Hello,
I have been researching about blockchains and stuff and it all seems like a big scam. It’s not sustainable and can be replaced by a simple database.
is there any legitimate use cases of blockchains or it is all just a big scam?
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Anything that requires a public, immutable database. Land registry would be one example. Notary public for electronic documents would be another.
You can leverage the majority consensus to create a trusted software build system. Each block would be a package build
If you have to have someone enforce the land registry or the documents, what is the benefit of the database being zero trust?
land registry
Yes! No more need for title insurance if ownership records are clear and public.
They already are in most countries. E.g. in Poland land registry is maintained by court system and any changes are made only as a result of court order or a filing made by a notary public, who has a real incentive to check all the documents, because they are on the hook financially for any false filings.
In other words, this is a solved problem without any blockchain nonsense.
Updates lag 4-6 months after filing, so not 100% solved.
also you can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
Usually, lag like that is due to an ancient codebase, database, and process setup. If you were to solve that, you still wouldn’t need blockchain. The software and process engineering does need careful consideration–almost all the stuff like this has had at least one major attempt to replace it over the decades, and it obviously failed–but again, nothing you would be able to solve just because blockchain.
Using it as a currency which requires no third party for transactions is a legitimate use case. See current payment processors vs Steam conflict for why it may be a good idea. There are a lot of times when it’s not a good idea either.
However the price must be reasonably stable and transaction cost low. Don’t think any of the major CCs qualify.
In theory, yes. I can’t think of a practical example, but it’s basically a decentralized, public, write-only database. I’m sure there are niche applications for use as a public ledger or similar.
Honestly, cryptocurrency is an example. Some cryptocurrencies don’t have mining and so aren’t all that bad, and there is a use case for it, even if most of what we see today is hype.
Another example might be something like a way of proving something happened before a certain time. Like how people can send themselves sealed letters in the mail, and claim that the postmark proves that it was sealed before that date. If you put cryptographic signatures only into a public blockchain, that could be used as evidence that the document existed at that time.
Some countries are considering using blockchain in the future for their land title registry.
I read something about potentially using blockchain the future while using onland (ontarios land registry service) but i can’t seem to find the page that mentions it.
Yes. Tracking stock shares would prevent dark pools and naked short selling to some degree.
That’s also why it will never happen.
Like most of the tech bro industry, they take something with real value, completely misunderstand it, creates fake value, pumps.
LLMs are awesome, but the current AI industry is terrible and completely misses the actual value of LLMs.
NFTs are actually a great way to digitally prove ownership, basically the future of digital ownership certificates.
Crypto is a way to make money for the people by the people, and not for the rich, by the rich, through the people.
Blockchain is the core idea that makes crypto and NFTs possible. You can think of it as a decentralized DB, it’s useful because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Imagine that the government decided to print a million dollars and give it to some politician, it’s small enough to not be noticed by the market, but it still devalues the money. They could only do it because they own the money management system. In Blockchain each transaction is confirmed by external parties (often multiple ones) and it has to align with the already existing db (which everyone has a copy of) so in that scenario if the government tries to “print” money it will be conflicting with the existing db and it will not be accepted, so they will have to either continue with an incompatible db (making it as worthless as monopoly money) or cancel the transactions by realigning with the common db.
Blockchain is not meant to be a database like the ones in web servers, it is meant to be a database for a consensus of users.
because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Only until it doesn’t. A centralized authority could overwhelm and become the majority. Or more concretely, the US government has the resources to more than double the contribution to Bitcoin, thus giving it complete control.
Nothing is perfect, but once a blockchain network is big enough it becomes near impossible to overtake.
Maybe currently, if the US government really wants to, they could dedicate a few trillion dollars to take over the bitcoin network. But it would make no sense to put that much effort into what would be mostly pointless. And if bitcoin ever reaches a point where it is a full on threat to the dollar then it’s network would probably be too big for any nation to overtake alone.
So you are not wrong in theory, but in practice it is near impossible.
