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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It’s just a data store (database kind of implies extra features) that’s trust-free and decentralised. It’s not even the only way to implement one; Ripple for example uses a slightly different scheme.
How has nobody linked the XKCD on this exact question? Randall Monroe compares them in the alt text to grappling hooks: something cool that might have uses, but only in very specific niches. https://xkcd.com/2267/
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.
It was an innovative way to use a blockchain/Merkle path, too. Even if you’d argue money but made in a different, harder to police way is a bad thing, it was new.
It’s really clever. I also think it was unintentional. They did not want to create a money laundering tool but a currency in its own right. That failed.
Also, this scheme only works with money involved. The miners run the system, and they get paid by creating new coins. If they cannot sell the coins to cover their costs, then there is no blockchain.
Sort of? Satoshi had anti-government objectives for sure, although you’re right that Bitcoin was supposed to be usable for small and everyday transactions as well.
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
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.
The conventional wisdom is basically that that’s never going to happen, though, and the barrier to becoming the majority is strong enough to stop any actual attacker.
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.
Gods unchained is a digital TCG that is the only good use of NFTs (and thus Blockchain) that I can think of.
The idea of NFTs is you have a specific instance of a thing that you can trade around. NFT art is stupid, because at the end of the day it’s a jpg. However, with a digital TCG, each NFT can represent a singular copy of a digital trading card. It brings back the “trading” aspect of a digital TCG, made more convenient than physical cards due to digital transfers.
How is this different from MODO?
Could you elaborate a bit how blockchain enables something unique here? I see that it enables trade between users, but if a single company controls the game and I assume supply of new cards, does the blockchain aspect for trading really matter?
Trading itself is basic and doesn’t need a blockchain. I guess with it you have it implemented in a public and tamper proof way, but that second part doesn’t seem to matter to me if the source is centralized.
So what exactly is gained from this approach over just your average ingame auction house?
Sure, there are a ton of things the blockchain would be great for. Also, it just so happens that nobody uses them for that because the people developing the tech only dream about using it to join the bitcoin billionaires club.
Yes. Decentralised certificates (NFTs) for the likes of digitally owning something non fungible (think like a concert or plane ticket that isn’t tied to Ticketmaster, etc), or more commonly, cryptocurrency. A way of storing wealth digitally without anyone controlling it centrally.
I would argue against this stance, but not completely. The need for decentralized authorities only comes about due to a lack or trust or failure of the custodians of the product.
From your example, you could turn concert tickets into verifiable tokens (I do think this would be a good idea), and it would solve a lot of after market sale and validation issues. The only reason we have these issues in [checks current year] is because monopolies like LiveNation/TicketMaster have so throughly turbo-fucked the system that venues and customers cant do anything about it.
IMO, blockchains are a cool concept, and I love that cryptography is now a common topic of discussion because of it. However, its a solution looking for a problem and the problems up until this point are manufactured by the people selling the product or straight up ponzi schemes.
You’d still have risks with a centralized db of the tickets which the tokens would solve.
Ticket master recently had an incident being hacked and that could literally happen to any company.
Granted a user could be hacked as well because of improper storage of the NFT. To really solve the problem it would also require everyone to be using good hardware wallets which I think is where things are going long term, but it’s yet another complicated step which will slow adoption.
One day having a hardware wallet will just be normal.
Most techbros trying to sell the Blockchain are just ponzi schemes/scams. It does have a legitimate use. But not for whatever the techbros are yapping about. It is essentially a decentralised database under nobody’s control.
Exactly, and such things that require or could be improved by decentralized systems tend to be managed by companies (monopolies, or close to it) that already are acting like enshitifying goblins instead of responsible curators.
The ticky part is that when these decentralized systems are involved, the true costs (power, hardware, network, etc.) are distributed and not easily collected.
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.
But them the government can’t unilaterally take your property from you for a pittance under eminent domain. Who wants a system like that?
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.
Yes they could? Just append a block with the government stating they now own the land.
I guess you could fork the blockchain and don’t accept this change but this would be useless. Even if no one accepted the claim, the government can just do whatever they want with that land.
Any application where you want to record something publicly without the possibility to alter it and in absence of a central authority.
A database requires a central authority so it doesn’t cover the same use cases.
The lack of a trusted central authority is key. If you have at least one authority you can trust just barely enough, the whole idea of a blockchain collapses. There needs to be an urgent trust crisis for this to work.
Also, if you have no trusted parties, you have a huge “First Owner” problem.
If we were to set up a blockchain to track the ownership of fluffy hats, what’s to stop me from seeing your fluffy hat, and quickly registering it as mine?
That is a good point. If there’s a dispute about the first owner, there’s no clean way to solve it. However, the current owner is clear, so we could just start tracking the history from the current time onwards, and ignore the history that’s shrouded in mystery and controversy.
That’s not the first-owner problem. I’ll try to explain in more detail. The problem arises when you’re using the blockchain as a “reciept”. You can only ever trace the ownership of the reciept, not the item it represents, without a trusted party.
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Say we made a blockchain that determines the ownership of all fluffy hats in the world. It starts at june 1st 2026. Lets just assume there’s a trivial way to perfectly describe fluffy hats that we can put in a token. Or hell, pretend it’s super complex, that changes nothing.
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You bought a fluffy hat in 2002, and made one for yourself in 2008. You own both, wearing one to bed when you go to sleep on may 31st, 2026.
