Please don’t auto downvote before reading.
A little bit ago some asked a question about why the hate of the blockchain, and that got me thinking if there even was a legitimate use case where the blockchain would be beneficial, but I couldn’t think of one outside maybe some sort of decentralized bank, but before I knew I was thinking it would instantly turn into some crypto scheme and strapped it, because crypto currencies are a scam on every level – and no they aren’t private or secret as some think either.
So I wanted to ask the community. Instead of using the blockchain for crypto, is there a better use where the blockchain could benefit society?
Let’s first state what the blockchain states it is:
Let’s say that you’re a user who wants to use the blockchain to manage something outside of the digital world with it. You create your product, and begin advertising it. No matter what this product is, it cannot affect the physical world. This means that immutability is a problem. The real world has mistakes. If a person sells their car, they need to hand over cash in the real world. How does that knowledge make it onto the chain? Same for a house, etc. Any object that has a transaction in the real world has to have an authority that manages whether that object has actually changed hands. So for the simplest use case, the chain has already failed.
Let’s talk about the next one: public. Nobody wants their transactions public. You don’t want votes to be public. The blockchain is not anonymous, no matter what anyone claims, because every record is tracked you can eventually deanonymize anyone if you wanted to. So this one is just a bald-faced lie and something not to be desired in any situation. The point here was to make it so that you can be decentralized and the public can be the ones to police others users of the chain, so let’s talk about how it’s fundamentally impossible for a chain to actually result in a decentralized world.
The blockchain is not actually decentralized. If you want to handle money in most countries on earth, you have regulatory bodies that govern everything about your operations. That means if you want to write an app like Shopify that someone can use to pay with bitcoin on a website, even if you are not selling something physical, you are still governed by a central body. Not only this, but once you want to sell something physical, you have to extract your money through a physical bank in the real world, which is also governed by the same regulatory bodies. This was immediately known as a problem in the early days of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it is still a problem today. This problem is not solvable as long as governments exist.
Funnily enough, each one of these elements does have use by itself! For example, distributed databases have been around for decades, and are the basis for much of the tech you use today. There are even immutable databases that are in use in many industries to keep an immutable record of what happened. AWS is sunsetting it now, but their QLDB was exactly that. CQRS with Event Sourcing is another implementation of the same idea. Finally, any government service or company could make records public if they want to. In fact many already do, for example home ownership records. If you own a house, that information is not private.
Putting something on the blockchain is no more than a move to make sure whomever owns that crypto gets more money out than they put in. If an actual use case existed for this tech, it would have been used decades ago when it was first invented (the blockchain was actually invented in the 80s by cryptographer David Chaum, decades before Satoshi invented Bitcoin and it was even discussed in Satoshi’s whitepaper).
I can talk for hours about how each element of the blockchain is just either a grift to extract money from others OR a cynical, incorrect outtake on how the real world functions. If you want that, let me know.
Besides other refutations, I’m going to refute the fact that blockchain requires those three points.
Block chain is a shared incremental ledger in it’s essence. Since its inception banking systems have adopted it to have shared ledgers between them to manage transactions between them in a secure way, without fear that the ledger has been tampered by some bad actor of the other bank, since the history of transactions is shared in a way that can’t be tampered without alerting both parties.
So yeah, that. Banks adopted it pretty quickly to be used in transactions. The way you describe immutability is incorrect, you can mutate the current state into the next one, you just can’t mutate past transactions. This example is very much not public, just shared between two private individuals, so not public either. I guess you can call it decentralised too.
You keep calling it “the block chain”, when blockchain is just a name for a technology, a chain of blocks of information condensed incrementally in the next block, that’s it. You are thinking too hard about it.
Edit:
Decentralised != distributed, a biiig !=. Decentralised implies that there’s no main/master node coordinating operations, there’s no main authority. whereas in distributed systems, the ones you mentioned anyway, there’s always a main node coordinating what worker nodes do, worker nodes act on what the main node, there’s a very clear authority role.
I’m going to go ahead and refute this claim.
Blockchains can be used to affect the physical world because blockchains can be used to transmit information. One example would be if the result of a blockchain transaction is sharing important information with a user, say a password, account number, or access token.
