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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)?

#111

Post by vinni2 »

vinni2 wrote: post #96
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…

How do you trust the source of the timestamp used for the pictures? I am assuming the clock on the camera is not synchronised with all nodes participating in the blockchain. May be I misunderstood the application. Edit: synchronising clocks is one of the hard problems in distributed computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization

It also reminds of this paper I read which uses blockchains to capture the video frames from car dash cam for insurance purposes. I wondered about the same clock synchronisation issue https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8752067

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

#112

Post by michaelt »

vinni2 wrote: post #96
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…

How do you trust the source of the timestamp used for the pictures? I am assuming the clock on the camera is not synchronised with all nodes participating in the blockchain. May be I misunderstood the application. Edit: synchronising clocks is one of the hard problems in distributed computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization

Presumably each car handover is conducted with an internet-connected cellphone, making it trivial to get a trusted timestamp accurate to a second or two.

It's complex to synchronize clocks perfectly, but to within a few seconds is easy and there aren't many cars that could rack up an appreciable mileage in such a short time.

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

#114

Post by mareko »

Venmo for all.

We're used to Venmo in the US but many places in the world don't have an equivalent. Valora is a new Venmo-like mobile app that's built on the Celo blockchain, a new network where mobile devices can efficiency sync with the chain, with a native stable coin, and a decentralized phone number verification protocol.

Check out https://valoraapp.com and https://celo.org

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

#115

Post by mtnGoat »

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…

There are contact/document editing tools that already show the change history and any redlines or additions. Even office can do this I think.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by netman21 »

Lotteries. Government monopolies aside, the problems with lotteries is trust. How can you be sure the organizer really pays out the winnings to the ticket holder who bought the winning number. In a public ledger you could verify all that and still keep the winner anonymous.

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

#119

Post by vinni2 »

michaelt wrote: post #112
vinni2 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you trust the source of the timestamp used for the pictures? I am assuming the clock on the camera is not synchronised with all nodes participating in the blockchain. May be I misunderstood the application. Edit: synchronising clocks is one of the hard problems in distributed computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization

Presumably each car handover is conducted with an internet-connected cellphone, making it trivial to get a trusted timestamp accurate to a second or two. It's complex to synchronize clocks perfectly, but to within a few seconds is easy and there aren't many cars that could rack up an appreciable mileage in such a short time.

You need some trusted source of time to make this work. So it won’t be completely trust less system.

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

#120

Post by avalys »

root_axis wrote: post #59
sebmellen wrote: post #52

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)

Presumably, the first person who hands off the car (in a “known good” state) would also insert a photo of the odometer into the blockchain.
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