Please don’t auto downvote before reading.
A little bit ago some asked a question about why the hate of the blockchain, and that got me thinking if there even was a legitimate use case where the blockchain would be beneficial, but I couldn’t think of one outside maybe some sort of decentralized bank, but before I knew I was thinking it would instantly turn into some crypto scheme and strapped it, because crypto currencies are a scam on every level – and no they aren’t private or secret as some think either.
So I wanted to ask the community. Instead of using the blockchain for crypto, is there a better use where the blockchain could benefit society?
I’d say in theory it could be used something like public records of proof for ownership of immaterial or intellectual property and the transfer thereof. Say the rights to music, writing, digital art and whatnot. Like the essence of NFT without the hyped up crypto bro speculation and pump’n’dump.
The difficulty would be to get it recognized as legally valid and the bigger difficulty that as there is no central authority there is also nobody being able to rectify fraud or user mistakes. If you implement central authority it’s basically just any old list of transactions with some extra crud so then the question would be why even bother.
So in theory it would be terrible to use as proof for ownership.
In theory in a perfect world without scams or mistakes it could be useful but then again why would you need it in a perfect world.
Weirdly enough, despite the hype of NFTs, that’s what they were being used for in the background of the bullshit.
Small artists were and still are using it to sell their work internationally, where they can tailor their own contracts that people, by default, agree to by purchasing.
They were used by people to control and verify their ownership of sensitive digital media as well.
Only the NFTs didn’t do anything of the kind, unless backed up by actual legal contracts in which case the NFT was pointless, and you could just have had the legal contracts
The only reason it had a brief flash in the pan was that it was an attractive grift for speculators betting there were greater fools, and when the fools ran out so did the NFTs
There were scams going on, still are, and it was a fomo bubble that rightfully burst. I mean, any industry has a scummy side to it and crypto, unfortunately, makes it easy to scam.
But NFTs are still being used for their original purpose, I’m not defending them, that’s just a thing that’s happening.
Over the last few years courts in at least a few countries have decided to recognize the contracts as legally binding proof of ownership. England, Singapore and China that I know of. I remember a couple cases coming up in Mexico and the United States but couldn’t find much well-sourced information on the follow up.
Private transactions, despite what people here are saying. Let me explain:
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Privacy is not equal to anonymity. The latter is much harder to achieve.
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There is Monero, a crypto made specifically for anonymity. It’s not very convenient to use, but it is preserving anonymity with multiple measures.
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Even Bitcoin, which is not built for that purpose, is private enough. It depends on how you use it.
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Deanonimization in general happens when you link your transaction with personal identifying information, but you can reduce your exposure by following certain opsec rules. I see this situation is better than traditional banking where your transactions are always not anonymous, and privacy is only protected by the bank itself. Data leaks happen, governments can get to your transaction info via legal means, but with crypto you have more options to protect yourself.
I strongly advocate for the exclusive use of Monero and even sell physical items shipped to your home with Monero directly. For this exact reason.
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It’s not even good as a bank. On the other thread you mentioned I commented that blockchain is an immutable ledger visible to everyone. That is a nightmare for privacy reasons.
Audit logs is genuinely the only application I see it may be good for, but we have other systems that have a smaller environmental and technical impact making them a better fit than blockchain.
I remember exploring how it could be a way to secure digital Democratic elections. Any thoughts on this?
Forever immutably recording who voted what, I really can’t see a way for that to go wrong
What’s so scary about that? While the reason seems obvious, I ask because if you know what sort of sophisticated voter identification models the parties have right now, they can easily ascertain your voting history with 90%+ accuracy and predict fairly well who you’ll vote for in the future anyway.
I was just thinking of this recently but if Trump utilized his immunity to the fullest extent and we descend into Kristallnacht territory, these voter models would be how they began purging, “the enemy from within.”
So given we already are at that point, then maybe the benefits of such a ledger could outweigh the cons.
You don’t fight fascism by accepting that it’s already here and opening the door further.
Ironically, you’re accepting fascism is here by preventing us from advancing with a more secure election system that would permit a more responsible, accessible digital voting, are you not?
