People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn’t worse than already established methods. And crypto is only “better” because it’s unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.
Uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrency that just came to my mind, some are already functioning or being introduced:
Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable domains that don’t require kyc to purchase.
Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable replacement for certificate authorities that can’t be hacked as easily as CAs can.
Decentralized, trustless, uncensorable server for small data like pgp signing keys, torrent magnet links, file hashes, static websites, code etc.
Decentralized, uncensorable, distributed way to store archival information or historical records like weather data, government document records, wikipedia edit history, book versions. Anything that shouldn’t change or is in danger of getting censored.
Automated financial markets open to the public through tokenization like stocks, bonds, commodities all settled on chain without 3rd parties.
Trustless on-chain contracts/smart contracts that will execute automatically or can be proven without a notary.
Decentralized, uncensorable, trustless identity system
No. Domains can be seized and blocked by countries via dns blocklists, anna’s archive just lost one of their domains recently, so has z-library, the pirate bay… European governments have been forcing isps to introduce dns blocklists for the websites they don’t like. Certificate authorities have been hacked before, can be coerced by governments to perform MITM attacks and require trust. The only reason why certificates are even remotely accessible to regular people is thanks to EFFs certbot, hosting providers can charge thousands of $ per year for a simple SSL certificate. There’s no reason for that when a cert and a domain name could be recorded on a public distributed ledger (blockchain) openly accessible and independently verified by thousands of nodes, no trust, no authority, no single point of failure, almost no chance of a MITM attack. Here I outlined how that would work exactly https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/10423786
Same thing with a pgp key server, magnet link repository etc. How many torrent sites went down and took their content with them? How many open source projects have been DMCAd and forced to shutdown, some without any legal grounds just by threatening frivolous lawsuits? Good luck taking down the entire blockchain, especially one not only dedicated to torrents. Always up, uncensorable, verifiable from beginning to end, publicly accessible with thousands of endpoints. How can you argue that’s not better than a centralized server that lives and dies by the will of one dude or his isp/vps provider or some company or government. Historical data like weather info, currency exchange rates or any other record always up, uncensorable, fully verifiable, freely available to anyone who wants via an online API with thousands of endpoints or by querying your local version of the blockchain instead of through a centralized, often paid online service. Trustless smart contracts are unique to blockchains, you can’t do them any other way because they require a trustless execution layer only a blockchain can provide, otherwise you’d have to trust some 3rd party who controls the computer. Tokenized financial markets give regular people easy access to the market without the need for a broker who will take fees, can dissable buying/selling like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, can front run it’s clients etc. It’s literally revolutionary tech being adopted by companies in and outside of the financial sector and governments around the world. Insane how people still dismiss it because “bitcoin uses blockchain and bitcoin wastes energy so blockchain bad” even when no proof of work or crypto currency is involved, not to mention that mining, smelting, transporting gold or silver also wastes energy and human work for a pretty useless metal that outside of some niche applications demand for which could be easily satisfied +1000 fold with our current supply is exclusively used to store value, that printing, securing, transporting cash wastes energy and a lot of human work. Digital fiat also has to be handled by a bank that needs servers, milions of ATMs and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF EMPLOYEES all of whom have to drive to and from work, have their building heated and lit, have a computer and whole infrastructure that needs to be maintained just to function not even 24/7, slower and less reliability than a crypto currency that doesn’t even require proof of work mining anymore, wastes a fuckton more energy and human effort than 10 bitcoin networks ever could. There’s nothing inherently inefficient about blockchains, for example the small data server example I provided is literally pretty much just a decentralized, uncensorable, trustless, permisionless, verifiable, community run CDN (content delivery network) which is more efficient than a single centralized server.
If [other applications of the blockchain, which has now existed for an extremely long time] don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless.
I’m not convinced there’s any internal use for blockchain. Internal implies under a specific umbrella, some overarching organisation, who can then be the central trusted server that makes blockchain unnecesary.
That said, non-public but open uses, such as tracking dealings between companies in markets with little trust and no single governments (the shipping example in your referenced comment) is indeed the thin slither of a plausible use-case.
Another limitation is that blockchain loses its benefits if anyone tries to design over the complexity of using it directly (using a ui that under the hood uses blockchain is no different to using a ui that talks to a central database, you’re trusting the central ui provider, you need to (at least be able to) build your own interface to realise the benefits of blockchain.
That means blockchain basically will never benefit individuals, it can’t. Sure, you could have multiple compatible uis shared around, but that’s no different security-wise to multiple central banks with an interoperable transfer system.
The only place blockchain has real benefits is when multiple large corporations/governments are interacting and don’t trust eachother/anyone.
See the link in my other replies for some examples of internal uses that still benefit from immutable, distributed ledgers.
Large organizations still have loss and risk from individual bad actors. Operating a central authority that validates every single transaction in a ledger, and validates ledger history and consistency, can be prohibitively complicated. A well designed blockchain implementation can resolve most of these issues.
A great example is a pharma/healthcare company that wants to manage medicine batch and expiration tracking, as well as distribution/patient assignment. With a traditional infrastructure every participant needs to phone home to a central authority. In a blockchain setup, peers can report ledger events one hop up and propagate it through the chain.
