There are none. Git (with post-commit hooks) is always a superior solution.
Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
21–30 of 291 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
why does it need a distributed blockchain though? Why not just put it in a database?
Because many companies with many conflicting interests need to be able to trust each other. If we put this data in a database, our enterprise customer can tweak the system to their advantage if they make a deal with us. The global, open database provided by a blockchain solves this problem, and also allows anybody to read the state without relying on our company to maintain the database or for uptime.
Is your organization unusually susceptible to that kind of corruption? It seems like blockchain or no, the clients have to trust that you'll provide the service you agreed to and not cash their checks and disappear etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#23I have only heard of one good use-case and I have been in fintech for the past 6 years.
Swift GPI allows banks to credit the receiving parties' account in 10 minutes rather than overnight.
It's an example where the existing party (swift) already had accumulated all the trust necessary and the consolidated ledgers were updated overnight.
Swift GPI allows a bank to track any inbound payments and recognize it to clients before it is formally received by the batch process.
In my mind it also sets the only way to successfully launch a blockchain solution... by the incumbents who already have the trust centralized and are interfacing with a very large amount of parties (8k banks in the swift network).
The best solutions in my opinion should come from governments as they often act as notaries often act as trust providers. Examples here are real-estate titles, assets and potential liens on those.
Hell, we should require the whole federal budget to be spend in crypto-dollars so citizens have full transparency of what happens with their taxes.
Governments that grasp cryptocurrency could remove so much transaction inefficiencies caused by the current registration processes and uncertainties around ownership.
Other potential solutions would be for multinationals their accounting. Their accounting of every subsidiary is in a different system and creating consolidations is usually done periodically (and expensively).
Allowing an open accounting architecture for multinationals could boost innovation and kill companies like SAP who really is the only player in town that can handle the complexities multinationals face.
A company like facebook or google could develop this and open-source it
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#24This hasn't really been done, but one possibility is credibly committing to a promise about future product behavior. Imagine a company with a negative reputation for whimsically changing product goals and functionality (cough, Google). Using a blockchain allows the company to commit to a certain set of rules for product logic, regardless of which PMs take over the product 2 years and 4 PSC cycles later.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#25Usually it's when you want decentralized validation of time-series data. E.g. The egg industry adopts a solution whereby the chicken are tracked on a blockchain so people know which chickens are kept outdoors and which are indoors. The eggs are then tracked and checked in at each quality gate and the consumer then gets a QR code for an app that tells them where the egg came from and where it was checked for tampering…
> the chicken are tracked on a blockchain so people know which chickens are kept outdoors and which are indoors. A blockchain does nothing to ensure that an indoor chicken isn't marked as outside. How an untruthful information is distributed or secured doesn't matter. All those blockchain logistics tracking ideas fail at the same point: where the blockchain meets the real, physical world.
Probably missing something big here, but that’s the problem I see with all crypto/blockchain/smart contract stuff. They’re supposed to remove the need for trust, but they don’t, they just shift the need along a bit. There always needs to be an element of trust somewhere or it all falls apart.
For blockchain logistics, you have to trust that the information entered is correct in the first place.
For smart contracts, if you don’t trust the legal system or the other party enough to use standard contract law, you still have to trust that they will abide by the contract (and if the legal system is in such poor shape that you don’t trust it, or the transaction is by nature illegal, then the other party has even less incentive to follow the rules).
It’s not possible to create a purely technological solution to what is essentially a people problem. Our entire civilisation is built on trust, our systems are built to reinforce trust and to provide consequences when it’s broken. Things go badly fast when trust fails and no amount of clever sums can change that.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#26Broadly speaking blockchain only solves a singular problem: Trust. If there is some work that needs to be done between parties and you don't trust the parties involved then you can use blockchain to do the work in a trust-less setting. This is why money has been the first and most prominent use case; people are less trusting with their own money. For a specific non-money potential use case of blockchain I would say i…
Not exactly what you are talking about but unstoppable domains .crypto are pretty neat how it’s implemented. I wonder could you do CA issues certs for such domains that live on chain at a specific address or is such a concept even needed if it’s on chain.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because many companies with many conflicting interests need to be able to trust each other. If we put this data in a database, our enterprise customer can tweak the system to their advantage if they make a deal with us. The global, open database provided by a blockchain solves this problem, and also allows anybody to read the state without relying on our company to maintain the database or for uptime.
So the customer set up an IT service with multiple servers to sync with yours so that both can sync to the ledger? How does that work in practice? Is someone also monitoring that nobody is doing a 50% attack? Are both parties present when something is inserted into the blockchain?
Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to ask.
In the aforementioned case, the pickup time in known, so all that matters is that the photos are timestamped before or at pickup time. We don't worry about 51% attacks because we use the Stellar blockchain, also used by Franklin Templeton investments and IBM and Keybase... The chance of a 51% attack going unnoticed is virtually zero.
The ledger is public, and anyone can view the history of the ledger using Stellar's API (a hosted version is available at https://horizon.stellar.org) or a blockchain explorer like https://stellar.expert.
The great thing is that the data is stored on a distributed series of nodes, so no syncing is needed.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#28A general use case is where there's a group of agencies or a group of business partners who may be all reasonably trustworthy but they are in separate trust domains. It can be generally useful for all those entities to have access to a single source of truth that can't be altered without the alteration being obvious.
You can do this by appointing someone as a trusted authority. But, in practice, this has overhead and no one is completely trustworthy at least absent a lot of overhead. You also often have to deal with reconciliation when there are a bunch of different data stores scattered around.
BTW, Hyperledger is the overall foundation of projects. Hyperledger Fabric is the most popular blockchain platform under the foundation. (There are also various libraries and so forth.)
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because many companies with many conflicting interests need to be able to trust each other. If we put this data in a database, our enterprise customer can tweak the system to their advantage if they make a deal with us. The global, open database provided by a blockchain solves this problem, and also allows anybody to read the state without relying on our company to maintain the database or for uptime.
Is your organization unusually susceptible to that kind of corruption? It seems like blockchain or no, the clients have to trust that you'll provide the service you agreed to and not cash their checks and disappear etc.
No.
But how are the many other people in the auto supply chain supposed to know that? With this solution, they don't have to trust our company, just the SHA256 hashing algorithm.
Math is easier to trust than a small startup.
Edit: To clarify, many of the people checking against the blockchain record are not our clients.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#30DNS! Namecoin (despite its cringe name) is pretty cool, and a marked improvement over DNS.