NISTIR 8202
Blockchain Technology Overview
You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
111–120 of 415 posts
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, no. Global, trustless coordination is a hard problem and is not necessarily illegal. Second, legality is subjective around the world. It is currently illegal in the US to gamble online, for some reason, even though casinos and lotteries are a thing. It is illegal in many countries to transfer a certain amount of money out of the country, for some reason. Certain sexualities are illegal in quite a few co…
I'm not saying: you don't need the blockchain because you shouldn't be doing bad things. I'm saying: you need the blockchain if and only if you are doing things that are illegal in your country. It's a decision criteria for when you need the blockchain. I'm making no moral judgement. And there are very good reasons to want to do things that your government deems illegal (for example, donating to a political organizat…
And I'm saying illegality is not the only usecase, though it is definitely a valuable and useful one.
In case it wasn't clear, the usecases i mentioned above (gambling, getting around capital controls) exist and are live in crypto right now.
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#113I've spent a lot of time doing consulting around blockchains for fortune 500 companies. Most technology choices are not a need. You can use MongoDB or MySQL in most cases. There are places where MongoDB has benefits, just as there are cases where a permissioned, immutable record has benefits. It's not a silver bullet, but it can add trust. This article seems to miss that creating immutable records of intermediary att…
Immutable data structure + GDPR right to correct or remove information = ?
(You can sort of get away with it if it's b2b only or a legal requirement to audit, but that limits the use cases further)
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#114Anyone 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.
Blockchain is useful in a narrow set of cases: when you need a distributed network with no trusted central party, and at the same time you need to prevent double-spending. Usually when you have something valuable and want to prevent double-spending, there is a central authority like a bank or a physical item like cash which will authoritatively answer who holds what. And usually for distributed systems like bittorrent, lying on the network has relatively little risk to other people.
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, no. Global, trustless coordination is a hard problem and is not necessarily illegal. Second, legality is subjective around the world. It is currently illegal in the US to gamble online, for some reason, even though casinos and lotteries are a thing. It is illegal in many countries to transfer a certain amount of money out of the country, for some reason. Certain sexualities are illegal in quite a few co…
The concept at question isn't really illegality as much as alegality (which is not a word that exists). Which is to say, the use case where no legal jurisdiction exists or is ineffectual. I suppose anarchy would be the proper term.
Or a jurisdiction which has rules that you can't or choose not to comply with
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can repeat it all the times you want, but it it is still a shortsighted view. “A database and a contract”... but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. I agree 100% with the article in that blockchain is being ‘applied’ to a whole bunch of places that don’t need it. That doesn’t mean that it can’t work wel…
> but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? > Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. What problems? I mean your arguing like something like public transportation is an impossibility without blockchain backing because: "Who owns the stations, who enforces the schedules and who owns the actual busses?" Those are not problems. They are all just quest…
But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
> To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain You say that, and then look at the number of companies selling blockchain based services promising exactly that, and enterprises paying for projects... It's understandable why as well. Pure "digital world" businesses that blockchain can deliver like provably actua…
No doubt that there are a lot of people selling those services, but I think they are capitalizing off the fact that a lot of people don't know/spend the time to understand where blockchain actually improves things - and it's no fault of those people.
From my understanding, blockchain is essentially "cheap trust" . You can pay the system a fee to trust math rather than a human. Once I learned that, I realized there are very few scenarios where cheap trust is needed.
So perhaps I should adjust my first statement with "people who understand blockchain" - although even that's not necessarily fair as it assumes that I "understand" it.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that I think it's unfair to look at the number of scammers/people selling "blockchain" services and make an assumption on the industry as a whole. Most of the developers in the space that I know completely write off those people and don't even consider them in the industry.
On whether money can be completely represented without recourse to the outside world -> Agreed, I should again amend my statement to say "value". There is no doubt that 1 Bitcoin represents a certain amount of "value" right now and that value has so far proven to be un-censorable. Whether it will be successful money is a different question.
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but who owns the database? And who enforces the contract? And who owns the actual data? > Blockchain provides satisfactory answers to all those problems. What problems? I mean your arguing like something like public transportation is an impossibility without blockchain backing because: "Who owns the stations, who enforces the schedules and who owns the actual busses?" Those are not problems. They are all just quest…
But what if two banks are transferring money between themselves? Which bank owns the database? Why should the other bank trust that database?
Trusted third party owned by the banks, or providing audited services to the banks. Banks trust the third party because contracts are enforced by law as well as federal and industry regulations.
Ain't no judge gonna throw up is hands and go "well, the smart contract says so, my hands are tied!". Blockchain doesn't solve anything where there is a functioning legal framework.
You can't use technology to solve a problem that isn't a technology problem.
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I think most people who have given blockchain an honest 30 minutes of brainstorming aren't arguing for real world assets connected to a chain. I would argue that there is potentially a use case when it comes to things that can be completely represented digitally e.g. money.
I frequently see commercials that must have cost millions of dollars to create and place that make the opposite argument. If what you're saying is true, the whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it. The more likely scenario, it seems to me, is that lots of these people actually believe in good faith that this is actually useful technology. If you assume that's the case, it makes s…
> The whole industry is just selling snake-oil, and (I think?) people are buying it.
No, not people in the sense of end user customers. The industry is selling snake oil and some investors have bought into it and subsequently promote it.
10 years down the road and they're still trying to find a mainstream use case, but they won't find it because in the end using a blockchain makes everything harder if you are a legal enterprise.
Re: You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you mean a system could exist to lower costs for some parties?
One needs no blockchain to make a guarantee that a cancellation of the payment can’t be performed.
Are you referring to cash transactions or something else? I’m curious what you may have in mind for remote payments, especially internationally