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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)?

#251

Post by littlecranky67 »

lucb1e wrote: post #73
detaro wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting cases are much more companies wanting to timestamp dozens to thousands of documents or events per day. But there the "notary" solution is a common one - many companies offer timestamping as a service with an API, and in most cases you can probably find one all involved parties can trust (e.g. some CAs run such services)

What are these companies timestamping though? That's what I meant to ask. I know there is a need for the service or there wouldn't be parties offering it, I just don't really know specific examples of uses for it because I never came across any myself. It appears to be a rare need to me, but you make it sound like some companies would want to do this so much that it's worth automating, but then I still don't know wha…

Look for RFC3161, its a standardized timestamping service over the network. You send arbitrarily binary content (subject to size limitations of course) via HTTP POST to an endpoint of the provider, and the resulting HTTP response is a signed data structure containing a cryptgraphic hash of the response together with the timestamp. When public/private crypto is used by the provider, all you need to verify the signed response for authenticity is the public key of the provider.

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

#252

Post by [deleted] »

lucb1e wrote: post #68
throw0101a wrote: post #60

NISTIR 8202 in Figure 6 (p.42) has a nice yes/no flowchart to determine if blockchain or something else is more appropriate (PDF): * https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf * https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8202 The DHS originally created it, but I can't find a definitive DHS source. Also here, at bottom: * https://www.fedscoop.com/blockchain-for-government-technolog...

To save everyone having to scroll through ¾ of the document before finding it, the flowchart OP means is on page 53 of the PDF (labeled "page 42" at the bottom of the page), figure 6.

[deleted]

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

#253

Post by geofft »

johnisgood wrote: post #202
geofft wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yes, but he said that it only solves a singular problem, and did not mention this property of the blockchain. Blockchain provides this, does it not? I have been looking around https://github.com/google/trillian , looks interesting.

I think the only meaningful definition of the term "blockchain" requires the idea of mining blocks / addressing double-spend somehow. Otherwise it's just a chain, a data structure we've had for decades. The term was introduced with Nakamoto's paper, and the insight of that paper was mining / proof-of-work, not hash chains.

It is technically true that one application of blockchains is solving problems that can be solved by regular chains, just like it is technically true that one application of self-driving cars is the ability to turn off the automation and let a human drive. But if someone asks about the applications of self-driving cars and you say "Driving on the open road is fun," I think most people would not accept that as answering the question asked.

(And I'm not just being pedantic: blockchains have a significant computational/environmental cost, so if you don't need the block mining feature, you will get many orders of magnitude faster performance and run many of orders of magnitude cheaper and cause fewer negative externalities if you just use a plain old hash chain.)

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

#254

Post by jonsno56 »

sthnblllII wrote: post #31

What is one good use case for ice cream scoops other than scooping ice cream? One might exist, but the real question is "who is the obsession of killing digital currencies coming from?"

Scoop melons instead of slicing them

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

#255

Post by 60secz »

lisnake wrote: post #109
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.

But at a significant price is complexity, latency, maintenance, and transaction fees. There are plenty of immutable append only databases, e.g. datomic. Why violate Occam's razor?

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

#256

Post by vmception »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #243
vmception wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have any of those issues for the following reasons:

When you want to use a cryptocurrency to move money between monetary unions, you only have to touch the cryptocurrency for 20 minutes or less. Your chance of any meaningful volatility is very low, even in these systems, the 24/7 trading smoothes out the volatile periods. No, you don't "lose out on exchange rates" especially if you are talking any real money or know how to trade better.

An expected spread for a few million dollars with or Bitcoin or Ether should be 30 basis points, at an OTC desk.

No tax or legal issues encountered.

For payments I primarily use stablecoins like DAI, which are not volatile at all.

Whether you use stablecoins or the native cryptocurrency, it is all way less limiting and cheaper than any exchanges, way less limiting than a random fintech app with random monetary restrictions.

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

#257

Post by omginternets »

lucb1e wrote: post #53
omginternets wrote: post #30

DNS! Namecoin (despite its cringe name) is pretty cool, and a marked improvement over DNS.

Why do you think it hasn't caught on? Not sure how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound suggestive. I don't mean it suggestively at all, I'm just curious why I heard of it at its inception but then never heard of anyone actually using it. You say it's a marked improvement so I would expect people to jump on it and stop paying the random companies running our TLDs?

The biggest issue for me has been the need to install the namecoin daemon. This basically means namecoin can only be used by technical folk.

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

#259

Post by steindavidb »

Do you mean blockchain or technology inspired by blockchain? Lots of cool merkle tree stuff (trillion, certificate transparency); also several international shipping supply chains use blockchain for chain-of-custody (txns are irrevocable cosigned transfer of custody with no trusted overseer). I would love to see criminal evidence and deeds of ownership move onto a similar framework.

I expect digital ID will also benifit from an auditable, immutable log (e.g. sovrin)

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

#260

Post by Nursie »

dgrin91 wrote: post #197
lucb1e wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you decentralize the certification process you can have a trust-less system. Okay so with a bit of hand-wavey stuff I'm sure we can make a parallel where you also solve world hunger with blockchain and trustless systems where there are no centralized parties that can do bad things. But realistically, how would this work? Whose key will end up signing the TLS certificate for my website? You're not really proposin…

You're totally right, I basically just said put a CA on a blockchain. There is a lot of handwaving in my short HN comment as I wasn't planning on writing out my full RFC here :). Here is some general thoughts I had on the matter - Placing things on a blockchain is a paradigm shift. Yes you can 'just' do it on a blockchain, but you're likely not taking full advantage of the capabilities you receive. Looking at the TLS…

It's a proof of identity, as well, because a certificate contains much more than just a public key, it contains names of servers etc. It's the CA saying "I attest that the holder of the private key that matches this certificate has this identity".

Under some schemes (see the EiDAS regulations if you have trouble to going to sleep some night soon) that also vouch for company registration numbers, company roles granted within the EU financial system etc etc.

I'm not sure how (or why) you would do that with a blockchain.

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