You’re holding us back for fear of what could be.
Even in the wake of what already is a practical reality as I showed.
Thats a lot of mental gymnastics to justify a massive overhaul of a system which would open up a whole slate of security issues. I get it, I used to believe strongly in blockchain but so far it seems to be a solution looking desperately for a problem to solve. You cannot “tech” your way out of societal issue.
The more voter accessibility, the better vote turnout. It’s no different than going the opposite way with voter suppression strategy or Jim crow laws. Most states already utilize digital transfer of voting data to state secretary central branches to my knowledge.
Not only this but it (a) actually helps prevent voter fraud while (b) improving turnout by way of digital accessibility.
If we shot down every idea from the peanut gallery because it wasn’t simple on its surface we wouldn’t have a lot of things.
But what did I notice is that you’ve now twice dodged the fact that the thing you’re most scared about implementing this is already a reality.
So can you explicitly tell me what unavoidable downside it would bring that doesn’t already exist in reality?
“who” in your sentence doesn’t necessarily need to identify an individual depending on implementation.
It’s all the bad idea of regular digital elections, with the additional stupid of being more public, complex and wasteful
No
Fine, I’ll elaborate a little more.
Blockchain generates typically with huge cost and inefficiency a decentralised ledger of events. If you are going to use a blockchain you need to ask yourself tow questions. 1. Do I need a decentralised ledger/record of events and, 2. Am I willing to put up with the huge increase in costs for creating said ledger.
In my opinion there is nothing that satisfies these two requirements. Blockchains can not remain decentralised for anything that interacts with the physical world as some needs to input the data in the blockchain. This requires you to trust a party destroying any notion of decentralisation (i.e. if an entity can control what goes into a blockchain then it really isn’t decentralised).
Following from this if you are willing to accept and trust a centralised actor to control what enters your blockchain why not trust them to manage your ledger. It would be simpler and easier than using a blockchain.
Finally, as for digital goods that don’t interact with the physical world. Why do you want to introduce a decentralised scarcity? It’s a silly idea. Either you own the intellectual property and you decide who has a license to use your digital goods (in which case you don’t need a blockchain) or you leverage some of the best attributes of the digital world and you leave the good to be freely copied, downloaded and used. A blockchain is just a wasteful unnecessary exercise at that point.
Basically there’s no legitimate use case for blockchain. The best proof of this is just how little real world adoption blockchain technology has in the real world. It’s as old as the iPhone and yet I don’t know a single person who uses it to get things done in their day to day lives. If it had a use we would have found it already.
The general category of potential use case is when you want some information to be public, undeletable, and outside of corporate or government control.
While I can’t think of a compelling use case at the moment (other than whistleblowers, maybe), given the direction our corporations and government are going it seems like the sort of thing that might become increasingly useful in the near future.
Just fraud. Nothing else.
Cryptography based Banking
There are lots of good reasons to not base money transfers on arbitrary numbers that you need to keep track of. Right now, banks have to make sure themselves that a transaction is legitimate and may never lose record of it, otherwise money just disappears to someone’s damage. With a blockchain, you get a hard proof a transaction took place. Whether that’s to proof you paid for something or for law enforcement to know you bribed a certain someone, I firmly believe it’s better than what we do now. If my bank told me tomorrow I have no money or claimed I spend it all on terrorism, I would be in a pretty bad spot.Ownership and Track Records
We live in a time of misinformation and AI generated bs. With the help of a blockchain, you can keep track of who posted something first, i.e who has the copyright or started some false information campaign, and also who generally spreads bs. This of course also works the other way around: Who has a good track record and posts trustworthy news or original content? And again, you wouldn’t necessarily have to rely on a single institution to play nice, not delete content etc. Although admittedly, it’s much more complicated this case, because you have to expect bad actors much more than in banking. Banking is infrastructure, this can be a lot of things (science and/or opinion and/or legal stuff…).Fraud!
Its only real use is as dark money. Which isn’t always a bad thing - there are a lot of activists in oppressive countries who rely on bitcoin donations, Anarchist Black Cross comes to mind.
