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Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

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Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#1

Post by snug »

I've been getting further and further into researching blockchains, and how the entire ecosystem works, and works together as an ecosystem. However it all just seems to be about trading cryptocurrencies either from fiat or other cryptocurrencies, and there are some small things out there like gambling and basic games, but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.

Getting away from the building blocks, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, smartcontracts etc. What are things like Chainlink, Cosmos, etc. really enabling us to do today? I found Orchid on coinbase, but there seems to have been little movement past its initial hype. It would be great to have a blockchain that can do anon VPN service, but doesn't seem there today.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#3

Post by snug »

giantg2 wrote: post #2

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

> For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses.

Yeah, IM looking for other examples, this has been kinda going on from the very beginning.

> I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for, but where are the real world examples?

I brought up Orchid, which seems interesting, any maybe promising at first, but the hype has died down. It's also not user friendly, as in I need both ETH for the smartcontract to work and OXT (Orchid Cryptocurrency) for the bandwidth I want to use.

I do think that blockchains can be useful, and will be useful, but it still seems like it's a solution looking for a problem, and maybe it's creating more problems first (i.e. need for smartcontracts, oracles, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#4

Post by davidajackson »

snug wrote: post #3
giantg2 wrote: post #2

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

> For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. Yeah, IM looking for other examples, this has been kinda going on from the very beginning. > I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for, but where are the real world examples? I brought up Orchid, which seems intere…

A lot of it is the due to high expenses at this stage (SISP debate aside), see https://ethgasstation.info/ for example. Gas price is so high that adding any complex logic on chain is often really costly--there are few real world applications that merit this, and certainly for micro txs it's not ready. That will probably change but I think it will take 5-10 years before tech improvements + adoption start to really move the needle.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#5

Post by giantg2 »

snug wrote: post #3
giantg2 wrote: post #2

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

> For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. Yeah, IM looking for other examples, this has been kinda going on from the very beginning. > I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for, but where are the real world examples? I brought up Orchid, which seems intere…

I can't find the block chain for government transparency, but maybe you can search on HN better than me. Here's something similar.

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/operations/articles/bl...

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#6

Post by alexmingoia »

giantg2 wrote: post #2

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

Signed records/messages don’t require a blockchain.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#7

Post by AlexITC »

About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation, there you will find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication.

Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase how everything works: https://atalaprism.io/

Another use case where I know someone working on it relates to auctions for cars being sold by insurance companies, the problem is that external people is bribing employees from the insurance companies to win the auctions, the goal is to remove this possibility by using smart contracts.

On the previous case, it's a common problem on public auctions conducted by the government and I would love if they use a system where auctions could be audited by anyone, so that participants trust that no one is cheating.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#8

Post by alexmingoia »

The purpose of Bitcoin is to have a fixed-supply digital asset that can be used as money, and which has no central authority to inflate the supply or censor transactions.

Bitcoin is not a building block to a blockchain. The purpose of a blockchain data-structure is to ensure the monotonicity/order of transactions in a distributed decentralized context such as the bitcoin protocol. A blockchain is just a list of transactions where each one references the previous one.

Orchid is a VPN network where participants are paid to route traffic with an Ethereum token. I don’t see any advantage to this over just paying a VPN provider directly. It does make VPN chaining easier, but you can still do VPN chaining without Orchid.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#9

Post by alexmingoia »

AlexITC wrote: post #7

About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation , there you will find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication. Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase how everything works: https://atalaprism.io/ Another us…

What about those cases uses a blockchain?

Any public/private key pair is a decentralized identity.

Re: Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

#10

Post by giantg2 »

alexmingoia wrote: post #6
giantg2 wrote: post #2

Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

Signed records/messages don’t require a blockchain.

True. The benefit of blockchain would be the transparent and immutable record. The blockchain becomes an official check sum for the continuum of documents. This ensures no documents have been added or removed in addition to validating authenticity no changes (signed documents only cover these second two).
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