Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).

Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.

Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.

source
- Terevos@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.
  
  source
  - dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?
    
    Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.
    
    source
  - Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.
    
    IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yo!
  
  You seems to know what you’re talking about, have you heard of Juliana trees? Like trees based only on the keys, so searching for a key takes len(key) time.
  
  Bet there is an other name for it but I so remember like that and no web search says anything about it so I’m trying my luck here :-)
  
  Same for robin hood hash trees :-D
  
  Cheers
  
  source
- dog@suppo.fi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I mean look at big corpo/government servers. They’re running an OS from 1980 and software that hasn’t been updated since 1960’s.
  
  We’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe.
  
  source
  - dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    My Android phone’s marketplace, Google Play, is literally newer than Bitcoin and I have government services + banking applications on it.
    
    source
kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.

source
- dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not.
  
  Oh, its worse than you think.
  
  Image
  
  www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/…/mining_CCS.pdf
  
  Once BTC hits enough halvening-cycles, the entire protocol doesn’t work anymore. Its more beneficial to fork the blockchain (and collect ~50 transaction fees), rather than work on the head (and only collect ~5 transaction fees).
  
  source
pizza_rolls@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.

One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.

It doesn't really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.

source
- Ajen@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Something about this comment didn’t seem right to me, so I did some quick math:
  
  There are approx 144,000,000 homes (incl apartments, etc) in the US. www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/…/VET605221
  
  Assuming every home is sold 5 times on average, that’s 720,000,000 sale records/deeds.
  
  Existing blockchain implementations use IDs that are around 32 bits, or 4 bytes.
  
  A “home sales record” or deed on the blockchain needs to include the buyer and the time/date of sale (8 bytes), along with a cryptographic signature (4-16 bytes). The seller’s identity doesn’t need to be included because it’s always doing to be the previous owner.
  
  So each record is 16-28 bytes, and there are 720,000,000 records. If we go with 28bytes, it would take about 20GB to store all of the deeds for the US. A 500GB hard drive costs $20.
  
  source
  - Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You forget that the blockchain is all about not trusting some middle-man/site, so you need to stock that blockchain yourself, everyone needs to stock that blockchain.
    
    So multiply not only the cost, but also the ecological impact just buying all those drives.
    
    And that’s only for *US" housing (I didn’t get the timeframe you used to calculate it, is it for like year 2050? Old data stays forever.).
    
    BTW found the guy buying 0.5TB Hard drives ;-)
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - netvor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    …and 20G that needs to be replicated to tons of nodes if it should be really decentralized.
    
    16-28 bytes seems extremely understated, I think it could easily be off by orders of magnitude.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Would a git repo count as a blockchain? It kinda fits your simplified description
  
  source
  - slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    No because you can do a git revert and remove the addition to the git tree.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
alokir@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I find it to be an interesting solution looking for a problem. There could be many applications but I’ve yet to see one that blockchain could solve better than anything else that we already have, outside of crypto currencies.

Web3 is an interesting though experiment but I don’t see how it would work in real life. It would be extremely slow, data loss would be a daily occurrence and it would be a privacy/security nightmare.

source
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.

source
- phillaholic@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.
  
  source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I can say of the top of my head the JPM and AMEX are running internal ledgers but there are many more, IBM and Accenture co-developed a system called Hyperledger which was given to the Linux Foundation. Its a tool kit for developing and deploying ledger applications primarily targeted at internal corps.
    
    One of the cases these are good for is an easier to manage rights and asset control systems than many products you would pay more for and with less futzing with IAM, LADP or AD.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus.
  
  I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven’t changed if you take a hash of them.
  
  source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    This is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can’t work.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- dangblingus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s a lot of words to say nothing. Like, you literally aren’t saying anything of substance.
  
  The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions.
  
  All of that is word salad.
  
  source
  - EnmaAi22@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Blockchains don’t inherently need obscene amount of erlectriciy
    
    Proof of work mechanism does. There’s lots of other consensus mechanism that don’t.
    
    source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Forward signed, immutable ledger - a dataset that is written and logged at time of write and validated using cryptographic signatures of the creator of that data and the node of the network responsible for the data. public systems use incentive systems to ensure unbiased writes, private systems work more like your typical app server.
    
    neutral consensus - this is the p2p aspect, this is a bunch of unrelated actors promising to work toward an unrelated goal, in public systems this is done via some form of game theory, in private systems orgs working together have contract law and are more interested in the the controlled writing.
    
    How it can take a lot of forms. Most people are just familiar with what the general public refers to as cryptocurrency. These are ledgers managed on p2p networks with the aforementioned game theory based consensus system. However ledgers are not required to do this, a ledger and even a blockchain can work without fees or even energy wasting miners, in these cases its usually the cryptographic write and channel messaging they want (some of these are a step up from AWS’s messaging stack).
    
    Ledgers like this are used in many ways and used in large orgs around the world, what the public is angry at and what the technology is are very different things.
    
    I hope I have “unsaladed things” for you
    
    source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.
    
    The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.
    
    You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- WintryLemon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Explain like I’m five?
  
  source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    sorry, gpt said i could do better
    
    A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.
    
    Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it’s just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.
    