But, as you said, it’s not really as “dark” as people think.
I seem to recall someone developing a “game” that was based on the blockchain but used to crowdsource protein folding models or something like that? I could be mixing two memories though. I could see how the concept could possibly be implemented for something like that, but I wonder if it couldn’t be handled more energy-efficiently by like a single quantum computer doing calculus.
This looks interesting https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay
Disclaimer I have not tried it , just discovered it now
Blockchain is perfectly fine. Its specifically certain crypto thats the issue as they use up to much energy for what they do. So for example bitcoin uses the energy intensive proof of work but then also artifically inflates its value such that it will always take more energy to make one as time goes by. So the amount of bit coins you could mine per barrel of oil was way less in 2010 in comparison to now and not just as a function of inflation. Regardless of that the proof of work is to energy intensive. Grid coing uses proof of stake and the computation is used to do useful work. So like im fine with that. blockchain is ultimately a distributed ledger which is fine but bitcoin was a poc of a possible use and unfortunately the creator did not realize the issues it would have energy wise if it was actually used as a form of currency. Bitcoin makes the k-cup guy look like the patron saint of environmental responsibility.
A blockchain is a log of data entries, that is resistant to tampering.
So I would say things like important debates or historical records are good. Congressional record, for example, is something that currently relies on the government being trustworthy as its basis for legitimacy.
If we didn’t trust the government to maintain the congressional record without altering it, then the congressional record would be a good candidate for blockchain storage.
Probably nothing, but that depends on your definition. Let’s look at the technicalities.
You have a number of crypto transactions that are bundled together into a block. Then you compute a hash - a checksum - for this block. If the data changes, then the checksum no longer matches. The trick that makes it a chain is to include the checksum of the previous block in the next block.
If someone manipulates the transaction history, they need to recalculate the checksum to match. But then they also need to change the following block and recalculate its checksum and so on.
This is a pruned down version of a Merkle Tree, which was thought up ~50 years ago. It doesn’t have to be a chain. You can allow a block to have more than 1 succeeding block; making a fork. Blockchains are one use of that data structure. Wikipedia lists some others. Git, for example, also uses this.
The bitcoin maker knew to use this trick when he needed it. When Torvalds wrote git a few years before that, he also knew to use it.
When you ask about Blockchain specifically rather than Merkle Trees, you greatly limit what can be done with it. So there aren’t a lot of uses left. Most people would say that a Blockchain is more than just a limited Merkle Tree. When you add in those features, you make it even more specific to the original application. So you are probably left with just crypto.
Let’s first state what the blockchain states it is:
- immutable
- public
- decentralized
Let’s say that you’re a user who wants to use the blockchain to manage something outside of the digital world with it. You create your product, and begin advertising it. No matter what this product is, it cannot affect the physical world. This means that immutability is a problem. The real world has mistakes. If a person sells their car, they need to hand over cash in the real world. How does that knowledge make it onto the chain? Same for a house, etc. Any object that has a transaction in the real world has to have an authority that manages whether that object has actually changed hands. So for the simplest use case, the chain has already failed.
Let’s talk about the next one: public. Nobody wants their transactions public. You don’t want votes to be public. The blockchain is not anonymous, no matter what anyone claims, because every record is tracked you can eventually deanonymize anyone if you wanted to. So this one is just a bald-faced lie and something not to be desired in any situation. The point here was to make it so that you can be decentralized and the public can be the ones to police others users of the chain, so let’s talk about how it’s fundamentally impossible for a chain to actually result in a decentralized world.
The blockchain is not actually decentralized. If you want to handle money in most countries on earth, you have regulatory bodies that govern everything about your operations. That means if you want to write an app like Shopify that someone can use to pay with bitcoin on a website, even if you are not selling something physical, you are still governed by a central body. Not only this, but once you want to sell something physical, you have to extract your money through a physical bank in the real world, which is also governed by the same regulatory bodies. This was immediately known as a problem in the early days of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it is still a problem today. This problem is not solvable as long as governments exist.
