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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)?

#161

Post by mgraczyk »

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?

The OP asked about hyperledger, which does not require proof of work. He/She's asking specifically about private blockchains.

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

#162

Post by thekevan »

rebelos wrote: post #136
snarf21 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would just like to say that if anyone has a rational counterargument to this, I really want to hear it. This is precisely the observation past which the logic becomes less coherent in just about any conversation I've had on blockchain applications.

Well in this specific example, what would they change to photo to? The case is to stop joyrides. Who would be able to take a joyride and end up with the odometer exactly as they had Photoshopped it to hours or days ago?

But yes, depending on the application, photos can be manipulated. But that is stating the problem with using photos, not the timestamping app.

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

#163

Post by _asummers »

ummonk wrote: post #75
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…

To make sure I understand it correctly, the blockchain is acting as a distributed notary service, right? That definitely feels useful.

The power of a notary is that someone is legally verifying the state of the document under penalty of perjury. In this case, you don't trust the party doing the verification, by definition, and there's no second party, so I don't see what this solves.

That there is an immutable log of the events is an implementation detail and could be solved with a write only DB completely independent of blockchain.

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

#166

Post by quesera »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #153

The biggest use would be for Automated Clearing House (ACH) funds transfers. Right now, banks receive and send money by sending flat files through a distributed processing system with no database transactions, verification, or transfer history. Some big bank robberies were committed a few years ago by compromising the banking systems that create and process these files. Once the file is sent to the ACH network, rever…

Wouldn't it be simpler for the ACH file creator to cryptographically sign the contents of the file?

Attaching a signature to the end of the file (a la PGP) after the padding rows seems workable.

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

#168

Post by tootie »

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…

Blockchain's value is in the distributed ledger. A home purchase has a small number of well-known parties. Doing digital complex financial transactions with a browser and HTTPS has been proven thoroughly effective. Real estate is still hindered by the model of agents and lawyers many of whom are in small operations or affiliated with a firm, but still operating independently. Most don't have the scale or the expertise to automate their processes the way they could be. But once it finally happens, it will probably just be forms on a web site like anything else.

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

#169

Post by g_p »

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…

Noting some of the sibling comments about timestamping and trust, something I've thought about before when explaining use of Blockchain is that the real use case is verifying the relative order and integrity of events. Clearly the time granularity within which you get relative order assurance will be dictated by the order interval.

But where this seems to fall apart is if you need very precise ordering (think stock trades), as an unpermissioned chain won't going you a high enough block rate. So you move to a trusted node that mints blocks, and at this point you might as well call it a ledger computer, issuing signed receipts.

The big unsolved problem is the analogue gap though, and how to get something from the real world into the chain - the person or device making the observation inherently need to become trusted oracles. In the odometer example, you could surely take a photo of the odometer before the joy ride, then submit the old picture once the vehicle is leaving your custody? Client side restrictions this is a live photo don't help as they can't be verified on-chain, so now the next person gets blamed? Or have I missed something here?

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

#170

Post by UweSchmidt »

technoplato wrote: post #79
root_axis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This has been the only comment I'm actually interested in seeing a response from parent commenter on.

There is no solution for the oracle problem: someone has to input the truth, and that entity can just run a database. End of story.

People made insane money with Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. People then dropped lots of other "coins" that eventually no one cared about. "Blockchain as useful technology" is the story to sell the next "coin". Employing a couple of devs and funding a few blockchain startups is trivial money in this context, often sponsored by "believers" (who got rich in the early days)

Blockchain tech comes with inescapable complexities and problems: bugs and security issues can't be fixed in blockchain programs. Any trivial action on the blockchain requires mining, i.e. the very thing that's done with specialized hardware in areas where energy is cheap.

My last point seems to be tangential, but do try it yourself with a small project on a private Ethereum chain, using geth, web3.js, there are good tutorials out there. Usually when you try out a fancy new tech you "get it" after a while, but I definitively did NOT see any way this is feasible.

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