    So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    lemmy.intai.tech/comment/578972
    
    You can also look in my post history, ask away, I’m no fan of where public systems have gone and understand the anger, point is, these techs ARE being used already in corp systems and even if you dont use this crop of chains, you will likely be using a system like this in the future, even if you dont know it.
    
    source
- loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
  
  source
  - manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The “blockchain” I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.

source
- loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Given that git was invented before the word “blockchain” started being used, shouldn’t we call blockchain applications “git-like” rather than retroactively calling Git a blockchain?
  
  source
- Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  A commitchain
  
  source
sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: github.com/…/distributed-compliance-ledger

It stores the data needed for Matter [ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.

I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don’t particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company’s guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn’t undergoing a malicious act.

tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.

source
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Nothing about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or the “Blockchain” are beneficial to human society. They only serve as a means for immoral people to acquire misappropriated funds.

source
wischi@lemmyrs.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
IMHO technically speaking the concpt of a Blockchain and decentralized zero trust computing like in Ethereum are indeed "interesting" as concepts.

But in practice there are a ton of issues with current implementations and it's likely not going to be used on a large scale because zero-trust doesn't scale well.

source
- dragontamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It was “interesting” 15 fucking years ago when it came out and we didn’t know what it could (or couldn’t) do.
  
  15 years later, no one has come up with an application, so I think we can stop pretending that there’s a solution here. We’re now into “just 5 more years” to figure out a good use of this thing, and no one is any closer to an answer.
  
  source
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.

The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.

source
kool_newt@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I see blockchain technology and it’s potential as analogous to a globally shared spreadsheet where nobody can go back and change history.

Now, just imagine what billions of humans could do if they could all share spreadsheets and know they are accurate?

source
megasin1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I haven’t been able to quite figure it out. But I keep having this idea that blockchain would be really good for journaling and validating elections. I haven’t been able to solve how you handle both anonymity and spam bots simultaneously because you can only give each person one vote. But the concept of peer 2 peer journaling sounds perfect for handling trust

source
- magic_lobster_party@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Many have devoted a lot of thought about how to make digital election systems. So far, no one has figured out a better alternative than paper ballots.
  
  Blockchain doesn’t bring any closer to a solution.
  
  source
  - Kushan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    A Blockchain is part of a solution but not the whole solution. A Blockchain is for all intents and purposes a digital paper trail, something that high can be audited and cannot be modified later.
    
    The problem is how do you use that system with a sceptical public that doesn’t understand or trust it. A technical enough person night understands it, but to the vast majority of people it may as well be “trust me, bro”. It’s a lot easier to trust a physicial piece of paper.
    
    Not to mention that an important part of voting is anonymity, which a Blockchain doesn’t really give you. How do you validate that a vote on the chain is legitimate without some kind of trail back to an actual human?
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’d probably be a component. The problem with digital elections is that they’re EXTREMELY complicated. Complexity means risk of error and you don’t want to fuck up an election. We’ve already seen the fuss people make when I
  
  source
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good)

I’ve been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US’s NAR and CA’s CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they’re all those events are in a trusted database.

Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.
source
- FamiliarSoftware@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  So I have two questions about this:
  
  Why use blockchain for that? Both of these sound like they will be centralized databases and blockchains just add a bunch of overhead for no benefit.
  
  How does a database prevent me from … just lying to it? The blockchain won’t magically detect if I paid off some guy to claim he inspected my house or weed and just hand out a certificate.
  
  source
Emberwatch@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I've been thinking about this for a while, and would love to have other, more knowledgeable (hopefully!) opinions on this:

I've been dwelling on how we might be able to enforce some sort of set of rules or widely agreed upon "morals" on artificial general intelligence systems, which is something that should almost certainly be distributed in order a single entity from seizing control of it (governments, private individuals, corporations, or any AGI systems), and which would also allow a potentially growing set of rules or directives that couldn't be edited or controlled by a singular actor--at least in theory.

What other consideration would need to be made? Is this a plausibly good use of this technology?

source
- magic_lobster_party@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Blockchain is at its core just an Excel spreadsheet. The only thing it adds is some form of distributed consensus (which may or may not work depending on who you ask).
  
  If you can figure out how to use an Excel spreadsheet to enforce morals in an AI system, then you’re good to go.
  
  source
ReallyKinda@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Could be used for coordinating large scale decentralized projects. Say we want to organize logistics of food so that everyone gets some. After calculating need for each locale independently, Blockchain could be used for people to commit to, for example, bringing 4 crates of carrots to a location for shipping. Additional blockchain ledgers might keep track of space on the transportation vehicles etc. The ledger’s main job here would be to ensure that a given task (or a given cubic foot for the space example) is not double booked.

source
- Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What value does Blockchain provide here? It feels like none whatsoever.
  
  source
meyotch@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.

The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.

In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?

source
Smokeydope@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have wet dreams about a new text based mesh internet powered by the gemini protocol. Imagine, if you will, instead of paying monthly to your ISP/cell service provider to acess the internet, that instead you bought an ‘internet box’ once. Where each router/gateway acts both as a self-hosting site for the user, and transmits this site text data to other local routers through LoRaWAN. There are many technical challenges to this kind of networks, one being “how do I check that all other routers have an up-to-date version of any one site?” and blockchain technology seems to fit nicely for that particular issue.

source
danhab99@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I thought Git was a blockchain. Isn’t it?

source
BlitzFitz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I believe there is an initiative by some big banks to push for wire transfers to be done via a blockchain as opposed to slow ach transfers.

They call it quantum computing or something like that… but seemed like it had potential to solve some issues with slow banking

source