Funnily enough, each one of these elements does have use by itself! For example, distributed databases have been around for decades, and are the basis for much of the tech you use today. There are even immutable databases that are in use in many industries to keep an immutable record of what happened. AWS is sunsetting it now, but their QLDB was exactly that. CQRS with Event Sourcing is another implementation of the same idea. Finally, any government service or company could make records public if they want to. In fact many already do, for example home ownership records. If you own a house, that information is not private.
Putting something on the blockchain is no more than a move to make sure whomever owns that crypto gets more money out than they put in. If an actual use case existed for this tech, it would have been used decades ago when it was first invented (the blockchain was actually invented in the 80s by cryptographer David Chaum, decades before Satoshi invented Bitcoin and it was even discussed in Satoshi’s whitepaper).
I can talk for hours about how each element of the blockchain is just either a grift to extract money from others OR a cynical, incorrect outtake on how the real world functions. If you want that, let me know.
Nobody wants their transactions public.
This is a broad generalization that is easily refutable. Examples:
- Property titles
- Political campaign contributions
- Supply chain certifications, to fight consumer fraud and counterfeitting.
Frankly, you say you can talk for hours on the subject, but I don’t think that hours of thought has been given to the subject.
I’m pretty blockchain neutral. I took an interest in it at one point, did some graphics work for a few companies so I learned the ropes. So yeah, I agree with the statement that OP’s making a few leaps in logic.
There are a lot of corrupt as fuck companies working in blockchain because of a weird cryptobro need to reinvent the wheel of finance, but blockchain is still kinda neat. Sending funds internationally is easier, in my experience. Moving funds across borders can be a pain in the ass through a bank if you don’t do it often - with crypto it’s a few clicks.
This is from my old crypto knowledge before I stopped working with those folks, but there was a company in africa that launched a mesh network that spanned across multiple countries, using crypto as both the payment and the fee for spreading the signal or using it. Then there were at least a couple cases of people securing control of personal, sensitive media by tokenizing it as an NFT - which I understand was done as a faster and cheaper alternative to copyrighting internationally.
Again, I can not state enough how not a crypto bro I am, because it seems like standing in the middle of the road makes me too block-chain friendly for the internet. I’ve been involved peripherally to a few things that made me go “Huh, that’s actually pretty cool.”
Nice explanation, thanks. I would read more.
Do you also have brief, pointed argument against crypto/blockchain that you use in casual conversation? The subject comes up fairly frequently and I know it’s all bullshit but I usually struggle to explain why. What key points would you make to people who might be starting to get seduced by the hype or who are already sucked in?
Besides other refutations, I’m going to refute the fact that blockchain requires those three points.
Block chain is a shared incremental ledger in it’s essence. Since its inception banking systems have adopted it to have shared ledgers between them to manage transactions between them in a secure way, without fear that the ledger has been tampered by some bad actor of the other bank, since the history of transactions is shared in a way that can’t be tampered without alerting both parties.
So yeah, that. Banks adopted it pretty quickly to be used in transactions. The way you describe immutability is incorrect, you can mutate the current state into the next one, you just can’t mutate past transactions. This example is very much not public, just shared between two private individuals, so not public either. I guess you can call it decentralised too.
You keep calling it “the block chain”, when blockchain is just a name for a technology, a chain of blocks of information condensed incrementally in the next block, that’s it. You are thinking too hard about it.
Edit:
Funnily enough, each one of these elements does have use by itself! For example, distributed databases have been around for decades, and are the basis for much of the tech you use today
Decentralised != distributed, a biiig !=. Decentralised implies that there’s no main/master node coordinating operations, there’s no main authority. whereas in distributed systems, the ones you mentioned anyway, there’s always a main node coordinating what worker nodes do, worker nodes act on what the main node, there’s a very clear authority role.
It’s a reasonable technology choice for whenever you need to have a ledger that is shared between multiple parties. Blockchain gives you an immutable (un-editable) history of transactions, including who made it, what it was, and where/when it happened, and gives all of the parties who are allowed to edit the ledger a way to trust in the outcome, even if the parties don’t trust each other.
