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Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

news.ycombinator.com

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

#11

Post by thinkingemote »

>but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.

I don't think there are any, but what you will find is a lot of enthusiasm for the potential of it. Such hype also help sells various crypto currencies or raise funding for startups, but might not be the same thing.

It's hard to separate the enthusiasm for the pure technology and persuasive opportunism to make a quick buck. It has been around a decade now so the core tech should be less on the edge.

I would suggest that the lack of actual normal day to day stuff indicates something important.

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

#12

Post by AlexITC »

alexmingoia wrote: post #9
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.

In the case of identities/credentials, the blockchain is mostly used as the decentralized timestamp service, used to know the relative orders of events, like when a credential was issued, which key signed the credential, whether the key was revoked by that time, etc.

Any public key could be seen as a decentralized identity but you don't have a way to certify if the key was ever rotated, where you usually go to centralized servers, a hacker may compromise a centralized service to change certain information about the public keys but it's unlikely it will compromise Bitcoin, these decentralized identities I mention are on practical terms, mutable, which is where the decentralized timestamp shines.

On the auctions, a trust-less smart contract is what shines, as you can get the participants to bid there, and in case of disputes, everyone is able to audit the smart contract to make sure the outcome wasn't manipulated.

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