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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

#201

Post by ThomPete »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #198
ThomPete wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can describe it any way you want. It doesn't change the fact that "value" is not something which is easily defined which again the art scene is a good example but also stamps, coins, stickers, physical Pokemon cards and so on.

You don't build an economy on Pokemon cards!

You build an economy of all sorts of things including pokemon cards. The economy is already there. Not sure what you are trying to get at other than you don't believe in the blockchain which is fine, you don't have to.

Just don't claim that you are somehow making an arugment against it cause you aren't for reasons already outlined.

There is nothing new about the types of businesses which can be created on top of the blockchain other than that they can be digital. But as a value system they are as solid as physical items.

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

#202

Post by zacurry »

dreit1 wrote: post #14
Daishiman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which investments?

I'm into mainly into stuff that either pays or plans to pay dividends, NEO, WTC, ARK, ETH etc.

Off topic - I keep hearing that WTC (Walton) is a scam . How confident are u about it ?

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

#203

Post by eksemplar »

tom_mellior wrote: post #134
chipgap98 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is stored on a decentralized database (many nodes). I buy my house and am send the rights to that land on a blockchain. Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. The scale of the network should make it impossible for the database to be corrupted. The whole idea here is distributed trust

> Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override thi…

> And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is.

It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership.

This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it might as well have been done through blockchain and in 20 years I imagine that it will.

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

#204

Post by tom_mellior »

eksemplar wrote: post #203
tom_mellior wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only someone with the private keys to my address/account/whatever could send that house to someone else. And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. The authorities must be able to transfer your house to your heirs if you die. The authorities must be able to take away your deed in certain cases. The authorities must be able to correct entries in the database. They must be able to override thi…

> And that is exactly the opposite of what a land title database is. It's exactly what it is where I live. When you purchase property both parties log in with their state issued digital id to sign the transfer of ownership. This isn't done by blockchain in Denmark, which means the nationstate owns and operates the system with little openness. NOT a problem in one of the least corrupt countries in the World, but it mi…

> It's exactly what it is where I live.

No. Yes, you can do it online, great. And yes, no other private person can fraudulently do it in your name, also great. But it does not follow that it's impossible to do it without your key; it is possible, and it must be possible, for the authorities.

Should the database be public for reading? Yes, absolutely. But you don't need a blockchain for that.

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

#205

Post by tarikjn »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #160
tarikjn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I agree with all that and pointed it out in my first answer.

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

#206

Post by dreit1 »

zacurry wrote: post #202
dreit1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm into mainly into stuff that either pays or plans to pay dividends, NEO, WTC, ARK, ETH etc.

Off topic - I keep hearing that WTC (Walton) is a scam . How confident are u about it ?

It is 100% not a scam. You can watch some videos where a youtube visits the office and talks to the team here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhXncTVOzA

Whether or not it will be a successful project or not is up for debate.

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

#207

Post by Geee »

teamonkey wrote: post #183
etr-strike wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think blockchains provide many useful functions. However, providing a token with value is a necessary feature. I’m very excited about things like Rootstock which add smart contract functionality to the bitcoin blockchain.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of tokens is to provide an incentive for running the ledger client and processing transactions: mining for uptake and transaction fees to maintain scale long-term. You need as many people to run the client as possible. If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.

Distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) are based on security by game theory. It's financially rewarding to agree with each other, and financially very costly to disagree or attack it. You can't have game theory in the protocol without intrinsic rewards, as far as I know.

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

#208

Post by Geee »

pipio21 wrote: post #37

Personally I believe in blockchain, but not current blockchain. Like anything it will take multiple steps and failing several times before it works. The perfect example is the internet, it was so wrong at the start, so ugly, and so naive. But it was free and open. Everybody said "internet is the future", and that created the dotcom bubble when everybody agreed and wanted to profit from it. I had friends at the time t…

I think you haven't been following the scene very closely.

There's already multiple solutions to these problems. Take a look at RaiBlocks (raiblocks.net) for example, which has instantaneous zero-fee transactions with very high throughput (hardware limited) without losing decentralization or other security properties (not proven atm). RaiBlocks uses delegated proof-of-stake with a block-lattice architecture.

Another example would be Cardano, which has the first provably secure proof-of-stake protocol with same security guarantees as Bitcoin, and is also secure in a scalable setting with blockchain sharding (as is planned in Ethereum too). Proof-of-stake doesn't require energy to mine blocks and can be scalable but is very hard to secure.

There's multiple other solutions as well, such as IOTA, Byteball, Steem, BitShares and others which might be more centralized and less secure to achieve scalability. Then there is Bitcoin Lightning Network almost ready, and also MimbleWimble coming out soon (http://grin-tech.org/). Lots of things are certainly happening faster than you can anticipate.

Additionally, there's projects like Enigma and Aion, which add scalability, privacy and interoperability on top of existing blockchains. This territory starts to get a bit complex for me.

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

#209

Post by rtkwe »

ThomPete wrote: post #88
svantana wrote: post #84

There is one obvious use case where it's already in use: illegal trade. The article mentions it as an aside but it's definitely not small business; if half the world's drug, weapon and human trafficking trade were to happen in bitcoin, it would justify the current exchange rate and then some. Of course, that would force governments to outlaw the exchange services, which would make bitcoin way less attractive to crimi…

So basically like cash?

Cash at least requires a pretty large effort to securely and secretively move large amounts.

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

#210

Post by WhitneyLand »

Barrin92 wrote: post #196
WhitneyLand wrote: post #139

There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years. Even the Internet was criticized by some after 10 years for failing to live up to “change everything” hype, and it’s true it hadn’t really close to doing so at the time. Some companies like Blockbuster Video weren’t a bit concerned for quite a while. To me the cu…

> There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years. While that might be true, that doesn't mean that a lack of success actually indicates success. That'd be a useless tautology. More importantly, earlier innovations that took their time usually at least had a clear proposition of value. When electricity was intr…

Of course I agree it doesn’t indicate success, I assume you understand I was only making the weaker claim, that lack of success at 10 years doesn’t set any ceiling on ultimate success.

Just saying it’s not unprecedented as other concepts have, however unlikely, eventually found success, and there are maybe a few parallels with basic research. Some computer science has come out of all of this already, some of which might be pieces to a puzzle we can’t entirely see yet.

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