81–90 of 291 posts
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…
Distributed 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.
Or, just use an entirely conventional database, operated by the notary.
One 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.
Distributed 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.
In can do some of the things you'd use a notary for. Or, just use an entirely conventional database, operated by the notary.
Thus, you must really, truly need censorship resistance to accept that sucktitude. So what are people censoring? Financial transaction, social media posts (but they must for moderation anyway.) Websites are also censored, which is layer down the stack from social posts, The low throughput of blockchains makes them inappropriate for this purpose. Probably also for the social posts as well. Good luck!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In can do some of the things you'd use a notary for. Or, just use an entirely conventional database, operated by the notary.
Finding a notary trusted by all parties may prove an issue, especially in international contexts. A blockchain may be cheaper.
A 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…
(And if one of the agencies has the ability to acquire more computing power than the others are currently contributing to the blockchain - which is almost always true in this era of cloud computing - they can attack the blockchain just fine. Yes, it will be "obvious" in that it won't match anyone else's records, but the whole point here is that you're not trusting the majority's records, you're trusting the blockchain, right? Who is to say the majority are not lying?)
Proof of work solutions to byzantine fault tolerance are vulnerable to 51% attacks almost by definition, so if there's a value to the data it needs to be backed by a stronger economic incentive for "virtuous behavior". Doing this outside of money is problematic. The other option is private blockchains with limited, authenticated accounts, but then why not just use a timestamped db?
In the long-term, I think blockchains will make a major showing in the design of self-driving vehicles (SDVs). For SDVs to really take off, it needs to surpass the safety of a human driver but the only way to do this reliably in a way that avoids the high costs and ugly protrusion of roof-mounted LIDARs is for SDVs to use low-cost internal sensor inputs and fallback on low-cost external sensor outputs from nearby veh…
One straightforward way to solve that is to say that only known car manufacturers may upload results and it must be signed by something that chains to the manufacturer's key - but at that point, you don't need a blockchain for this.