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

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

#101

Post by smt88 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

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…

> where the timestamping party cannot be trusted to act honestly because of conflicting interests

But in this case, isn't whoever controls your code the "timestamping party"?

Looking at two examples:

A: With blockchain

The timestamp that the photo was taken is immutably, publicly logged.

B: Without blockchain

The timestamp the photo was taken is logged by you, the software provider.

What is a scenario where (B) is less secure than (A)? In both scenarios, you have no proof of when the photo was taken. It could've been two hours or ten minutes ago. There is no way to digitally verify it.

So it sounds like all you're doing it creating a public, verifiable record of something that you have no incentive to alter and something that doesn't actually verify the state of the vehicle at any point in time.

From personal experience, the most common types of fraud in this space are (1) just posting an old photo as though it were taken right now, and (2) posting a photo of a different vehicle. I don't see how either of these are prevented.

What am I missing?

(Full disclosure: I built software that does something similar for different types of clients, so I've worked on the problem of "verifying vehicle state" for ~10 years.)

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

#102

Post by svrtknst » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #97

(Disclaimer - I believe myself to have a better idea of what a blockchain is and how it works than the average layman, but I'm certainly not an expert) Having recently completed a house purchase and waded my way through reams of paperwork in the process, I'm stunned that there's no "document provenance chain" implementation. At every stage of the process, I was presented with tens or hundreds of pages of paperwork th…

Yeah might get away with just version control. If my understanding of blockchains is correct, which it almost certainly isn't, then the core features you're after would exist in the overlap between a distributed VCS and a block chain, i.e. a series of commits, where I can verify that my sequence is the same as yours, and that both of ours are the same as the governments.

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

#103

Post by nitwit005 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

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…

It seems like this is a case where the customers would effectively be trusting that your app does what it claims it does, in which case the detail that blockchain is used probably doesn't matter that much.

An app can always show the users fake results, regardless of what's genuinely stored in the distributed ledger.

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

#104

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

Blockchain is extremely useful for one thing only (and, like Unix philosophy, it does it particularly well): scamming.

If you want to learn about examples, read throughout the comments. I've read about half the comments and, to no surprise, not much of substance.

Distributed DB ("private Blockchain") has its uses, but it isn't publicly owned like a traditional Blockchain.

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

#105

Post by drodgers » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #97

(Disclaimer - I believe myself to have a better idea of what a blockchain is and how it works than the average layman, but I'm certainly not an expert) Having recently completed a house purchase and waded my way through reams of paperwork in the process, I'm stunned that there's no "document provenance chain" implementation. At every stage of the process, I was presented with tens or hundreds of pages of paperwork th…

I'm not sure that you even need full version control (as in, the bit where everyone involved uses the same system) — if you just have a good diff algorithm, that would let you check what's changed since you last read the document.

I've seen companies like https://draftable.com providing exactly that (seemingly targeted at lawyers and people who do this all day) and it seems to work pretty well.

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

#106

Post by snarf21 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

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…

Sorry, but your solution solves nothing. The transporter could take a picture of the odometer and tweak the image. Your solution is only as secure as the input flow and you can't control it. A blockchain can't reflect physical reality. It can only reflect what someone said/says physical reality is. Additionally, they have to trust you to push the "right" data to the blockchain. If they are already trusting you, you can just run the database yourself.

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

#107

Post by seibelj » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #40

For 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.

Correct. There is a core group here that advocates the positive elements, I know many prominent people who occasionally comment here but get downvoted a lot. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vbuterin Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, occasionally posts here.

I myself am the head of all blockchain engineering at Poloniex, a large and old crypto currency exchange. I try and advocate for this industry but it is very difficult vs. all other technologies.

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

#108

Post by geofft » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #81

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…

Only that? What about non-editable history?

You can do that with a plain old hash chain without any mining of blocks.

Certificate Transparency does this - each monitor adds records to their ledger and signs them, and the latest record includes a hash of all previous records (via a Merkle tree). Auditors trust any hash they see which is signed by a monitor. If they see two ledgers where one is not a subset of the other, they trust all the data in both ledgers. If this persists, they have cryptographic proof that the monitor is trying to not include some record it previously included.

Git does this. Each commit object has the hash of the parent commit objects. You can walk through a commit object and see what the ancestry is. If you push to a server, it can make sure that your new history includes all the old history, and similarly, if you pull from a server, you can do the same check.

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

#109

Post by lisnake » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

60secz wrote: post #77

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?

Yes, but what if I piggyback my insignificant data on the back of some other bigger public blockchains, like bitcoin or ethereum, where cost of 51% attack is in tens of billions? That way I can get protection with their level of security.

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

#110

Post by Geee » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #47

Geee wrote: post #5

Decentralized and private cloud data storage: https://sia.tech The benefit from using blockchain is that your data will be safely replicated and accessible from the cloud, and at the same time you are the sole owner of the data. Only your private key can access the data. In this case, blockchain also facilitates a decentralized marketplace for sellers and buyers of data storage.

> your data will be safely replicated and accessible from the cloud, and at the same time you are the sole owner of the data. Only your private key can access the data. So it's like an FTP drive where the hosting company makes backups and you encrypt the files before uploading, like Tarsnap? Trying to come up with any difference (advantageous or no) I guess the point is that there isn't a single owner? Nobody liable…

Yes, it's similar to just encrypting yourself and then using AWS S3 or something. That's not a differentiator, but usually people object decentralized solutions because they fear that anybody could access the data. So it's built into the protocol itself, and you can't accidentally send unencrypted data to the network.

For most users, the real benefit is price. Also, there might be users who can't use AWS S3 for example, because it's not available in their country for some reason.

There is liability, but it's handled through smart contracts. The hosts have to insert collateral to the system, which they lose if they can't hold their end of the data contract. The data is also replicated to multiple hosts, and encoded with erasure correcting code (with user selected redundancy) which protects against host failures.