What is one good use case for ice cream scoops other than scooping ice cream? One might exist, but the real question is "who is the obsession of killing digital currencies coming from?"
Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
31–40 of 291 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#32The biggest use case I have found of blockchain tech is timestamping, especially in a case where the timestamping party cannot be trusted to act honestly because of conflicting interests. I'll give you an example, from one of my startup's enterprise customers. This company needs to ensure that their high-end auto inventory remains in the same state through transport — the mileage, the car body, etc. They've had issue…
A GitHub repository would provide the same level of guarantees right? Everyone else gets read access - the transporter gets write access. They can't rewrite history, or else it gets caught on a mirror that anyone else is maintaining.
Certificate Transparency gets the same guarantees as well, without using a blockchain.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#33One good use case I've found is file authentication. If a file is signed and it can be matched against a distributed ledger, it can help ensure the authenticity of the file. I can imagine uses for this everywhere from piracy prevention to checking authenticity of documents, records, etc. Imagine that all land records are in a distributed ledger. The land owner has a signed certificate that can be verified anytime for…
Either if that passkey is forgotten no one can own the land anymore, or there is a central authority (court) that can reallocate land, at which point there is no need for the decentralized trust of a blockchain.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#34The biggest use case I have found of blockchain tech is timestamping, especially in a case where the timestamping party cannot be trusted to act honestly because of conflicting interests. I'll give you an example, from one of my startup's enterprise customers. This company needs to ensure that their high-end auto inventory remains in the same state through transport — the mileage, the car body, etc. They've had issue…
A GitHub repository would provide the same level of guarantees right? Everyone else gets read access - the transporter gets write access. They can't rewrite history, or else it gets caught on a mirror that anyone else is maintaining. Certificate Transparency gets the same guarantees as well, without using a blockchain.
No... I'm not sure where people get the idea that Git provides what a blockchain does.
The biggest hiccup with this proposal is that whoever is provisioning the Git repository (most likely us) would also have the ability to change read/write permissions. This is not the case on a public blockchain. With the solution you describe, we would basically be running our own psuedo-private blockchain, with no advantages over a private blockchain like IBM Hyperledger.
But we use a public blockchain for a reason.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#35Usually 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.
I think this is referred to as "the oracle problem" in Blockchain
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#36The biggest use case I have found of blockchain tech is timestamping, especially in a case where the timestamping party cannot be trusted to act honestly because of conflicting interests. I'll give you an example, from one of my startup's enterprise customers. This company needs to ensure that their high-end auto inventory remains in the same state through transport — the mileage, the car body, etc. They've had issue…
A cool initiative that applies time-stamping on blockchain to fight fake news/increase accountability in online publishing is https://wordproof.com/.
I've been trying to analyze the robustness of their approach but I think their hashing algorithm (sha of json content blob) and the trustworthiness of the blockchain (they use EOS) are the two only components. Can someone who has more background in cryptography and blockchains perhaps share some thoughts about their approach?
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#37This 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.
This doesn't make sense. What are the repercussions if they change product direction? They can just ditch the blockchain along with the parts of the product they committed to.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#38Distributed non-repudiation; useful for inter-org or inter-political timestamping/handshaking and maybe even intention/confirmation registration.
In can do some of the things you'd use a notary for.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
why does it need a distributed blockchain though? Why not just put it in a database?
Because the person who owns the database has to be trusted, where here no one has to be
This is not true. You are always trusting someone. <-- that is a really really big period. In this case you are trusting the authors of the code which this process runs on. The machines that this code runs on. And last but not least the fact that no one has control over majority of the nodes. You are always trusting someone or something.
Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?
#40For what it’s worth, you might not get great answers here. HackerNews readers tend to have a relatively negative view on crypto, and many people involved in the space thus tend to avoid discussing crypto here to avoid accidentally getting into a flame war. If you’re interested, I might suggest reading Coindesk or visiting the Discord or Telegram of interesting projects.