It’s not still the early days of blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#611

Post by cmews » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #596

cmews wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium network is an example of a successful blockchain project/application in my opinion. They created the biggest decentralized lorawan network in the world that is used by more internet of things companies everyday. Also they are trying the same thing for creating a decentralized 5G network. It’s still early days for them because I think they started in the end of 2020 or the start of 2021, but they have grown to…

I am very curious about these actual users of Helium you refer to. I know there are a lot of nodes (where if you dump money at people--whether by direct subsidy or via circular incentive engineering--to run them that isn't surprising); but I hadn't heard of actual users. Is there any documentation of such, charts of actual usage over time, or articles covering "we adopted this and it was great"?

I got some airly (https://airly.org/en/products/airly-sensor/) air quality sensors in my neighborhood that are using Helium and you can see other solutions that are using https://www.helium.com/ecosystem. Not sure about the actual usage over time from sensors vs new hotspots joining the network and paying the DC fee, but I'm following https://twitter.com/HNT_DC_Burn and this should increase if the Helium network will be adopted more by sensors/IoT companies. Also the 5G hotspots they are providing in the US will probably add some value as well. You can check the helium twitter feed for companies they partner with or are using the helium network.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#612

Post by yashg » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #559

hubraumhugo wrote: post #33

I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…

Biggest logistics companies in the world use it: https://www.tradelens.com/

Do you know of any logistics company that actually uses it? What exactly do they store on blockchain? Who gets to add blocks to the chain? Are those permissioned blockchains? Can a private permissioned blockchain even be called blockchain? How does a private blockchain differ from a centralized database?

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#613

Post by betterunix2 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

cinquemb wrote: post #517

Vespasian wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the law and the fact that (eventually) someone will come and physically remove whoever claims to own your house. A Blockchain without the ability to initiate (and complete) such a process is worthless for questions of real world ownership. Of course a Blockchain could be empowered to do that....through a law.

A blockchain (or the contracts that run upon any particular one) could also incentivize a distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce some ones else's real world claims (a signed tx from the same addr with the on chain claim putting their owner ship up as collateral to be liquidated at a discount conditional if the buyer can secure the premises by any means neces…

"distributed group of participants to take it upon themselves to temporarily and physically enforce"

Do you think I should risk my life to enforce your property rights? I have two kids and I want to watch them grow up, I can't die because someone with a gun claimed ownership of a stranger's house.

Without an organized government of some kind, society does not scale beyond about 200 people. We just cannot keep track of relationships and trust and whatnot beyond that. I live in metropolitan area with a population of 25 million people; a distributed group of vigilantes enforcing property rights is not even remotely workable here, and this is not even the largest city in the world. My in-laws live in a suburban area with a lower population density -- their town has a population around 20 thousand, and that disorganized group is not going to work there either.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#614

Post by tim333 » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

A nitpick is that [2] isn't front running. Front running is where you figure an institution is going to buy lots of some stock and get a buy order of your own in first, typically done by brokers.

Making fake trades to make the price look like it's going up can be called market manipulation in this case I think. This is also called painting the tape. A similar but slightly different scheme is wash trading where you basically sell an asset to yourself to make it look like that's the price and that there is trading volume going on. There's a lot of this kind of thing going on with NFTs.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#615

Post by barneygale » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #587

lkrubner wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been documenting this with specific companies. A recent one that I worked with was Omnichains: https://www.omnichains.com "Omnichain CEO Pratik Soni speaks to Inbound Logistics about the growing number of blockchain use cases in the supply chain, including in reverse logistics, product authentication and sustainability." Apparently this company started with the idea that they would use the blockchain to make sup…

There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets. Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.

Most NFTs aren't stored on the blockchain.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#616

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

aflag wrote: post #595

giaour wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of a governing authority, property disputes would revert to being settled by violence or the threat thereof. Why should my band of armed thugs defer to what it says on the blockchain when they could instead hit you with a $5 wrench until you vacate the premises? https://xkcd.com/538

Because everyone else around them would help defend the validity of the deeds, as they all own property in the same way. Like I said before, I'm far far away from having all the answers about how to set up a decentralized society and I'm not even sure I would like to live in such a society. However, issuing deeds and currency is an important job that currently you need a central government you trust to do. With a blo…

[deleted]

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#617

Post by quickthrowman » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

andreskytt wrote: post #294

tomputer wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use cases like storing the history of a car on-chain, transparent supply chains, public voting... this all sounds interesting but never made it to product-market fit. Anything that does not exist natively on the blockchain doesn't need a blockchain at all. If a token on the blockchain would represent you as the owner of a car and one day someone steals your private key which represents your car ownership, that pers…

That said, blockchain-like technologies (ksi, more specifically) can be used to assure the integrity of databases storing the relationship between you and your car.

I have never had the state DMV lose record of my ownership of a vehicle. I don’t know anyone that has. I can’t find any record of it happening.

It doesn’t sound like an actual problem to me.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#618

Post by acdha » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #510

chucke wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the promise of having an insurance contract publicly verified by a decentralised system is to reduce the inherent costs of the current regulated system. In my country,and I assume in most it's the same, in order for you to sign a buy contract for a house, there has to be a notary involved. The whole process costs a significant percentage of your already heavy purchase. A blockchain won't solve all the probl…

Mire important than a notary is title insurance. Title insurance is a form of insurance that protects lenders and homebuyers from financial loss from an improper title to a property, for instance someone selling you a property they don’t own. This is the kind of thing at first glance people say is made for the blockchain, but in reality the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a…

> the incumbent solution is actually pretty reasonable and the actual gains from a new system are negligible.

This is especially true when you learn about the nasty edge cases title insurance helps with. A lot of people trying to drum up buyers for their hashes talk like the value comes from recording the chain of transfers when you're really paying for things like handling cases where, say, a surveyor made a mistake in 1952 and now two landowners have legal ownership of overlapping properties or some mistake in probate three owners ago meant that someone has a claim on 10% of it.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#619

Post by yashg » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #396

awild wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General mathematics and computer science don't require burning energy on the scale of nations just to function

Neither do consensus protocols not based on proof of work. How many times do people have to comment that bitcoin is not the only crypto?

PoW is what makes Blockchains of BTC truly permissionless and decentralized. It's a solution to the 51% attack. Yes PoW is resource hungry and expensive but it's a feature not a bug.

If we remove PoW to reduce cost and stop wasting energy, it just makes it another centralized system. PoS or FPoS is centralization in the hands of a few whale coin holders.

Many other VC backed blockchains like Solana are not even decentralized. And to talk about enterprise blockchain like Corda or Hyperleger, I don't know if it's even correct to call them blockchain.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#620

Post by baobabKoodaa » Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #190

galaxyLogic wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".

Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.

Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/