But there’s also the more obvious case, you can use financial blockchains to send money. If a system is designed to work with that currency, then it will presumably work with that currency. You could for instance design a vending machine to take Bitcoin, if it receives a certain amount of currency to a certain address, it dispenses a snack. Yes, there is an authority that manages this vending machine, but that’s unavoidable in any case. No matter what the scenario is, someone needs to own the machine and manage maintenance and supply for it.
Your example isn’t a blockchain, it’s just an example of an immutable database with a linked list structure. A blockchain has to have all three elements, else it’s just a previous technology that is already in use and has been for decades. Immutable databases already existed. Public ledgers already existed. Cryptographically hashed databases and audit tables already existed (CQRS with event sourcing is an example of this).
Your examples around affecting the physical world still are not accurate. If the blockchain has a contract in it that says “dispense a snack” then it’s completely dependent on what happens in the real world. Maybe the snack doesn’t dispense, maybe there isn’t a snack to dispense, maybe the user tricks the machine into thinking it didn’t dispense a snack so it dispenses two. There is no way for the blockchain to validate the results of reality. It’s just not possible. The entire premise of the blockchain is that you can remove authority, remove government, remove all this in between and just have users validate each other. It’s just not possible. It completely ignores reality.
Nice explanation, thanks. I would read more.
Do you also have brief, pointed argument against crypto/blockchain that you use in casual conversation? The subject comes up fairly frequently and I know it’s all bullshit but I usually struggle to explain why. What key points would you make to people who might be starting to get seduced by the hype or who are already sucked in?
What the other person said is good, but two of the simplest things to say are “this tech already existed and was in use for decades, and doesn’t require the massive energy waste that blockchain does” or “blockchain is designed around distrust in everyone. If you distrust everyone then why are you doing business with them?”
Not OP, but in my circles the simplest, strongest point I’ve found is that no cryptocurrency has a built-in mechanism for handling mistakes. People are using these systems, and people make mistakes. Without built in accommodations, you’re either
Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks. So the only people left using it are those who expect greater rewards to offset all that additional risk, which are just speculators and grifters.
I completely agree with your post except for the last part.
This all depends on the risks involved in the traditional systems you’re comparing the cryptocurrency to. Traditional systems are exposed to some kind of risk that cryptos aren’t. For example, with cryptocurrency your account can’t be seized or frozen by authorities, be them governments or banks. With some cryptocurrencies you are also at much lower risk of hyperinflation (or inflation in general).
In many cases the risk involved in using cryptocurrencies will outweigh the risk posed by traditional finance, but that’s not true in all cases. In some parts of the world, the risks involved in traditional finance are significant…
This is a broad generalization that is easily refutable. Examples:
Frankly, you say you can talk for hours on the subject, but I don’t think that hours of thought has been given to the subject.
I haven’t talked to anybody that wants those things public, so yeah I can still claim that. Those things are public, but that does not mean people want them public. I have spent hundreds of hours debating people on blockchain tech, including as part of a previous job. Please do continue to try to refute me though.
I’m pretty blockchain neutral. I took an interest in it at one point, did some graphics work for a few companies so I learned the ropes. So yeah, I agree with the statement that OP’s making a few leaps in logic.
There are a lot of corrupt as fuck companies working in blockchain because of a weird cryptobro need to reinvent the wheel of finance, but blockchain is still kinda neat. Sending funds internationally is easier, in my experience. Moving funds across borders can be a pain in the ass through a bank if you don’t do it often - with crypto it’s a few clicks.
This is from my old crypto knowledge before I stopped working with those folks, but there was a company in africa that launched a mesh network that spanned across multiple countries, using crypto as both the payment and the fee for spreading the signal or using it. Then there were at least a couple cases of people securing control of personal, sensitive media by tokenizing it as an NFT - which I understand was done as a faster and cheaper alternative to copyrighting internationally.
Again, I can not state enough how not a crypto bro I am, because it seems like standing in the middle of the road makes me too block-chain friendly for the internet. I’ve just been involved peripherally to a few things that made me go “Huh, that’s actually pretty cool.” It’s just another technology.