Hello,
I have been researching about blockchains and stuff and it all seems like a big scam. It’s not sustainable and can be replaced by a simple database.
is there any legitimate use cases of blockchains or it is all just a big scam?
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The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.
If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.
But with that system, you would lose these features:
- partially-anonymous participants
- service of all customers, even illegal ones
- immunity to court orders
it cannot really replace a simple database. it has an integrity guarantee. not in the way that data won’t get modified accidentally, but that it won’t get modified onesided.
the git version control system also uses a kind of a blockchain structure. git was made by the creator of linux. a major difference is that git does not use proof of work for consensus, I think it just does not use anything for that, other than the web server’s access control mechanism.
commits are built on top of a large chain of histories, and the commit ID verifies that the current state and the history of it is the exact same when you checkout that commit ID on any other computer. if you go find in the repository a commit made 3 years ago, and change that commit (this is supported by git but not recommended), either the content or the metadata like time of commit, the whole history after that also need to get rewritten to remain valid, and so all those commits will now have a new commit IDsince a lot of replies branched towards Cryptocurrency, which is where blockchains are implemented the most in. But it isn’t the sole purpose of blockchain.
It’s a distributed, append only(theoretically), tamper proof data structure. Look up merkle tree, certificate distribution, etc. These comes in different shapes and sizes for storing transaction logs, to keeping track of online identity and false impersonation.
You can implement a blockchain that might not get as power hungry as crypto block chains(because mining), and it’s a cool solution in distributed systems
blockchains are a solution looking for a problem.
It absolutely can’t be replaced by a simple database, saying that makes me question that you truly understand the technology. Here’s the important question, who owns the database and how do you know you can trust them?
Would you trust me to manage a database that holds your money? What about someone who’s actively opposing you? How about a foreign nation? That’s the thing blockchains solve, a decentralized 0-trust way to have an append only ledger, yes a database can be an append only ledger, but it can’t be decentralized or 0-trust, that’s the important thing here.
Let me give you a very recent example, Steam has been censored, and has had to remove certain games from their catalog, this happened because PayPal and other payment providers forced their hand. This is the sort of problems that arise from having someone own the database, they can dictate what you do or don’t. Let me be extra clear, this sort of censorship is essentially impossible in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because no one controls the database.
Not really, blockchain technically has been around for almost two decades and there still isn’t a good use for them. It’s very interesting piece of tech that could potentially be useful, but still isn’t in a practical sense.
Think of it this way, blockchain tech is a solution looking for a problem to solve rather than the other way around.
Yes. Public append-only data structures. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
Yes. Tracking stock shares would prevent dark pools and naked short selling to some degree.
That’s also why it will never happen.
it’s really difficult to be anonymous with a credit card
It’s just a data store (database kind of implies extra features) that’s trust-free and decentralised. It’s not even the only way to implement one; Ripple for example uses a slightly different scheme.
How has nobody linked the XKCD on this exact question? Randall Monroe compares them in the alt text to grappling hooks: something cool that might have uses, but only in very specific niches. https://xkcd.com/2267/
Any application where you want to record something publicly without the possibility to alter it and in absence of a central authority.
A database requires a central authority so it doesn’t cover the same use cases.
this was a no nonsense answer, unlike the others discussing Cryptocurrency ;~;
That was… Very well said
i’ll add a concrete example to this… i’ve described a startup i built in another comment but TLDR:
compliance obligations when protecting kids from sexual predators are difficult to prove: sexual abuse usually comes out 30 years later, so standard record keeping is pretty fraught… companies (like the company monitoring compliance - our startup for example) might not exists any more, paper gets lost, database formats become difficult or impossible to read
writing signed proof of compliance to the blockchain is a way of ensuring that an organisation was doing what they could at the time… how this is achieved is tricky for anyone but the source of record, but with blockchain it’s possible (described in the post)
Good summary, a few additions from my side:
- Being public is not required. E.g. banks could form an internal block chain shared only with other banks.
- Blockchains are a database. An immutable and usually distributed database.
