You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work • Hacker News Board

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#21

Post by GauntletWizard » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

danielmg wrote: post #13

melkiaur wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one I like: the farmer has a veal and introduces its date of birth on the blockchain. The veterinary that comes to check it posts a validation mark on the blockchain. If you trust the veterinary, you should trust the birthdate. The veal grows up to become a cow, and is sent for slaughter. The farmer stores an event on the blockchain and sends it to be cut into meat. The slaughterhouse stores an event (with th…

That's already a solved problem in the UK after the BSE crisis. From what I was told (by a friend who worked on it), it uses certificates to provide trust and verification. Uses a central database hosted by DEFRA. No blockchain needed. https://secure.services.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/ctso/ Everything you describe can be solved, in a better and more efficient way, by non-blockchain technologies.

Part of this problem is that signed merkle trees are the solution to lots of problems, and block chain advocates say "Those are blockchains!" and then try to introduce the undesirable feature (forward looking hashes that require proofs), while crypto nuts have already been screaming about merkle trees forever.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#22

Post by h1d » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #2

Anyone have any good counter arguments to articles like this? That there is a use case that makes sense? I’ve been trying to find one and can’t, but it hasn’t stopped major corporations like IBM, who I would expect to jump on the hype train, but even AWS is embracing it to a degree with their latest announcements.

I think they always fail because they try to use it inside a known party where there's always a better centralized solution because they already have some trust built for it to work.

Cross parties or even industries may be a better target.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#23

Post by dmitriid » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

czr wrote: post #9

I'm reminded of the helpful "How to decide if blockchain is right for your project" flowchart ( https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPFvZuqU8AAeU0C?format=jpg ) from @MalwareTechBlog.

Also these two articles:

- Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain, https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

- and the followup, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#24

Post by ajkjk » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #2

Anyone have any good counter arguments to articles like this? That there is a use case that makes sense? I’ve been trying to find one and can’t, but it hasn’t stopped major corporations like IBM, who I would expect to jump on the hype train, but even AWS is embracing it to a degree with their latest announcements.

For blockchain to be valuable there needs to be an otherwise unsolvable coordination problem.

One way the problem can be unsolvable is not to be literally unsolvable but philosophically unsolvable, which is why bitcoin itself is probably a legitimately good application of the idea. The anarchic ideal is to not trust anyone in particular with controlling money, and any actor who says "no trust me, I'll do it right" is probably less trustworthy for having said that, so it seems unsolvable. So a 'self-organizing' coordination is somewhat necessary, essentially for the same reasons we like democracies more than autocracies.

(uh but proof of work is evil, so, just cause it's a good usecase doesn't mean it should exist.)

Besides that, most of the 'coordination problems' that people purport to want blockchains for seem to be simple cases of glaciation and incompetence. If you can't reconcile accounts across banks / supply chains / etc efficiently, your industry just sucks technologically and needs to get it together, and it'll still suck when you have a blockchain making your IT more expensive, but at least then you don't have to reach consensus on protocols so good for you I guess?

I would love to hear of other useful cases of otherwise-unsolvable coordination problems, but I really can't remember any right now.

On the other hand, ETH-like cases are completely legitimate uses of blockchain-like things ('running code in the ether' is not something you can do any other way, basically by definition, and is also just _cool_), but they are rather different and not directly comparable.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#25

Post by danielmg » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

melkiaur wrote: post #19

danielmg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already a solved problem in the UK after the BSE crisis. From what I was told (by a friend who worked on it), it uses certificates to provide trust and verification. Uses a central database hosted by DEFRA. No blockchain needed. https://secure.services.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/ctso/ Everything you describe can be solved, in a better and more efficient way, by non-blockchain technologies.

It could be solved, but is it really ? Shall I remind you of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal#UK_Inv... The blockchain doesn't offer a technological solution that couldn't be done with a centralized authority (I particularly like the way passports rfid reading involves certificates signed by each country). But it offers means to achieve that even if nobody safe enough wants to host the bloo…

That wasn't about the provenance of the meat but the production of the end products - e.g. pies etc. They were just dumping in bad meat in place of good.

Blockchain isn't going to solve that - you could put the ingredients in the on it and have them signed etc but at the end of the day humans are mixing the food.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#26

Post by ajkjk » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

h1d wrote: post #17

ajkjk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those seem to require a blockchain at all; a trusted authority database would accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

The point is you don't need a central authority. And I'm sure running a central authority costs some too which could also gain power that no one in the industry can resist.

Yes, that's the point: pay lots of money and make your system incredibly complicated, in exchange for not having a central authority when you literally already have one you could just use, for a worse and less-maintainable version of the same technical result.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#27

Post by dmitriid » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

melkiaur wrote: post #19

danielmg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's already a solved problem in the UK after the BSE crisis. From what I was told (by a friend who worked on it), it uses certificates to provide trust and verification. Uses a central database hosted by DEFRA. No blockchain needed. https://secure.services.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/ctso/ Everything you describe can be solved, in a better and more efficient way, by non-blockchain technologies.

It could be solved, but is it really ? Shall I remind you of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal#UK_Inv... The blockchain doesn't offer a technological solution that couldn't be done with a centralized authority (I particularly like the way passports rfid reading involves certificates signed by each country). But it offers means to achieve that even if nobody safe enough wants to host the bloo…

Someone marks horse meat as cow meat on blockchain. How exactly blockchain solves that?

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#28

Post by MusaTheRedGuard » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

Most people who are even a little bit serious about working/investing in crypto, are well aware of this and have been saying this for the past few years.

Inb4 "you're not investing, you're speculating/gambling". I'm aware.

Inb4 "blockchain is a slower database". Again, I'm aware.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#29

Post by schoen » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

berbec wrote: post #11

9. Currency.

The article has a non-numbered use case for "Money" (and one for "Smart contracts") in which the author claims that blockchains are useful for these purposes. So the article is sort of "lite" blockchain skepticism: it focuses on the interfaces between blockchain-stored data and the real world, such as the oracle problem (how do we know that data that people store on a chain is accurate and that they haven't lied about it?), as well as the enforcement of blockchain-stored claims to physical assets.

Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work

#30

Post by richardhod » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

danielmg wrote: post #13

melkiaur wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one I like: the farmer has a veal and introduces its date of birth on the blockchain. The veterinary that comes to check it posts a validation mark on the blockchain. If you trust the veterinary, you should trust the birthdate. The veal grows up to become a cow, and is sent for slaughter. The farmer stores an event on the blockchain and sends it to be cut into meat. The slaughterhouse stores an event (with th…

That's already a solved problem in the UK after the BSE crisis. From what I was told (by a friend who worked on it), it uses certificates to provide trust and verification. Uses a central database hosted by DEFRA. No blockchain needed. https://secure.services.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/ctso/ Everything you describe can be solved, in a better and more efficient way, by non-blockchain technologies.

Agreed. Yet there is a case: I think the use case is for those who would rather do without centralised government and rather have a libertarian polity.