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?
A blockchain is just a list of records. You put data in it, and you have some script that ensures the data is internally valid. For example, with cryptocurrencies you can’t allow a transaction that causes a balance to be less than 0. A blockchain containing such transaction is invalid.
This is nothing particular. You can do this with most data records.
What’s unique about blockchain is that if you have two blockchains, both are internally valid but have records that disagree with each other, then you have a way to decide entirely by yourself which one you should prefer. For example, with Bitcoin you choose the blockchain with most “work”. No need to ask some third party about which one you should prefer.
And that’s where it falls apart. These situations are rare. There might be a few niche cases. I haven’t heard of any use case that’s particularly convincing to me.
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.
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?
It’s all the bad idea of regular digital elections, with the additional stupid of being more public, complex and wasteful
Forever immutably recording who voted what, I really can’t see a way for that to go wrong
“who” in your sentence doesn’t necessarily need to identify an individual depending on implementation.
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.
I’m just here to tell you that this is a very US centric view. I’m not from the US and, outside of random internet posts, there are no records of any of my political associations, past or present, and I’ve voted in all local and national elections for >20 years. Seeing as extremist forces are unfortunately currently gaining power over here, I REALLY wouldn’t want any type of public record even hinting at who exactly I’ve been voting for.
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?
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.
I’m going to say “no”, at least in the practical sense.
Before “AI” was the current hype, there was an equally annoying “Blockchain all the things” hype (and associated cryptobros partially fueling it). Aside from the various crypto scams, I’m not entirely sure if/where it found its niche. The fact that everything today isn’t running on blockchain like the hype of yesteryear predicted is pretty solid evidence that it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
I know several privacy focused apps use it for syncing data between multiple clients. For example Google Chrome syncs user data to your Google account, but Brave browser syncs user data using block chain.
I don’t know if it’s actually the best way to do that, but it’s an option.
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.
The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.
I feel like greater minds than mine could come up with a way to use that to fight government corruption. Every transaction is a matter of public record.
I doubt it’s really a practical solution though. Each transaction makes each subsequent transaction more computationally expensive. Plus all these vendors and contractors and everything are accustomed to fiat currency. Likely, they’d just immediately exchange it for cash.
This of course doesn’t tackle the issue of under-the-table corruption where you invite a senator out for lunch and kickbacks. I’m also sure that the government would want to maintain their own ledger, or that conniving people will find a way to cook the books anyway.
Thank you. I’ve been saying for years that blockchain should replace government records for all public domain applications.
I believe alternative methods of validating blocks (series of transactions) such as Proof-of-stake, instead of the vastly more computation and energy-intensive proof-of-work that Bitcoin uses would largely address the issue of computational expense. There are other methods of increasing efficiency and speed of processing as well such as the use of more efficient ‘layer 2’ mechanisms for processing blocks. I remember reading about these and their implementation when I was researching cryptocurrencies out of curiosity. I believe Ethereum and some others have largely implemented these. The decentralized applications aspect of Eth was super interesting to me as well. Basically, you can program software to run on the blockchain which can make it nearly impossible to shut down by a centralized authority so long as the network is sufficiently decentralized. Some of the programmable money (so-called decentralized finance or ‘DeFi’) apps are pretty interesting as well in terms of enabling more people to utilize the more complex financial instruments that Wall Street firms have been using for years. Of course, a lot of that has turned into a Wild West of scams and ‘rug pulls’, not to mention massive targets for hackers who try to exploit vulnerabilities to steal millions so buyer beware for sure.
The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.
This is probably the key thing. Let’s say that you wanted to purchase a home in Turkey but you live in Canada (just play along). A transaction on the blockchain can show a verified transfer of funds, record the purchase and act as proof of ownership.
As you mentioned, the big issue is computational expense.
Yeah, my original thought was that you could see a record to show that a public works contract put forth by Politician Joe and awarded to ABC Roadwork Inc, and then later you’d see that most of the contract money ended up in Joe’s cousin’s investment account.
And again, I don’t think it’s foolproof because ABC would just immediately convert everything into cash to pay their vendors. But it’s still nice to think about alternatives even if we know they might be impractical because hey, that’s how we come up with better alternatives.
If we’re imaging a world where corporations and governments would agree to this level of accountability, wouldn’t it be eaiser to just make certain financial transactions into public records?
Currently we consider some things public records (registering a company y, the voting roll) and other things private (income and taxes, bank transactions). If there was the will to chnage things we could just make the financial records of all elected government officials and corporations with government contracts automatically publically accessible. This doesn’t need block chain, a law could be passed deeming these “in the public interest” such that banks would have no grounds to refuse a request from journalists or any citizens to access them.
This would be a lot simpler and cheaper than block chain. But its unlikely to happen for the same reason that block chain won’t be used for this either.
