Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 291 posts

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

#271

Post by FridgeSeal »

vmception wrote: post #256
FridgeSeal wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No, you don't "lose out on exchange rates" especially if you are talking any real money

Your currency -> crypto, crypto -> destination currency are the two places you’ll suffer exchange rate losses.

> ... or know how to trade better.

Make a mistake, or you aren’t a trading wizard and you’re irrevocably out of luck though!

> it is all way less limiting and cheaper than any exchanges, way less limiting than a random fintech app with random monetary restrictions.

Until I later discover I’ve got pay tax on the gains or something later on and then have to sit down and work that out. Or that I had to declare it or something because I’m moving an amount above some threshold. Sure, it might take only 20 mins of everything goes nicely and you know exactly what you’re doing and someone doesn’t sneeze and tank the value of the currency out from underneath you, but I’m much happier going through proper channels where I at least know it’s going to work because it’s being done by people whose job it is to make it work.

Why would I use a stable coin, instead of just three fiat currency it’s backed by though?

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

#272

Post by vmception »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #271
vmception wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No, you don't "lose out on exchange rates" especially if you are talking any real money Your currency -> crypto, crypto -> destination currency are the two places you’ll suffer exchange rate losses. > ... or know how to trade better. Make a mistake, or you aren’t a trading wizard and you’re irrevocably out of luck though! > it is all way less limiting and cheaper than any exchanges, way less limiting than a random…

> Your currency -> crypto, crypto -> destination currency are the two places you’ll suffer exchange rate losses.

For you to still write this means you don't know what a basis point is.

And to elaborate on all the random things you think you'll encounter means you didn't really understand a word I said.

My reality is valid, yours can be like mine if you started searching for solutions instead of rehashing outdated problems.

And if you want, stablecoins improve all of that. DAI is not backed by fiat currency specifically, although it can use other fiat-backed stablecoins as collateral.

Why this method over fiat? One reason off the top of my head is that I typically convert what would be an international wire into a domestic wire. So I inherit a lower compliance burden and also the same day settlement capability. I have the capability of avoiding exchange rate and interchange fees when that matters to me. Even apps like Revolut and Transferwise are more expensive and would still have transaction limits. They are also quite restrictive on businesses they will bank, compared to an actual bank, and this list often complies with a foreign standard (usually some carve-out of an EU/EFTA banking license)

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

#273

Post by car »

Check out Ubirch.com. They use firmware for IoT sensors writing to the blockchain to make data tamper proof, for example. One possible application could be the signing and blockchain anchoring (Bitcoin or Ethereum) of video from body cams, making manipulations impossible.

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

#274

Post by rmdashrfstar »

sebmellen wrote: post #264
accountofme wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are not the trusted party. I have tried to make this abundantly clear in my other comments.

I think if saying that it’s a simpler, easier solution that provides the guarantees that you need, and the other poster still does not understand this, it’s safe to say you shouldn’t put more effort into this. Thanks for your explanations :)

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

#276

Post by mectors »

At Legal and General we use hyperleder to power Estuare, the first pension risk transfer reinsurance in production. Our reinsurer is based in Bermuda and given the population is only 64K and has very few unemployed actuaries, it is hard to scale the reinsurance business via hiring people. Thanks to Estuare monthly operations related to high value contracts with insurers can be fully automated and allow the business to scale. Given that the insurer and reinsurer can both introduce new data and eiter sides used to do extremely complex calculations in a spreadsheet to validate how much money needs to flow in which direction each month, the process would take weeks due to often human error. With Estuare the process now takes minutes and is fully auditable, which for contracts that can run 50 years is important, as well as allowing previous data updates to be incorporated immediately instead of once a year.

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

#277

Post by tupputuppu »

sebmellen wrote: post #264
accountofme wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are not the trusted party. I have tried to make this abundantly clear in my other comments.

Why can't you be the trusted party? At the end of the day, one of your servers is involved in the blockchain and using server capacity to do that. Why can't you just use that server capacity to host a simple app where people send the images?

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

#278

Post by tupputuppu »

noxer wrote: post #247
captn3m0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Well, considering the business is transporting sports cars, what's the threat model here? Someone wants to take the car on a 15min joyride and will bribe a Github employee to be able to do that?

And you think the actual implementation of the blockchain will be more secure and tamper pro of?

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

#279

Post by tupputuppu »

jkepler wrote: post #233
Canada wrote: post #48

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…

Money is the first and obvious use case when you have a decentralized trust machine. But since money is only our shared language for communicating value, censorship resistant publishing won't be far behind.

It's 12 years since the advent of blockchain yet there isn't a single good example of such censorship resistant publish ng. What gives? I'd imagine you must be wrong.

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

#280

Post by tupputuppu »

mectors wrote: post #276

At Legal and General we use hyperleder to power Estuare, the first pension risk transfer reinsurance in production. Our reinsurer is based in Bermuda and given the population is only 64K and has very few unemployed actuaries, it is hard to scale the reinsurance business via hiring people. Thanks to Estuare monthly operations related to high value contracts with insurers can be fully automated and allow the business t…

Apologies but I fail to see how blockchain is relevant to your need? Are there lots of other parties besides Estuare involved in the blockchain or is Estuare just using it as a backend system which might as well be replace by an SQL server with PKI.
Post reply on HN