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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)?

#241

Post by accountofme »

sebmellen wrote: post #209
doonesbury wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the question: is anything really be solved here? No, not really. A db table of jpegs taken at different points in the hand off is essentially fine too. Carfax seems to so fine without blockchain. And really the bottom line is the end recipient: what recourse is there if the car shows up with too many miles?

The recourse is that the transporter doesn't get paid. Just a small adjustment to incentives massively changes the occurrence of damage to the car or anything similar. If you're arguing to put everything in a spreadsheet, or have us control the database and do without timestamping, I don't know what to say to you. Blockchain works here. Our business model isn't changing because you're saying we don't need it. Build a…

If you are the trusted party and your servers are secure, why do you need a blockchain?

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

#242

Post by SahAssar »

sebmellen wrote: post #178
bob33212 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail would be just as good. Have them send you an email as part of the handoff process. Time/date/photo will be documented in a source of Truth

If you know anything about email headers, this is a bad solution. Are you suggesting that everyone has a shared Gmail account with one password? What happens when an email gets deleted?

What are you talking about? The suggestion was that the transporter simply send an email with the same data. The receiving party would get the email, and when an email is sent the sending party has no access to change it.

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

#243

Post by FridgeSeal »

vmception wrote: post #189
FridgeSeal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country this is already fully supported: PayID will let you transfer money instantly instantly between accounts (up to some daily limit), with no fees. Similarly, an app called BeemIt, which is supported by the major banks here gives you a very similar experience, albeit with a prettier UI/UX. As it stands, there’s now no advantage that cryptocurrency offers in this space anymore IMO.

blockchain for no limit then.

Ah yes, for all of those times when I need to move unlimited amounts of cash, via something whose value fluctuates wildly, and you still lose out on exchange rates going into your destination currency.

If I needed to move all of my money for some reason, I’d much, much rather just go through normal channels and not have to worry about the logistical and legal issues crypto currencies incur.

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

#244

Post by bawolff »

jkepler wrote: post #237
bawolff wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country the government issues little pieces of paper with patriotic symbols on them that we pass to each other. Maybe im just a stick in the mud, but i always thought it worked pretty great.

Works great until the government either recalls the pieces of paper (PM Modi in India, anyone?), or institutes strict capital controls while running the printing press incessantly (Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, just to name a few examples).

True, but on the other hand, with cryptocurrencies, you're at the whim of some combination of developrs and large mining pools. There is not a whole lot preventing them from instituting an inflationary policy and pocketing the created coins, either.

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

#245

Post by throwawayay02 »

Pamar wrote: post #223

I arrive late so maybe someone mentioned this already: https://www.deutsche-boerse.com/dbg-en/media/press-releases/... (Frankfurt Stock Exchange uses a blockchain as a ledger for securities lending)

It's really hard to understand from all the complex financial lingo what the benefits of using it are (as opposed to a managed DB). The word blockchain isn't even mentioned once on that press release or the website of the company that supposedely created it.

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

#246

Post by noxer »

_asummers wrote: post #163
ummonk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no such thing as a "write only DB" Who ever has control over that DB physically can tamper it. From external such a DB would be a black box. You store something and read again to check if it has been stored but whoever is in controller can just drop it after wards anyway. You have no clue whats actually happening. The black box could contain 2 DBs you query one and everyone else queries another.

A public DTL has a public state unlike a normal DB everyone knows the complete DB and its distributed. If you write to it you can read form anyone else including your own node to verify it has in fact been written. Instead of trusting who is in control of the read only DB you trust that a no majority of nodes collude to tamper. Its important to know that there is a negative incentive to collude because almost all participant are participant in such a system because they theme self want to use an immutable ledger.

This does not apply to BTC or similar blockchains where the people (miners) in "control" (collectively) are not the primary users of the immutable ledger. Because there is a false incentive (money/block reward) to participate even if you have no interest in using the system at all.

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

#247

Post by noxer »

captn3m0 wrote: post #32
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…

A GitHub repository would provide the same level of guarantees right? Everyone else gets read access - the transporter gets write access. They can't rewrite history, or else it gets caught on a mirror that anyone else is maintaining. Certificate Transparency gets the same guarantees as well, without using a blockchain.

If you ignore the fact that people at GitHub can delete whatever they want. The difference is that they probably wont tamper with someones data but they can. On a distributed ledger however "they" are many different humans who don't know each other and have only one common interest and that is that no one tampers with the data. And even if a majority would collude and tamper it would be impossible to hide that from the others.

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

#248

Post by littlecranky67 »

lucb1e wrote: post #57
zubairq wrote: post #3

Timestamping documents via their hash

I know there exist uses for timestamping, but I don't know how often this actually comes up in practice. Have you ever gone to a notary to timestamp something before Bitcoin came along? The options are posting it to something like Twitter, including a newspaper headline in your cryptographic signature if you want to prove an after date rather than a before date, or indeed a notary. While I agree blockchain is a more…

There exists a dedicated timestamping RFC: RFC3161. And yes, there is a vast number of publicly available (for a fee) service providers that offer this as a service. Even before blockchain, these were in use. In Germany, there was a law that would require you to store you bookkeeping transactions only with those timestamps applied to avoid retroactive tampering. I.e. if you had received an Invoice as a PDF, you were required to timestamp it in a "secure, tamper proof manner" to be legally compliant. I personally used the free RFC3161 service provided and run for free by DFN ("Deutsches ForschungsNetzwerk", an organization of universities and higher education institutions). The law was abandoned, and it is okay now to store digital invoices without timestamps. If I would have been audited, I am not sure that those timestamps would qualify to met the requirements by law, but I took my chances. To this day there are still various providers of RFC3161 timestamps, and interfacing is rather easy (you send an HTTP post request by cURL and receive a signed fingerprint by the trusted party).

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

#249

Post by edanm »

drodgers wrote: post #105
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.

Microsoft Word has a great diff - it's used all the time when drawing up contracts.

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

#250

Post by mikedelfino »

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…

Microsoft Word can compare documents.
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