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At 1 second past midnight, june 1st 2026, I make two tokens, one for each of your hats.
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I am now officially the first owner of those hats. You are suddenly a thief holding my property, even though it never left your head.
That’s the first owner problem. Without a trusted source, there is no way to ensure the first owner in a blockchain is actually the owner under the current legal definition (as in, you made the hat from homespun wool, it’s on your head right now). It gets even worse though, because I can even make tokens for nonexistent fluffy hats that haven’t been made. As soon as someone makes it, i’m already the owner.
The ONLY application for a blockchain with a trustless system is if the entire property is directly on the blockchain, and that doesn’t work.
Oh… Well that’s pretty bad. It’s like Wild West at that point. Anyone can make these fraudulent tokens. Someone would need to prove that there exists a connection between the token and the real world item it represents.
I guess therein lies the problem. These tokens shouldn’t represent physical objects. If you really want them to, you need a certification authority. If you can find one, it means that you actually can trust someone, so you don’t even need to use a blockchain for tracking these things. Why not just use a trusted authority to handle a traditional database.
So what does that leave us with? What can you do with a blockchain that doesn’t require the tokens to be connected to real world objects?
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It’s also a problem of ownership. For exchanges between banks, a blockchain is better because no bank would be the owner of the database.
Plus it’s safer because altering a database is usually trivial while altering a blockchain is virtually impossible.
If you have multiple banks, you can have multiple copies of the same database. If any one bank modifies their copy, it is obvious who modified it and what was changed. No blockchain needed.
Everything is possible, but it would be a much more complex solution than running a blockchain that is designed for that use case.
Could this be a true voting record? Votes would be transparent, but as you say, unalterable.
If the political vote is public, voters are exposed to blackmail or they may sell their vote. It’s a bad idea unfortunately.
There is a project called MACI that prevents the blackmail part
I appreciate that when you find a relevant xkcd, the explainxkcd page also has relevant information to the discussion:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2030%3A_Voting_Software
When the reporter follows the interview up with a mention of blockchain technology, Megan and Cueball reflexively tell the reporter to avoid any voting system using the technology at all costs. Blockchain is a relatively new technology that is intended to solve some computer security issues by making it difficult to doctor old data. However, in the process of solving the old computer security issues, it has introduced new computer security issues that have not yet been ironed out; for instance, it doesn’t solve input fraud issues, only data-doctoring fraud, so if a program caused the voting machine to record a vote for candidate B whenever a vote for candidate A was cast (such a program could be uploaded to the voting machines through USB, or through the internet which the voting machine must be connected to for blockchain), blockchain would not prevent it. Blockchain has also had a large number of high-profile scams, thefts, and implementations with critical security holes. Thus, Megan and Cueball may not trust this blockchain solution because of this history.
Blockchain is really great at preventing post-facto data changes. With blockchain you can somewhat guarantee that no one comes in after the election and changes the votes on the machines. (Unless they’re handling the blockchain in a stupid fashion, for example without the distribution.) But you cannot prevent tampering with the machines themselves, such as making them record votes that didn’t happen, or tampering the data before it’s written to the blockchain.
Also, the security issues that Blockchain solves could also be solved via write-once memory, which would be more secure and more difficult to doctor.
Most computer security specialists are more worried about programs that randomly and/or deliberately misreport a vote, than people changing the votes after they’re already recorded, so blockchain would solve an issue that most computer security specialists are less worried about, while causing new issues (the perpetual internet connection among them).
Whereas voting with a piece of paper can be tracked and validated by a severely myopic 6 year old. And you can recount it. You can’t “recount” a blockchain if that’s your only source.
And if you do both, then why bother with the blockhain?
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.
There’s a few issues with that approach:
- Blockchains can’t forget, but they also need to add new blocks on every period, meaning that there’s a lot of idle events that are added to the chain. You can increase the period, but then the chain has more latency. Either way, the disk space needed to store the full chain grows really fast, which becomes a problem when trying to bootstrap a new root node, or backup an existing one.
- Unless you’re trading land titles internationally (read: there’s no single trusted authority), blockchains could just be replaced with a regular distributed database and servers.
- Chains don’t offer out of band recovery and error correction.
Totally agree. And my problem with the example of land use that a single entity (the government where the land is) will be the sole enforcer of it. So who cares if the information is slightly less centralized, when the actual product is just as centralized as ever?
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.
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.
@tired_n_bored @Deestan the mining aspect is what makes it secure.,. In theory Proof of Stake is greener, but once someone archive 51% of stake he became the owner of the network, while with proof of work the cost of securing the network is permanent… Saying this, i do agree that bitcoin energy spend is ab issue…
That’s true, but also the algorithm plays an important role. Do we really need ASIC farms in order to secure the network? Ideally, and how it was thought at the beginning, the individual nodes should also be responsible for its validation, using consumer grade hardware.
There are greener algorithms like the Monero’s. Also Nano uses something called “block lattice” in order to secure the network, with close to 0 required energy
@tired_n_bored I totally agree with that (I did made a thread on my last reply where I states monero approach), not sure about nano tho… Dont it have the same 51% issue as PoS?
@tired_n_bored @Deestan I think monero made the right choice of making ASICs useless and be mined on traditional PCs… Anyone can join the mining at anytime what makes mining farms (like the ones with ASICs or GPUs) way less common
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
