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Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

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Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#51

Post by lucb1e »

dgrin91 wrote: post #19

Broadly 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…

> If you decentralize the certification process you can have a trust-less system.

Okay so with a bit of hand-wavey stuff I'm sure we can make a parallel where you also solve world hunger with blockchain and trustless systems where there are no centralized parties that can do bad things. But realistically, how would this work? Whose key will end up signing the TLS certificate for my website? You're not really proposing anything more concrete than "let's move CAs to a blockchain".

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#52

Post by sebmellen »

root_axis wrote: post #50
sebmellen wrote: post #7

The 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…

What does the blockchain add to the equation beyond what the photo already does?

The timestamp of the photo. This way we know that the photos were taken before transport, and the state of the car when it's dropped off should match the state of the car at pickup.

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#53

Post by lucb1e »

omginternets wrote: post #30

DNS! Namecoin (despite its cringe name) is pretty cool, and a marked improvement over DNS.

Why do you think it hasn't caught on?

Not sure how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound suggestive. I don't mean it suggestively at all, I'm just curious why I heard of it at its inception but then never heard of anyone actually using it. You say it's a marked improvement so I would expect people to jump on it and stop paying the random companies running our TLDs?

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#54

Post by cynusx »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #41
cynusx wrote: post #23

I 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…

A centralized messaging platform using blockchain? You may be kidding. SWIFT has been playing with blockchain for years, always backing off. They had a partnership with Ripple once, some hackatons, a lab dedicated to blockchain. Former CEO even bragged about making bitcoin transactions himself. There was one corner use case around GPI and R3 Corda announced in 2019, but I doubt it ever was used in production.

Hmm, my impression was that it was blockchain based.

Well, I guess that brings the useful applications I know of to 0

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#55

Post by sebmellen »

handmodel wrote: post #43
xchaotic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why does it need a distributed blockchain though? Why not just put it in a database?

Call me cynical but I'm still confused by this. If the issue is that people are taking cars for joyrides why not just have the car post a route file to a database or to its own computers of all the trips. Are auto suppliers really taking joyrides AND hacking into the computers? If you are capable enough to do that wouldn't it also stand to reason you'd be capable enough to disable any tracking units?

That sounds ridiculously impractical, and far more technologically complex and time-consuming than the solution we've built. You're free to compete with us though — I'd be interested to see how you manage the route files, how you make sure that the database is neutrally controlled, how you use the car computer to determine whether or not there's a dent in the car body...

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#56

Post by pintxo »

sebmellen wrote: post #52
root_axis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the blockchain add to the equation beyond what the photo already does?

The timestamp of the photo. This way we know that the photos were taken before transport, and the state of the car when it's dropped off should match the state of the car at pickup.

Wouldn't sending a copy of the photo to the owner prior to transportation be sufficient? Actually, why doesn't the owner take a picture himself? After all I could easily manipulate the picture before timestamping.

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#57

Post by lucb1e »

zubairq wrote: post #3

Timestamping documents via their hash

I know there exist uses for timestamping, but I don't know how often this actually comes up in practice. Have you ever gone to a notary to timestamp something before Bitcoin came along?

The options are posting it to something like Twitter, including a newspaper headline in your cryptographic signature if you want to prove an after date rather than a before date, or indeed a notary. While I agree blockchain is a more elegant solution, it's the only solution I see in this thread so far where blockchain has an extra advantage, and I'm curious whether we need to have an extra country on this planet in terms of power consumption just to avoid going to a notary on occasion.

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#58

Post by aerojoe23 »

Canada wrote: post #48

The use case is money. That's it. All valid use cases involve a transfer of stored value. (eg. money, securities, collectable stuff) For everything else there's a much cheaper option, even for time stamping. Anything involving "proving" something, meaning making some assertion at some time is not a good case. For those look at certificate transparency for a better example of how to handle that. When people say "stora…

Once it is digital isn't the money use-case really about proving the transfer of wealth?

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#59

Post by root_axis »

sebmellen wrote: post #52
root_axis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the blockchain add to the equation beyond what the photo already does?

The timestamp of the photo. This way we know that the photos were taken before transport, and the state of the car when it's dropped off should match the state of the car at pickup.

Nothing proves that the timestamp accurately reflects when the photo was taken or that the photo itself is even accurate. If I wanted to joy-ride one of these cars I'd simply do so before taking the photo. The odometer display can also be trivially modified for the sake of a photo (i.e. roll back the odo for a photo and then revert to accurate numbers after the photo)

Re: Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

#60

Post by throw0101a »

NISTIR 8202 in Figure 6 (p.42) has a nice yes/no flowchart to determine if blockchain or something else is more appropriate (PDF):

* https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf

* https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8202

The DHS originally created it, but I can't find a definitive DHS source. Also here, at bottom:

* https://www.fedscoop.com/blockchain-for-government-technolog...

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