Also worth noting that the computations don’t have to be expensive either, it’s only there in cryptocurrencies to artificially limit the number of blocks generated on a public system and tie it into the reward system.
So for a bank, that could be a plain single iteration of a sha256 hash, and once share everyone agrees those were the transactions and you can’t go back and change one without having to change the whole chain.
Make it sha1 and you basically have git.
A blockchain is more or less just an append-only database. Or even an append-only replication log with built-in checksums.
I would argue against blockchains being a database… its more of a ‘signed sequential log’ than a database.
Well, Wikipedia describes it sufficiently vague: “a database is an organized collection of data”. But is a linked list on its own a database? I’d say the blockchain itself is the data structure but any software using it is most likely a database.
The lack of a trusted central authority is key. If you have at least one authority you can trust just barely enough, the whole idea of a blockchain collapses. There needs to be an urgent trust crisis for this to work.
Also, if you have no trusted parties, you have a huge “First Owner” problem.
If we were to set up a blockchain to track the ownership of fluffy hats, what’s to stop me from seeing your fluffy hat, and quickly registering it as mine?
That is a good point. If there’s a dispute about the first owner, there’s no clean way to solve it. However, the current owner is clear, so we could just start tracking the history from the current time onwards, and ignore the history that’s shrouded in mystery and controversy.
That’s not the first-owner problem. I’ll try to explain in more detail. The problem arises when you’re using the blockchain as a “reciept”. You can only ever trace the ownership of the reciept, not the item it represents, without a trusted party.
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Say we made a blockchain that determines the ownership of all fluffy hats in the world. It starts at june 1st 2026. Lets just assume there’s a trivial way to perfectly describe fluffy hats that we can put in a token. Or hell, pretend it’s super complex, that changes nothing.
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You bought a fluffy hat in 2002, and made one for yourself in 2008. You own both, wearing one to bed when you go to sleep on may 31st, 2026.
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At 1 second past midnight, june 1st 2026, I make two tokens, one for each of your hats.
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I am now officially the first owner of those hats. You are suddenly a thief holding my property, even though it never left your head.
That’s the first owner problem. Without a trusted source, there is no way to ensure the first owner in a blockchain is actually the owner under the current legal definition (as in, you made the hat from homespun wool, it’s on your head right now). It gets even worse though, because I can even make tokens for nonexistent fluffy hats that haven’t been made. As soon as someone makes it, i’m already the owner.
The ONLY application for a blockchain with a trustless system is if the entire property is directly on the blockchain, and that doesn’t work.
Oh… Well that’s pretty bad. It’s like Wild West at that point. Anyone can make these fraudulent tokens. Someone would need to prove that there exists a connection between the token and the real world item it represents.
I guess therein lies the problem. These tokens shouldn’t represent physical objects. If you really want them to, you need a certification authority. If you can find one, it means that you actually can trust someone, so you don’t even need to use a blockchain for tracking these things. Why not just use a trusted authority to handle a traditional database.
So what does that leave us with? What can you do with a blockchain that doesn’t require the tokens to be connected to real world objects?
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It’s also a problem of ownership. For exchanges between banks, a blockchain is better because no bank would be the owner of the database.
Plus it’s safer because altering a database is usually trivial while altering a blockchain is virtually impossible.
If you have multiple banks, you can have multiple copies of the same database. If any one bank modifies their copy, it is obvious who modified it and what was changed. No blockchain needed.
How do you sync those copies? Whatever sync process you use could be abused to propagate wrong transactions into other banks unless you figure out a solution to the bizantine generals problems, other than a Blockchain I mean.
Everything is possible, but it would be a much more complex solution than running a blockchain that is designed for that use case.
Could this be a true voting record? Votes would be transparent, but as you say, unalterable.
If the political vote is public, voters are exposed to blackmail or they may sell their vote. It’s a bad idea unfortunately.
