I witnessed a Blockchain project by a major corporation that had some use. It’s just that doing it without the Blockchain would have had just as much use and way less complexity.
Timex
3669
That’s the thing. I’ve seen people contrive ways to use the Blockchain, but it’s never been a good solution. It’s always just trying to shoehorn Blockchain into a problem.
They’re trying to shoehorn blockchain into the product chain to tell Wall Street they have a blockchian solution so please inflate our stock to the stratosphere despite the fact that it’s all bullshit.
At least, that was the plan until about a month ago.
I mean yeah, the blockchain solves 1 specific problem with an information database. It makes it impossible for a third party to alter a record or input false data, because the distributed network would notice the bad data and deny it.
Now, that also makes it impossible to easily fix a mistake that was written in, as you need the entire network to agree on that change and “fork”. (This all depends on the implementation)
Honestly, it is an alternative to a lot of other systems that already exist. I suppose the only real benefit from a blockchain system is that you could have it connected to multiple entities to use it as some sort of transaction governance system. Rather than relying on a 3rd party centralized system that could possibly be biased.
I don’t think there are many systems that would benefit from becoming decentralized. The immutability of the blockchain is a feature, which is a double edged sword. It fixes “man in the middle” attacks while adding complexity for simple tasks. It really is a solution in search of a problem.
Thrag
3672
Thankfully there was only a brief period where I had to repeatedly explain what blockchain was and why our business hadn’t the slightest use of it.
Whenever someone says “blockchain” in my head I hear it like the chorus of the “monorail” song from that episode of the Simpsons.
“blockchain! Blockchain! BLOCKCHAIN”
Marge: “But our DB’s fast and stores more than a token”
Bart: “Sorry Mom the CEO has spoken”
I’ve seen this sort of thing also. Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. From a pure engineering perspective it is an interesting idea but I haven’t seen a use case that really needs it yet.
We all know government is Big Brother and wants to control our lives. Blockchain blocks the chains of Big Brother! That’s its use! Who doesn’t love the black market and the Silk Road? They need crypto!
ShivaX
3675
Except for the part where the blockchain network people are biased parties. Though to be fair, they’re rarely 3rd party. They’re usually invested in it. Which is almost always worse.
Either way, a majority of entities can collude to say it actually converged into a different consensus and everyone else colluded to forge a different result. It’s just a bit more work to manipulate a DB than a blockchain, because the former cares about efficiency, and the later about being complicated.
Security through reliance on laziness.
The closest thing I have seen to a legitimate use is for Chinese dissidents using it to archive web publications they are afraid the Chinese government might alter or try to delete entirely.
Now whether that could be done more effectively and more efficiently using another method, I am not qualified to comment on.
rei
3678
I remember that inane use case claim earlier in this very thread I think.
That doesn’t seem possible. Storing more than a few hundred bytes on the big blockchains would be terribly expensive. I read somewhere that 1kb costs around $100 in gas fees on Ethereum.
Maybe dissidents were storing links to web publications, but the pubs themselves would have to be stored elsewhere.
I did mention it before, so it might well be in this thread.
Tom can punish me if he sees fit.
Re archiving data, digital timestamping uses one of the underlying techs behind blockchain, but costs a tiny fraction because there’s no need for transactional proofs, just forward hash chaining to demonstrate that a document is legitimate as of a certain date. It would be insanely wasteful to use a distributed blockchain just to secure some documents, because normally you try to minimize the data in the blockchain itself. There’s a reason NFTs are links to data, not data themselves.
The problem for some hypothetical Chinese hacker is that whatever document they want to publish needs for political purposes to be broadly accessible to a Chinese audience, and that’s not going to happen with any kind of technology whatsoever given the whole national Internet is pretty much locked down. If all they want to do is secure the data outside the country, they can find any number of lower-tech methods ranging from some stealthy VPN to just taking a vacation somewhere with a memory stick.
Lantz
3682
Some one (or maybe a couple people) did it once back when it would have been way cheaper. Acting like it’s a normal use case is silly.
MikeJ
3684
That’s hilarious. I can’t believe there are coders (or strategy game players) who think ‘code is law’ is a good idea.
This flash loan exploit has been used a ton of times already this year to pull the same sort of stunt. Since this isn’t being treated as a security hole, I assume it’s working as intended.
Well, coders, legislators, lawyers, and companies have, for more than 22 years now. Nobody cared, so here we are; cyberpunk is good, actually.
Probably insiders doing it as a way of draining their ponzi schemes of funds in a mostly legal manner.
It is strange that once a single flash loan has been used to drain money from a crypto company that all the other crypto companies didn’t tighten things up to prevent it.