Sure, I suppose any public record is a public record. And you’re right, as much as I’d love to see it and it’d be good for the world, I don’t imagine it happening in my lifetime.
I suppose either way an unscrupulous person might find a way to launder their money.
The only counterpoint I can think of is that the distributed ledger is much harder to fuck with than a physical or digital archive with a couple backups.
But is this actually a problem. Does people go around now and need proof that they bought some property?
To me it seems like blockchain is a solution looking for problems that doesn’t really exist.
But is this actually a problem. Does people go around now and need proof that they bought some property?
Yeah, all the time, obviously. That’s literally what a receipt is. If people did not need to prove that they owned things, then receipts, titles and deeds wouldn’t exist.
Palestinians commonly have to defend their home ownership to settlers claiming their land but i doubt blockchain would help even if it was around long enough to record such a thing. American Indians are another obvious case of “but it’s written right here …” where blockchain probably wouldn’t help.
Title fraud is a real thing
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.
I like git, most used version control system around these days. The way in which commits are hashed is very much a blockchain.
I also like public timestamp services, which are also often implemented as a blockchain
This looks interesting https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay
Disclaimer I have not tried it , just discovered it now
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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The “Blockchain” technology is gonna become crucial in the future of AI and Deepfakes.
Since videos, and especially still images can be faked. They would be treated just like witness testimonies, evidence that can be falsified.
What I think will happen is that people would have to use live internet connection to verify a video.
So what happens is that whenever a video is recorded, there will be a “blockchain verify” feature in the camera settings, when enabled either the video feed or the hash of the packets of video data is sent to a blockchain network where it gets timestamped and stored permanently on the blockchain.
The network would consist of various nodes that ideally aren’t government run. Think like the ACLU, EFF, or Journalists, or people who independently want to join the network. Each would run their own node independently.
So any time theres suspicion that a video may be faked, the courts can just ask the network to send their own copy of the blockchain, if theres a consensus, then the video can be proven to have been created at the time that is timestamped. So there’s no way of creating a fake video evidence after an incident since you wont have the timestamp on the blockchain.
who pays to maintain the network? This is not a cryptocurrency, whoever does the mining needs to be paid for their spent resources, and it won’t happen automatically
That’s a good point, people make nodes because the incentive helps make sure there are enough servers on the network to keep it secure.
However, back in the days before blockchain we had SETI. So a case could be made that people will volunteer resources for something that mutually benefits them. Protecting ourselves from doctored media and deepfakes would be a pretty good incentive.
Then again, there are a lot of different cryptos tied to tasks already - like using phones as nodes in a mesh network, using a decentralized search engine, learning about crypto itself, etc. If blockchain turned out to be a good way to verify media, there could be a pay off for joining the distributed ledger.
The blockchain is always “gonna become crucial” in lots of things, depending on whatever looks popular at the moment, yet it never does because it is obviously a bad idea.
It’s a grift, and if you’re not an active grifter, you are the mark
Full self driving in 2 years, I swear…
Why would this require a blockchain, as opposed to standard public servers run by the same parties mentioned?
Because the fewer servers the more trust you need in the servers owners. And the trust is not limited by intentions, it’s also limited to their ability to not be compromised by private or state sponsored hackers.
How does this protect the blockchain from someone just uploading hashes of AI generated video though?
It doesn’t prevent every falsification. It makes it much harder.
Say the incident is a car crash. And assuming dash cams also get this blockchain feature. The car crash already happened and you cant fake a video afterwards that make it look like the other person hit you first. And if you try to preemptively fake a video, you cant know every possible roads, roadsigns, nearby cars, or what vehicle the other person is driving, basically you cant predict everything that was on the scene before the incident occurs.
Imagine if you hit a truck at 5 PM heading west on Road 27 and on the intersection on Road 52. You’d have to know beforehand the road that the incident will occur on, the position of the sun (its 5PM and you’re heading west, remember), the road signs, how wide the road is and how many lanes, the fact that the other vehicle is a truck, what the truck looks like, etc.
I mean you have to create so many fake vehicle collision videos then when an incident happens, you’d have to hope one of the ones you faked matches the situation, then quickily find the video and send it to the blockchain.
Not to mention, the other person could have a dashcam video without any discrepencies. And any slight discrepency on your faked video would make court believe the other recording more than yours.
I mean its not impossible fake something. But its hard to do it before something happens.
It still doesn’t prevent me from making a camera that generated ai with timestamps, real block chain, and instead of capturing pixels from lens, generates then from a prompt that says " politician bribes etc etc"
You can check out the use cases on hyperledgers blog. E.g. https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/blog/energy-mines-digital-trust-the-future-of-global-supply-chains
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.
