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Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

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Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#151

Post by tree_of_item »

ezoe wrote: post #110
Animats wrote: post #24

Some big banks are gearing up to use a blockchain to track interbank settlements.[1] But this isn't a coin, nor is there mining. It's simply a shared ledger that can't be altered without cooperation between a majority of the parties. All alterations are clearly visible to all parties, which is good for auditing. Only big banks who have signed up for this have active nodes, and they are not anonymous. This is an alter…

Since only the trustworthy bodies can join the party, they can do the job more efficiently by not using any of the trendy blockchain which may technically prevent the fraud but otherwise inefficient. And since there are only banks can join the network, I doubt it can technically prevent the fraud among banks because unlike public cryptocurrencies, it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computation…

I think you misunderstand how private blockchains work:

> "they can do the job more efficiently"

They ARE doing the job more efficiently by not using proof of work, and instead most likely going with a quorum approach based on public keys.

> it does not give incentives to the banks to spend a lot of computational power to the network

Right, because it doesn't use proof of work, it uses a quorum vote. The banks would still need to form a cartel in order to get a (super)majority of the vote.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#152

Post by adventured »

root_axis wrote: post #34
kemonocode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you expect someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency, without access to international banking? And no, we-will-suspend-your-account-if-you-look-at-us-funny PayPal is not an option. Cash in foreign currencies is extremely risky.

The people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices and sometimes even electricity. Additionally, trading cryptocurrency for spendable money is time consuming and expensive. The idea that cryptocurrency is a viable option for the participants of third-world economies is absurd. I'm not saying that nobody in…

> people who are so poor that they don't have reliable access to banking services very often are lacking reliable access to internet connected computing devices

That's absolutely true when you get to the bottom ~3-4 billion people in the world. However it also used to be true about the ~2 billion people above them as well. Mobile banking - smart phones - have legitimately reshaped that for people in nations that have for example GDP per capita levels of around $3,000 to $8,000. It wasn't very long ago that the context for those people wasn't too dissimilar to that of what third world people are still dealing with today. Go back before ~2009 in small to mid size towns in Romania, Vietnam or Nigeria; today these people widely have access to easy, relatively secure banking via their phones. In the near future their mobile banking systems will provide easy access to something like Bitcoin as well, and obviously some of them already are.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#153

Post by gersh »

It seems useful as way to keep records in poor or very corrupt countries without stable institutions. For example, if you don't have a very stable government, it seems like it is a good solution for keeping property records or storing voting records. It also seems like an alternative for creating universal financial records without requiring the same level of regulation. Fundamentally, the technology is disrupting the way government functions. However, if we live in countries with stable, existing governmental institutions it may be hard to fully understand the disruptive potential.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#154

Post by tree_of_item »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #97
ThomPete wrote: post #29

People always overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. Go to any country perhaps with the exception of Estonia and you will see that digitalization was supposed to change governments for the better. Instead they mostly have created very sporadic successes but a lot of failed implementation sometimes even making it worse. Yet there is no doubt that in the long run things are changing for the better…

>Digital Pokemon cards, 2nd hand ebooks market, 2nd hand digital assets market Are you kidding ? So the big use of the blockchain is to take things that have zero marginal cost of production, and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?

> and enforce a completely artificial cost of production, to make non-scarce goods scarce?

Yes, that is the entire point of this blockchain stuff, isn't it? You get ownership of large natural numbers (coins) that would be trivial to copy otherwise.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#155

Post by __Duncan__ »

DenisM wrote: post #118

Here's a vague idea... How about a reputation ledger? My reputation will accumulate over time, and people will trust me, simplifying some transactions. For example I could rent a short-term stay at a lower rate because I am such a nice fellow and will never mess anything up. Because my reputation has direct monetary value I would be hesitant to mess it up by being a dick, unless for a very big gain. The counter-parti…

Sounds like a black mirror episode...

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#156

Post by adventured »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #21
kemonocode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you expect someone in a third-world country to keep money away from a hyperinflating currency, without access to international banking? And no, we-will-suspend-your-account-if-you-look-at-us-funny PayPal is not an option. Cash in foreign currencies is extremely risky.

jewelry is a good option, as long as you can tell real jewelry from fake: valuable, somewhat liquid, holds value reasonably well, easy to hide, portable

You get massacred on jewelry anytime you need to actually sell it. If you paid $2,000-$3,000 for that diamond ring, you'll get $150-$200 for it from a buyer in a crunch. Jewelry being resold does anything but hold its value, it's a truly epic beating you'll take to the downside. 75-90% of the value of retail jewelry is bullshit, you're almost never paying the bulk of the retail price for the actual gold / silver / diamond, you're paying the mark-up from a store (as a validated trinket, to verify by reputation sharing that it's hopefully the real deal). Take a nice engagement ring into a pawn shop to sell it, you'll get $0.10-$0.15 on the dollar if you're lucky, and that's a good scenario where you're not under pressure to move it to an even shadier buyer.

The only way to go with the concept you're suggesting, is to buy actual gold (coins or similar). With something like gold coins, you'll still suffer a discount on a need-to-sell, but it won't be nearly so bad. Do not think under any circumstances that jewelry holds its value in a resale, it holds a small fraction of its value (unless we're talking a million dollar extraordinary specimen (equivalent to art in the jewelry world), but that's a super rare context, and you'll still sell it at a hefty discount in a crunch).

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#157

Post by Vendan »

ThomPete wrote: post #112
Vendan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a downside of physical, not an advantage.

It's both an upside and a downside depending on perspective. From a value perspective, it's an upside just ask the art-scene.

That's not an upside. That's a downside that got parlayed into an upside.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#159

Post by prodtorok »

DenisM wrote: post #118

Here's a vague idea... How about a reputation ledger? My reputation will accumulate over time, and people will trust me, simplifying some transactions. For example I could rent a short-term stay at a lower rate because I am such a nice fellow and will never mess anything up. Because my reputation has direct monetary value I would be hesitant to mess it up by being a dick, unless for a very big gain. The counter-parti…

sounds like a dystopia.

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

#160

Post by M2Ys4U »

tarikjn wrote: post #141
tehlike wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 1: Do you need blockchain at all? Or do you need public/private key signing?

Where would you register all the votes and verify the counts? The blockchain would help secure that database from an actor targeting votes of people not likely to verify their votes.

Being able to (trivially) verify votes sounds like a recipe for buying votes and/or intimidating voters to me.

Inefficiency in voting technology is a feature, not a bug. Pencil on paper is the best system we have for precisely this reason.

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