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What Problem Blockchains Solve

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Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#91
post #8

I think a good resource to give you an idea of what blockchain can actually do comes from the "Blockchain use cases " and "Blockchain solutions" sections of IBM's Blockchain marketing page: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain This gives you an idea of some real world business problems that have been solved with the technology. Still, personally, I find the question of "when do I decide to consider using a blockchain as an…

1. If you need to share all the data and the data distribution methods across multiple legal entities — there's no one 'owner' of the data like a company. If you are doing a blockchain implementation for an internal project... why? Why are you not just using a regular database like Postgres or MongoDB or Oracle or ScyllaDB? But if you are going to be sharing all this data across 50-100 companies, and no one themselve…

4. It can’t involve anything off the chain (physical assets or items) or your data integrity will require some sort of a centralized trusted oracle that defeats the trustless nature of the blockchain.

This basically means most of the examples in IBMs marketing (supply chain management, vaccine rollouts etc) don’t actually make any sense to do on blockchain vs using a regular database.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#92
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's a name for this fallacy, but to put it bluntly, you can just apply logic applicable to the fucking Soviet Union for any country and law system. > You earned your wealth. It's not the government's A common misconception among libertarians and alike; that's outright false. Pretty much everyone in a regular developed/ing country, especially in a centrally planned economy like the USSR, has wealth becaus…

Argue with nerds on the internet and someone will always claim a 100% tax is both legal and just.

Who is arguing that a 100% tax is legal and just? Is that some weird slippery slope tuned to a million? A 100% tax can't work, so any tax is bad! Is that it?

Taxes are a great way for citizens to give back to the pool used on them, proportionally, and for governments to insentivise and discourage behaviour ( e.g. lower taxes on electric vehicles and raise them on more polluting types). Saying taxation is theft is a great way to out oneself as incredibly naïve and with approximately zero understanding of how anything related to government, politics or economy functions.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#93
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

Forced labour is pushing it, at least for the general population. They were paid, had vacations and other "benefits", and could change jobs. If those are your criteria for forced labour, wait until you hear of countries with healthcare tied to the employer, and close to zero employee protections. But yes, they were kept inside the country, which is a separate issue.

My criteria for forced labor is being criminally charged for refusing to work.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#94
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's a name for this fallacy, but to put it bluntly, you can just apply logic applicable to the fucking Soviet Union for any country and law system. > You earned your wealth. It's not the government's A common misconception among libertarians and alike; that's outright false. Pretty much everyone in a regular developed/ing country, especially in a centrally planned economy like the USSR, has wealth becaus…

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

> forced labor

Yes, that’s exactly why people who actually lived there now regret its collapse. The younger the person, the more they were oppressed by the KGB.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#95
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

> forced labor Yes, that’s exactly why people who actually lived there now regret its collapse. The younger the person, the more they were oppressed by the KGB.

Keep telling yourself that. My grandparents just died. They hated the USSR for stealing their best years from them. They didn't even get to travel until they were in their 50s.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#96
post #31

Could it potentially be used to keep a distributed database of information collected by a large array of satellites orbiting something like the sun? I know I’m reaching here, and I’m pretty anti-cryptocurrency so I’m not looking for a nail really, but I just think distributed stuff is cool and the way blockchains work surely has some purpose when light lag is in play. Like couldn’t it be used across a dyson swarm of…

Only if the setup needs to be zero-trust. Systems of correspondent banks etc. worked very well even in times where worldwide communication took weeks, and even today there are e.g. traditional Islamic money-transmission networks that operate extremely efficiently because they rely on trust.

True I’ve been reading the culture series lately so my vision was off a truly decentralized series of habitats. I could see a trustless ledger being a solution to them all wanting to trade currency etc but not necessarily being a single coherent group. Then again as I said I may just be reaching.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#97
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced labour is pushing it, at least for the general population. They were paid, had vacations and other "benefits", and could change jobs. If those are your criteria for forced labour, wait until you hear of countries with healthcare tied to the employer, and close to zero employee protections. But yes, they were kept inside the country, which is a separate issue.

My criteria for forced labor is being criminally charged for refusing to work.

Arguing with commies on the internet is a waste of time. The goal posts are always changing.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Indian telecoms are using blockchain tech to maintain a distributed database of do-not-call numbers. Lag of up to 24 hours is ok and the relatively small number of parties is quite trustworthy. Basically they just use the bc for consensus and mirror it to a rdbms for read queries. That’s the only bc implementation I know that is both in production and is not speculation- or crime-fed.

Hey, I have a few serious questions, as I have really been trying to understand the benefits of using blockchain over "classic" stuff. They may sound like I'm questioning things, and that's because I am but with the goal to further my understanding. > Lag of up to 24 hours is ok So you could use any eventually consistent DB? Or a pub-sub type queue that you process at your leisure? > and the relatively small number o…

It will never be as quick to loop through a giant blockchain to generate a dataset and then do something with it as it is to run queries in a highly optimized database that mirrors the end result of looping through that ledger. Blockchains are kind of like git and you need to move through each commit before you can get a snapshot of the current data.

Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

Money is representation of value within a society, but it only has value within that society - and to the extent it can be traded abroad. The value is protected by the legal system, by the army, facilitated by the roads, bridges and infrastructure. Just because you get a "dollar" or "ruble" in exchange for work doesn't intrinsically mean that you are owed anything. That obligation comes from the system in which you,…

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Re: What Problem Blockchains Solve

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the uses cases of blockchain that have been deployed outside of financial schemes, where the blockchain solves a problem in a unique way that could not have been addressed with non-blockchain? Sure there were probably blockchain projects that got traction and use blockchain, but the only reason it’s blockchain was that it’s easier to get funding for that. Genuinely curious.

You will probably consider these as "financial schemes", but having worked in finance for many years my impression is there are a number of problems in financial infrastructure that are extremely annoying and costly at the moment which could be much better addressed with blockchain based solutions. Blockchain is not the only way you could solve them, it just has the potential to be much better. One example: Trade rec…

So how does the chain verify ownership of the non-chain assets that are being traded?

Or does this not actually validate the transaction directly? Is this just about creating a trustless arbiter for market prices or something along those lines?

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