how back offices in enterprises currently work in order to grasp it.

Finance is incredibly substantial. Everything you know is powered by finance. It's a multi hundred trillion dollar industry.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#34

Post by cachestash »

kd5bjo wrote: post #9

In 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…

Is your ssh key not a proof of identity?

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#35

Post by keiferski »

Blockchain has existed as a widespread technology for what, a little over a decade now? And people are already proclaiming its fundamental uselessness?

Seems like a massive lack of patience and long term thinking. It took nearly a century for the first airplane to go anywhere and another half-century for it to be widespread and practical.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#36

Post by Taek »

The strongest use case right now in the blockchain space is Bitcoin as a sovereign money. It's an asset with substantial liquidity that has incredible protections against asset seizure and strong independence against capital controls.

It's the type of thing that you go 30 years without needing it, but then when you do need it you really badly need it. Bitcoin does this well today and there are plenty of people who proactively plan for financial contingencies by holding some percentage of their portfolio in self-custodied Bitcoin.

We also have several examples (Greece a few years ago, Venezuela recently) of this playing out in favor of the prepared in the real world. When your country's financial system melts down, your Bitcoin holdings can give you liquidity and options despite everything else around you being completely disfunctional.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#37

Post by paulgb »

Shmebulock wrote: post #32
xupybd wrote: post #24

I understand it can make for hard to tamper with historical data. For things such as temperature records of transported food and medical goods this can be very valuable. As you can have mobile record taking and storage. While having confidence that the data has not been altered.

While having confidence that the data has not been altered after being added to the blockchain.

Reminds me of this: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vi...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#38

Post by sparkie »

xupybd wrote: post #24

I understand it can make for hard to tamper with historical data. For things such as temperature records of transported food and medical goods this can be very valuable. As you can have mobile record taking and storage. While having confidence that the data has not been altered.

The problem here is that the ledger is public - and there exists few wholesalers who want their customers to learn who their suppliers are.

So the ledger must by design, anonymise each entity involved.

If you anonymise each entity, then every entity is Sybil.

You have no more confidence in anything than you would've had pre-"blockchain".

Re: Ask HN: Are there any substantial examples of blockchain solving a real problem?

#40

Post by PeterisP »

anotheryou wrote: post #7

I still like it as "proof of existence", proofing that you where in possession of a certain information at some point in time. (by publishing the hash on the blockchain). I think this is already relevant for court cases.

This use case, especially for legal proof in court cases, has been solved by digital signatures with timestamps - essentially, you hash the document; and a third party issues a digitally signed certificate that they verified that hash at this specific day and time). The technical infrastructure and legal process for that existed before Bitcoin was invented and the blockchain boom, I recall doing some work on these things back in 2002 or around that time.

It does rely on having some trusted authority making (signing) that timestamp, but for the legal system that's not a problem, probably the other way around - having a digitally signed document with a timestamp from some official provider will be trivially accepted by the court, but any custom solution that somehow places data on some public blockchain will require an extensive and possibly expensive process to get acknowledged.

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