141–150 of 291 posts
Blockchain as a system (datastructure + PoW) solves consensus & trust between agents in a trust-less and censorship-resistant way (without introducing a trusted party).
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…
You say that: “Broadly speaking blockchain only solves a singular problem: Trust.” but there is another equally significant contribution that deserves to be acknowledged: scarcity. Bits & bytes can be cloned effortlessly by computers which is why a version of Photoshop ripped from a DVD is indistinguishable from the same version downloaded from a CDN as an iso. As long as the hashes match, you wont be able to tell ap…
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.
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 c…
It would require cooperation from auto manufacturers but I'm sure you could come up with a scheme where the car itself signs and timestamps mileage data.
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…
Timestamping can be accomplished cheaply by piggy backing on a secure blockchain that’s already being used for the purpose of money (Bitcoin). No need to start from scratch for each use case.
For anything that involves timestamping some assertion that many parties care about on an ongoing basis it's much cheaper to have a distributed system of watchers. See certificate transparency. There's a lot of commercial inventive to want to falsify that, but is anyone able to in practice? There's no blockchain there.
(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…
Inventory management. In many cases you want this centralized so you can manage it. But the reason is really so you have a “record” of what is in storage. The blockchain keeps it decentralized (ie less risk of a user deleting it), at the same time anyone can query the inventory.
I believe certificate transparency http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ is based on blockchain technology. (Haven't studied it in detail, just happened to notice this new SCT field in my Let's Encrypt certificate recently.)
Certificate Transparency is mostly built out of a Merkle tree hash which is a 1979 idea from Ralph Merkle (also the M in MD5 and various other things) and ordinary digital signature technology of the same sort used in those certificates. An observer can verify that the log remains consistent (thus nothing can be retrospectively inserted or removed as opposed to appended - without an observer detecting this) and that…
I should correct this. MD stands for "Message Digest" which is what this type of algorithm is for. So then it's just a coincidence that it's also the initials of (Ralph) Merkle and (Ivan) Damgård whose method for making a cryptographic hash out of a compression function was used.
Another option is gambling. With smart-contracts it's possible to build fair and auditable casinos on blockchain.