The money required to double the bitcoin hash rate and maintain double is immense. It’s specialized hardware that would need to be manufactured (lead time while network continues to grow, plus who even has the capacity to do that other than TSMC or Samsung) and the network would see it coming and have a chance to do something about it.
It was a risk when it was smaller, but the ability to pull an attack off like that now and maintain the attack isn’t practically in the realm of possibilities. (Edit and that’s not even getting into where they’d get the power to power the network which is estimated at 173Twh a year and the need to keep expanding that power to maintain the attack in adversarial conditions.)
Attacking the network in other ways via corrupt laws with multi government cooperation would be far easier.
It’s cheaper and easier to manipulate the stock markets through politics than to build/take over the majority of the distributed ledger.
People will easily list a lot of credible legitimate usecases
that are hypothetical
and have remained hypothetical for 18 years.
Being on Lemmy, I like the idea of decentralized and permissionless stuff, including money. The problem I have with crypto is that they’re either clearly scams (Trumpcoin, Melaniacoin etc) or they were not intended as a scam but the market fails to fairly price them because they speculate (e.g. Bitcoin).
Also I don’t understand why people keep insisting in buying Bitcoin when the energy to “produce” it is enormous and is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions when there are greener cryptocurrencies.
Not really, blockchain technically has been around for almost two decades and there still isn’t a good use for them. It’s very interesting piece of tech that could potentially be useful, but still isn’t in a practical sense.
Think of it this way, blockchain tech is a solution looking for a problem to solve rather than the other way around.
Besides money laundering, you mean? Not as such.
Merkle Trees were thought up in the 70ies or so. A blockchain is a Merkle Tree without branches. They are used in a number of application; for example git which predates bitcoin.
The actual innovation behind bitcoin is mining. A payment system needs someone who runs it. Bitcoin introduced a way for these people to get paid by creating new currency for themselves. That way, there is no single entity in charge. There is no contractual relation that would require government enforcement.
If a Merkle Tree is the only thing a blockchain is to you, then it has legit uses. But that was already widely used before a simplified version became called blockchain.
If you’re thinking about a bitcoin-type blockchain, then evading government oversight is its sole use. The technical overhead and the economic inefficiencies exist only to obscure identities and legal responsibilities.
The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.
If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.
But with that system, you would lose these features:
- partially-anonymous participants
- service of all customers, even illegal ones
- immunity to court orders
Basically, no. At least, not until everyone has the knowledge and resources to run their own compute, which is never.
Decentralized systems must be accessible and maintainable by the majority. Blockchain is neither of these. It’s also why the internet moved to platforms rather than remaining as many niche forums.
Additionally, network effects and economies of scale make decentralized systems difficult. See Lemmy. Even here, World is the biggest because it’s simpler and easier to do everything in one place. People don’t have to make decisions. People don’t have to do their own work.
Basically, human psychology and economics suck
since a lot of replies branched towards Cryptocurrency, which is where blockchains are implemented the most in. But it isn’t the sole purpose of blockchain.
It’s a distributed, append only(theoretically), tamper proof data structure. Look up merkle tree, certificate distribution, etc. These comes in different shapes and sizes for storing transaction logs, to keeping track of online identity and false impersonation.
You can implement a blockchain that might not get as power hungry as crypto block chains(because mining), and it’s a cool solution in distributed systems
blockchains are a solution looking for a problem.
Recording data on an “eternal” digital data storage is incredibly useful. You don’t need much imagination here but I think we overestimated how much people actually want this and how ok we are with less perfectionist systems given that they work now just fine. Storing something on the web is usually just as good in practice despite being less perfect data store mechanism.
That being said what if we have incredibly important information that is difficult to share or preserve - an immutable blockchain with so much financial security is a really powerful tool here.
Thats what got me into bitcoin at the beginning but disappoingly it never reached the point where it would outcompete non-blockchain tech. Mostly because we live in a better world than many believe 🙃
In theory you could use them for ERP systems like SAP to track components in global supply chains