There is a project called MACI that prevents the blackmail part
I appreciate that when you find a relevant xkcd, the explainxkcd page also has relevant information to the discussion:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2030%3A_Voting_Software
When the reporter follows the interview up with a mention of blockchain technology, Megan and Cueball reflexively tell the reporter to avoid any voting system using the technology at all costs. Blockchain is a relatively new technology that is intended to solve some computer security issues by making it difficult to doctor old data. However, in the process of solving the old computer security issues, it has introduced new computer security issues that have not yet been ironed out; for instance, it doesn’t solve input fraud issues, only data-doctoring fraud, so if a program caused the voting machine to record a vote for candidate B whenever a vote for candidate A was cast (such a program could be uploaded to the voting machines through USB, or through the internet which the voting machine must be connected to for blockchain), blockchain would not prevent it. Blockchain has also had a large number of high-profile scams, thefts, and implementations with critical security holes. Thus, Megan and Cueball may not trust this blockchain solution because of this history.
Blockchain is really great at preventing post-facto data changes. With blockchain you can somewhat guarantee that no one comes in after the election and changes the votes on the machines. (Unless they’re handling the blockchain in a stupid fashion, for example without the distribution.) But you cannot prevent tampering with the machines themselves, such as making them record votes that didn’t happen, or tampering the data before it’s written to the blockchain.
Also, the security issues that Blockchain solves could also be solved via write-once memory, which would be more secure and more difficult to doctor.
Most computer security specialists are more worried about programs that randomly and/or deliberately misreport a vote, than people changing the votes after they’re already recorded, so blockchain would solve an issue that most computer security specialists are less worried about, while causing new issues (the perpetual internet connection among them).
Whereas voting with a piece of paper can be tracked and validated by a severely myopic 6 year old. And you can recount it. You can’t “recount” a blockchain if that’s your only source.
And if you do both, then why bother with the blockhain?
You can’t “recount” a blockchain if that’s your only source.
What are you trying to say here?
If each vote is a block in the chain them it is definitely recountable.
If I get a reciept of my vote’s hash in the chain, I can confirm it’s being included.
The real issue with using a blockchain is it would anonymize the process.
If each vote is a block in the chain them it is definitely recountable.
That’s not what it means. With this system, you can’t independently verify what happened. You can only also look at the blockchain and see that some hash has registered some vote.
But you don’t know if that is actually true. You can’t see if pushing the red button makes the red vote come out. You can manually count if you want, but the original billet doesn’t exist, only a processed form of it on the blockchain.
If I get a reciept of my vote’s hash in the chain, I can confirm it’s being included.
Only THAT it’s included. Otherwise you have something linking you to your vote, which is bad
Besides money laundering, you mean? Not as such.
Merkle Trees were thought up in the 70ies or so. A blockchain is a Merkle Tree without branches. They are used in a number of application; for example git which predates bitcoin.
The actual innovation behind bitcoin is mining. A payment system needs someone who runs it. Bitcoin introduced a way for these people to get paid by creating new currency for themselves. That way, there is no single entity in charge. There is no contractual relation that would require government enforcement.
If a Merkle Tree is the only thing a blockchain is to you, then it has legit uses. But that was already widely used before a simplified version became called blockchain.
If you’re thinking about a bitcoin-type blockchain, then evading government oversight is its sole use. The technical overhead and the economic inefficiencies exist only to obscure identities and legal responsibilities.
It was an innovative way to use a blockchain/Merkle path, too. Even if you’d argue money but made in a different, harder to police way is a bad thing, it was new.
It’s really clever. I also think it was unintentional. They did not want to create a money laundering tool but a currency in its own right. That failed.
Also, this scheme only works with money involved. The miners run the system, and they get paid by creating new coins. If they cannot sell the coins to cover their costs, then there is no blockchain.
You know at a point there will no longer be a block reward for miners, instead only fees on transactions
Sort of? Satoshi had anti-government objectives for sure, although you’re right that Bitcoin was supposed to be usable for small and everyday transactions as well.
its always been a ponzi scheme, the people still pedaling it, are right wingers thinking they will still strike it big some day.i once followed a yotbers channel one guy pedal lost 1mil+ from SBF crisis, and hes still doing it to this day.
