41–47 of 47 posts
I don't remember who first said it but blockchain has exactly one killer feature, Bitcoin. If you try to adapt it anywhere else you're probably abusing the tech.
I would argue that Ethereum smart contracts are much more useful than bitcoin itself. PoW, on the other hand, is a complete waste of resources.
This is Case #1 in "You Do Not Need Blockchain: Eight Popular Use Cases And Why They Do Not Work": https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p... The article does a good job of explaining why blockchain doesn't add anything meaningful for this use (and other ones).
The article talks about how blockchain is good at handling money transactions but in the same breath says that logic doesn't apply to supply chain management? Their analogy was extremely weak. Secondly, smart contracts? Does the author not know smart contracts are applied to supply chain as well?
I honestly cannot think of another more overhyped and useless technology right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw another very interesting use that I don't fully understand from a technical perspective, but it basically promised to accurately report position-at-time, via a system of transponders. The use case is, I can tell when Fedex or the local pizza place is lying to me about my delivery being 30 minutes away, or half a mile down the street, or whether the delivery driver actually attempted to physically deliver my pac…
Well, that is already working pretty well. E.g. large carriers are using that in their operations, one of the distinctions between those and small time operators. One of the biggest benefits of this is the electronic proof of delivery. Just how Blockchain would help with I didn't get yet.
Not sure how it worked, though. :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing the IoT component. The devices themselves do the data "entry" on the blockchain so the whole system is automated, distributed and tamper proof (assuming you don't hack the devices, of course).
If you have a tamper-proof, automated, and distributed, 100% trusted devices providing statistics for your supply chain, why do you even need blockchain? I dunno, this seems like the one-time pad thingy. If you had a mechanism to transfer a 10GB one-time pad to your friend in a secure manner... why not transfer your 10GB of "protected" data in that secure manner instead? Just because a technical solution "technically…
That all said, I still don't know what problem blockchain solves. Other than crypto-currency.
I don't remember who first said it but blockchain has exactly one killer feature, Bitcoin. If you try to adapt it anywhere else you're probably abusing the tech.
Read up on Namecoin and see if you still agree with that statement. Blockchain for DNS is a pretty brilliant solution, IMO.
This is a great article outlining several cases where blockchains are being applied to solve supply chain issues ineffectively.
Yaron's assessment finds that
Key repudiation resistance is the only real compelling case where a blockchain is the right tool for the supply chain. This is not to say that there aren't valuable uses for blockchains within the context of more hyrid solutions.
"The block chain does some amazing things but accomplishing those goals comes at a very real cost. Byzantine attacks are a pain and require lots of resources to deal with. So if we don’t need to survive them then we don’t need the block chain. This article isn’t about saying the block chain is bad. It is about saying that we should use the right tool for the right problem. If your block chain application is based on off chain storage then there is a non-trivial probability that you may not actually need the block chain. It’s worth at least thinking about".