The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
It is exceptionally useful for the auditing of damn near everything in digital space, as long as shared resources and 3rd parties have access to the blockchain … which is probably the major reason companies and politicians don’t want anything to do with it.
It’d be a lot harder to hide crimes, fraud, grey business dealings, bribery and illegal donations, sanction violations, etc, etc if every event in the entire financial system and supply chain was logged and verifiable.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.
At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.
Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies? Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate or bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that?
The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.