That’s a very simple example but I hope it gets my point across
Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto
People bring up crypto because it is the only use of blockchain that isn’t worse than already established methods. And crypto is only “better” because it’s unregulated and allowed a bunch of scams to be pulled.
Uses of blockchain other than cryptocurrency that just came to my mind, some are already functioning or being introduced:
Every single one of these already has a much better way of being handled without using an inefficient system like blockchain.
No. Domains can be seized and blocked by countries via dns blocklists, anna’s archive just lost one of their domains recently, so has z-library, the pirate bay… European governments have been forcing isps to introduce dns blocklists for the websites they don’t like. Certificate authorities have been hacked before, can be coerced by governments to perform MITM attacks and require trust. The only reason why certificates are even remotely accessible to regular people is thanks to EFFs certbot, hosting providers can charge thousands of $ per year for a simple SSL certificate. There’s no reason for that when a cert and a domain name could be recorded on a public distributed ledger (blockchain) openly accessible and independently verified by thousands of nodes, no trust, no authority, no single point of failure, almost no chance of a MITM attack. Here I outlined how that would work exactly https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/10423786 Same thing with a pgp key server, magnet link repository etc. How many torrent sites went down and took their content with them? How many open source projects have been DMCAd and forced to shutdown, some without any legal grounds just by threatening frivolous lawsuits? Good luck taking down the entire blockchain, especially one not only dedicated to torrents. Always up, uncensorable, verifiable from beginning to end, publicly accessible with thousands of endpoints. How can you argue that’s not better than a centralized server that lives and dies by the will of one dude or his isp/vps provider or some company or government. Historical data like weather info, currency exchange rates or any other record always up, uncensorable, fully verifiable, freely available to anyone who wants via an online API with thousands of endpoints or by querying your local version of the blockchain instead of through a centralized, often paid online service. Trustless smart contracts are unique to blockchains, you can’t do them any other way because they require a trustless execution layer only a blockchain can provide, otherwise you’d have to trust some 3rd party who controls the computer. Tokenized financial markets give regular people easy access to the market without the need for a broker who will take fees, can dissable buying/selling like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, can front run it’s clients etc. It’s literally revolutionary tech being adopted by companies in and outside of the financial sector and governments around the world. Insane how people still dismiss it because “bitcoin uses blockchain and bitcoin wastes energy so blockchain bad” even when no proof of work or crypto currency is involved, not to mention that mining, smelting, transporting gold or silver also wastes energy and human work for a pretty useless metal that outside of some niche applications demand for which could be easily satisfied +1000 fold with our current supply is exclusively used to store value, that printing, securing, transporting cash wastes energy and a lot of human work. Digital fiat also has to be handled by a bank that needs servers, milions of ATMs and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF EMPLOYEES all of whom have to drive to and from work, have their building heated and lit, have a computer and whole infrastructure that needs to be maintained just to function not even 24/7, slower and less reliability than a crypto currency that doesn’t even require proof of work mining anymore, wastes a fuckton more energy and human effort than 10 bitcoin networks ever could. There’s nothing inherently inefficient about blockchains, for example the small data server example I provided is literally pretty much just a decentralized, uncensorable, trustless, permisionless, verifiable, community run CDN (content delivery network) which is more efficient than a single centralized server.
Man, if they could understand anything you just wrote I’d think you’d said enough to at least make them think twice.
5% chance they read your comment thoroughly
1% chance they understand what most of that means.
Critical mass is not required for internal systems. Not all implementations of blockchain are intended for public use.
I’m really tired of this. Blockchain. Is not. Crypto.
Here’s the research I did for everyone four months ago: https://lemmy.world/post/36683795/19677963
I’m not convinced there’s any internal use for blockchain. Internal implies under a specific umbrella, some overarching organisation, who can then be the central trusted server that makes blockchain unnecesary.
That said, non-public but open uses, such as tracking dealings between companies in markets with little trust and no single governments (the shipping example in your referenced comment) is indeed the thin slither of a plausible use-case.
Another limitation is that blockchain loses its benefits if anyone tries to design over the complexity of using it directly (using a ui that under the hood uses blockchain is no different to using a ui that talks to a central database, you’re trusting the central ui provider, you need to (at least be able to) build your own interface to realise the benefits of blockchain.
That means blockchain basically will never benefit individuals, it can’t. Sure, you could have multiple compatible uis shared around, but that’s no different security-wise to multiple central banks with an interoperable transfer system.
The only place blockchain has real benefits is when multiple large corporations/governments are interacting and don’t trust eachother/anyone.
See the link in my other replies for some examples of internal uses that still benefit from immutable, distributed ledgers.
Large organizations still have loss and risk from individual bad actors. Operating a central authority that validates every single transaction in a ledger, and validates ledger history and consistency, can be prohibitively complicated. A well designed blockchain implementation can resolve most of these issues.
A great example is a pharma/healthcare company that wants to manage medicine batch and expiration tracking, as well as distribution/patient assignment. With a traditional infrastructure every participant needs to phone home to a central authority. In a blockchain setup, peers can report ledger events one hop up and propagate it through the chain.
That’s a very simple example but I hope it gets my point across
Identifying anomalous behavior from bad actors is already a solved problem with databases and governing bodies.
Nobody said it wasn’t? But different models have different benefits and drawbacks?