No less than 8 spelling or grammar mistakes, and barely on topic.
i think op asked for Blockchain not Cryptocurrency
in the spirit of reddit:
*peddling
Anything that requires a public, immutable database. Land registry would be one example. Notary public for electronic documents would be another.
You can leverage the majority consensus to create a trusted software build system. Each block would be a package build
If you have to have someone enforce the land registry or the documents, what is the benefit of the database being zero trust?
land registry
Yes! No more need for title insurance if ownership records are clear and public.
They already are in most countries. E.g. in Poland land registry is maintained by court system and any changes are made only as a result of court order or a filing made by a notary public, who has a real incentive to check all the documents, because they are on the hook financially for any false filings.
In other words, this is a solved problem without any blockchain nonsense.
Updates lag 4-6 months after filing, so not 100% solved.
also you can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
Usually, lag like that is due to an ancient codebase, database, and process setup. If you were to solve that, you still wouldn’t need blockchain. The software and process engineering does need careful consideration–almost all the stuff like this has had at least one major attempt to replace it over the decades, and it obviously failed–but again, nothing you would be able to solve just because blockchain.
But them the government can’t unilaterally take your property from you for a pittance under eminent domain. Who wants a system like that?
Yes they could? Just append a block with the government stating they now own the land.
I guess you could fork the blockchain and don’t accept this change but this would be useless. Even if no one accepted the claim, the government can just do whatever they want with that land.
You can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
Like most of the tech bro industry, they take something with real value, completely misunderstand it, creates fake value, pumps.
LLMs are awesome, but the current AI industry is terrible and completely misses the actual value of LLMs.
NFTs are actually a great way to digitally prove ownership, basically the future of digital ownership certificates.
Crypto is a way to make money for the people by the people, and not for the rich, by the rich, through the people.
Blockchain is the core idea that makes crypto and NFTs possible. You can think of it as a decentralized DB, it’s useful because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Imagine that the government decided to print a million dollars and give it to some politician, it’s small enough to not be noticed by the market, but it still devalues the money. They could only do it because they own the money management system. In Blockchain each transaction is confirmed by external parties (often multiple ones) and it has to align with the already existing db (which everyone has a copy of) so in that scenario if the government tries to “print” money it will be conflicting with the existing db and it will not be accepted, so they will have to either continue with an incompatible db (making it as worthless as monopoly money) or cancel the transactions by realigning with the common db.
Blockchain is not meant to be a database like the ones in web servers, it is meant to be a database for a consensus of users.
because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Only until it doesn’t. A centralized authority could overwhelm and become the majority. Or more concretely, the US government has the resources to more than double the contribution to Bitcoin, thus giving it complete control.
It’s cheaper and easier to manipulate the stock markets through politics than to build/take over the majority of the distributed ledger.
Nothing is perfect, but once a blockchain network is big enough it becomes near impossible to overtake.
Maybe currently, if the US government really wants to, they could dedicate a few trillion dollars to take over the bitcoin network. But it would make no sense to put that much effort into what would be mostly pointless. And if bitcoin ever reaches a point where it is a full on threat to the dollar then it’s network would probably be too big for any nation to overtake alone.
So you are not wrong in theory, but in practice it is near impossible.
The conventional wisdom is basically that that’s never going to happen, though, and the barrier to becoming the majority is strong enough to stop any actual attacker.
The money required to double the bitcoin hash rate and maintain double is immense. It’s specialized hardware that would need to be manufactured (lead time while network continues to grow, plus who even has the capacity to do that other than TSMC or Samsung) and the network would see it coming and have a chance to do something about it.
It was a risk when it was smaller, but the ability to pull an attack off like that now and maintain the attack isn’t practically in the realm of possibilities. (Edit and that’s not even getting into where they’d get the power to power the network which is estimated at 173Twh a year and the need to keep expanding that power to maintain the attack in adversarial conditions.)
Attacking the network in other ways via corrupt laws with multi government cooperation would be far easier.
