Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#51

Post by sanderjd »

mschuster91 wrote: post #32
sanderjd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what are the deficiencies of current clock-in / clock-out systems that blockchain technology might help solve?

Not GP, but current systems usually are not manipulation proof. Using a blockchain makes post-clock-out modifications visible immediately.

Sure, but what I'm curious about is: is that a real problem in practice that organizations have been fighting, or is it just a problem in theory? If I told an organization, "I've built a blockchain based time tracking system that is 100% impossible to be tampered with", would they say, "oh thank goodness this is a huge problem for us!", or would they say, "oh that's sort of neat but our tampering related loss is already within acceptable bounds"? My sense is that it would be the latter.

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#53

Post by noloblo »

RexetBlell wrote: post #29
bluebluetimes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would ETH name service Domains be integrated with the browser or this is supposed to work only in onion Tor and Mist browsers Update fixed formatting

There is a Chrome extension that does this for you for IP addresses (I think). All ethereum wallets are also implementing support. You can make your Ethereum domain name point to anything you want. So instead of sending your transaction to a long hex string, you can send it to "johndoe.eth".

Thanks but chrome and electron-based applications really heat the Mac, get the fan running all the time and bringing it to a halt.

Are there projects to build native cocoa apps on top of eth/btc much like aquamacs for emacs

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#54

Post by SkyMarshal »

yithump wrote: post #12

Democratic Autonomous Organizations -- which are corporations whose law is created not by human organizations; the law for ricardian contracts is instead defined by a relationship between trustless consensus and formally verifiable logic. See the og tao here: http://chriseth.github.io/browser-solidity/?gist=192371538cf... and read about the $50 million tao debacle on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organ…

That's "Decentralized Autonomous Organization".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#55

Post by ashnyc »

sanderjd wrote: post #51
mschuster91 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but current systems usually are not manipulation proof. Using a blockchain makes post-clock-out modifications visible immediately.

Sure, but what I'm curious about is: is that a real problem in practice that organizations have been fighting, or is it just a problem in theory? If I told an organization, "I've built a blockchain based time tracking system that is 100% impossible to be tampered with", would they say, "oh thank goodness this is a huge problem for us!", or would they say, "oh that's sort of neat but our tampering related loss is alre…

It is not only about being impossible being tampered with. It is about trusting the system. Since we trust the blockchain with 100 + billion dollars. trusting it for a time sheet system should not be that hard

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#56

Post by mundo »

RexetBlell wrote: post #26
mundo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is being trusted to accurately report whether the borrower has paid? I have never understood how the "oracle" problem gets worked out in practice.

The amazing this about this particular application is that an oracle is not required at all. So it's completely automatic and trustless. The contract (think of it as a class in Java) has a single function which looks something like this: function acquire_name() { if (msg.value > $200) {self.registrar.transfer_ownership(self.domain_name, msg.sender);}} registrar is a pointer to an instance of the domain registrar that…

I don't really follow. Is this transaction in eth or dollars? If the former, how does the algorithm know what the exchange rate is? If the latter, how does it know a USD transaction has even taken place?

It sounds like you're talking about a hypothetical future in which eth is just as useful as USD, meaning that the risk in holding eth and converting it to USD is negligible, and that the contract writer doesn't have to worry about the exchange rate changing much. If so, then it seems like you're sort of solving the easy part and skipping over the hard part.

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#57

Post by sanderjd »

ashnyc wrote: post #55
sanderjd wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what I'm curious about is: is that a real problem in practice that organizations have been fighting, or is it just a problem in theory? If I told an organization, "I've built a blockchain based time tracking system that is 100% impossible to be tampered with", would they say, "oh thank goodness this is a huge problem for us!", or would they say, "oh that's sort of neat but our tampering related loss is alre…

It is not only about being impossible being tampered with. It is about trusting the system. Since we trust the blockchain with 100 + billion dollars. trusting it for a time sheet system should not be that hard

Sure, but I think you're missing my point. Is this a problem that really needs a solution or is it a solution in search of a problem? Are time tracking systems not trustworthy enough already? Perhaps I'm just ignorant, but I've never heard of this issue, and it just sounds like the sort of thing that sounds like a problem to techies, but isn't really a problem in practice.

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#58

Post by candiodari »

RexetBlell wrote: post #44
candiodari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget to tell what happened after that. Someone someone found contract terms (relating to starting a new sub-entity to the DAO) that favored them, started transferring the eth to themselves using this method (they "probably" gained the ability to dictate how the eth would be spent after an initial period, which plenty of people are desperate to point out isn't the same as owning it). And then ... Humans interven…

Just for the record, no transactions were rolled back. A special one time transaction was generated that moved all the ether from the Dao contact to a withdrawal contract, from which all investors could get their ether back. Majority of the users upgraded their clients to be on the chain with this special transaction. The rest of the people (~15%) remained on the original chain without the special transaction, that c…

The DAO was unwound, including everything it had done. If that's your idea of "no transactions rolled back", I submit that that's exactly the sort of distinction without a difference I was talking about.

This would be akin to solving a bank heist by simply rolling back all transactions involving that bank, including 2nd and 3rd degree transactions to before the heist.

So if some person sold a house to a buyer with a mortgage from the bank close enough to the bank heist, and then went out and bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with the buyer, the bartender would wake up the next day to find the payment for the bottle missing, and the house would be unsold, just so the investors in the bank would be guaranteed the money they invested to be loaned out.

I mean I understand. This simple and automatically enforced contracts is every loaner and landlord's wet dream. They get that the rules are stacked against the tenants. They can rob tenants blind using this game. They don't realize that they cannot play this game against the banks, the millionaires and/or billionaires of our little planet, and they don't know any other game to make money.

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#59

Post by candiodari »

skewart wrote: post #48
candiodari wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do see the usefulness of that approach, but I also see an amount of risk. A disaster waiting to happen. Let's say, for instance childpornhere.eth goes live, someone pays and receives mail with pictures of a kidnapped child. Havethisguykilled.eth. Sponsorkillingblacks.eth. tipISISnottoattackyourkids.eth. And so on and so forth. The bitcoin "hostage" situations that we see now. Famously the encryption viruses, but th…

In many (most) parts of the world the legal system for enforcing contracts isn't all that reliable and trustworthy. An Etheruem-based contract is a big improvement over a traditional contract enforceable only by a slow, corrupt court. Pretty much all technology increases the surface area for fraud. However, the benefits usually outweigh that increase. Blockchains are no different. But the benefit is likely to accrue…

Okay ... let me put it this way. 4 years back I transferred a number of bitcoin, in the low 3 digits, to tradehill, in order to explore this whole finance thing and trading.

We all know how tradehill, and mt. Gox, and ... ended, so can you explain to me how this works better without the option to go to a court ?

Re: Ask HN: What are new applications that can be built on blockchains?

#60

Post by mschuster91 »

sanderjd wrote: post #57
ashnyc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not only about being impossible being tampered with. It is about trusting the system. Since we trust the blockchain with 100 + billion dollars. trusting it for a time sheet system should not be that hard

Sure, but I think you're missing my point. Is this a problem that really needs a solution or is it a solution in search of a problem? Are time tracking systems not trustworthy enough already? Perhaps I'm just ignorant, but I've never heard of this issue, and it just sounds like the sort of thing that sounds like a problem to techies, but isn't really a problem in practice.

Timesheet cheatery is an extreme problem - often enough timesheets are... adjusted afterwards to hide violations of labor law or simply to dock pay.
Post reply on HN