Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1000 votes, singer B got 700 votes. But singer B is more viral and popular in social media. You think if singer B goes to the next level, it will increase the rating of the show much more compared to singer A does. So you decide to bump up the singer B's voting number to 1100.
Blockchain can prevent this malicious behaviour.
Paper ballots work fine and have amazingly low error rates, leave it be.
FYI, the voting in blockchain can be anonymised.
The issue I have with electronic voting of any kind is that it's a huge and valuable target, it's pretty much guaranteed that multiple hostile nation states will want to poke holes into these systems. Introducing crypto doesn't do squat to prevent all sorts of nasty problems, including information leaks and stolen private keys. Given what we know about how most people handle basic passwords, I think paper is probably the most secure form of voting we've ever seen.
The political voting is a complex beast so I am not going to comment on it yet. My main focus is for the voting process like American Idol, choosing moderators in forum.
When you think through this, every voting system has a weak link in terms of verifying who is a valid voter. So you must have a centralized authority here. Thus a blockchain is useless.
This is the hypothetical solution. Let's say there are 1000 voters. You premine 1000 coins then send it to each voter. Voter then can vote with 1 coin. So you can make sure the voting process is valid, and you can hide the sender in the smart contract. Of course, the technicality is not this simple. But you get the idea.
I'm not claiming any benefit related to government control, just that escrow would be unnecessary.
A centralized source will be held accountable to the legal demands, thus as trustworthy as the blockchain yet significantly more beneficial for all users in terms of speed, storage and utility.
Beyond that you can make something unique digitally and hash it and someone can "own" that digital thing, instead of money it can be items in a game or art or anything really. A musician can make a song for a single person and sign it into a blockchain and you can prove who it was for. Lots of neat applications that haven't been created yet just like the internet when it was new.
Heck, you don't really even need a database for this at all, come to think of it. Just have the QR code contain a signed copy of the part identifier. You can validate that the signature matches the manufacturer's public key and that will be just as good as asking the manufacturer if it's valid.
Also, now that I think about this, this whole scheme (including using a blockchain) has the fatal flaw wherein a knockoff can just copy the QR code from a valid part. There's nothing stopping anyone from reusing the QR codes, and the knockoff will appear just as legitimate as the original.
Given that a blockchain is just a distributed database with a distributed certification mechanism, you can generally immediately construct a couple of non-blockchain solutions by first removing distributed certification, then distribution of the database itself. You can then quickly see the eigenmerits of those kinds of distribution for the problem at hand. I have yet to see an example where they are positive.
So there are 3 actors in supply chain: manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. In your solution (centralized database and API), you rely on the goodwill of the manufacturers which is fine (I guess) in most cases. But retailers and consumers have good reason sometimes not to trust the manufacturers. Vice versa.
Okay, let's consider this case: the manufacturer produces milk packaged in a bottle. So they put QR code in the milk, and put some information in their database. Let's say they put the production date into this database.
QR code: Abbbccc Information: produced on January 5th 2018
They send the milk to the warehouse A. Warehouse A keeps the milk for a night before sending to the retailers. But alas, there is a storm preventing the warehouse sending the milk to the retailers. So 1 week later, it delivers the milk to the retailers. Warehouse A informs the manufacturer about the incident. But let's say this milk only has 10 days before it hits expiry date after the production. Manufacturer decides to lie to the retailers. They updates the database.
QR code: Abbbccc Information: produced on January 11th 2018
In blockchain, this corruption can be prevented.
Say the manufacturer instead just has an RSS feed on their site, where they publish that information (digitally signed, of course) as the milk is produced. The retailers just have to keep a local copy of that feed, and so they can detect any later tampering.
</sarcasm>
That said, this does bring to mind one genuinely useful aspect to the blockchain I forgot about, and that's the fact that Keybase uses the bitcoin blockchain (IIRC) to periodically record the Merkle tree roots that they use to verify their own information. The only reason to do this is as proof that they're not tampering with the Keybase history that they publish, and so fundamentally this is just the same thing as digital notarizing that I did mention before (except in this case it doesn't matter whether the courts recognize it as being valid). And you could still accomplish this without a blockchain simply by having a neutral third party agree to keep a record of the merkle tree roots, but this is one of the few cases where the 'trustless' aspect of the blockchain actually is useful.
Though of course even with a 'trustless' blockchain you still have to trust the chain itself. With Bitcoin, you can assume nobody's managed to execute a 51% attack against the chain (at least, for the time being; AIUI with the way things are going it looks like the Chinese government might be able to do it by exerting pressure on all the Chinese miners), but if you're running your own chain, how do you make mining the chain popular enough to prevent attacks?
In fact, to my mind, the only real benefit of Bitcoin at this point is the fact that it's so popular it's hard to attack (well, except by the Chinese government).
I'm not actually a Bitcoin/blockchain hater; I can't avoid having a soft spot for any tech that makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk world :) What I dislike is the mania. Bitcoin is a cool experiment, not a production-ready solution to anything.
maintain a queue of.. failed modifications and retry them later when the API goes back up again.
neither would I have to
provide the software that does this to the client so the client doesn't have to do any work for it.
You're literally describing a benefit of blockchain. Its right under your nose.
Your blockchain client still has to have a queue of transactions to be submitted, as the Internet is not magically reliable.
You're literally describing a benefit of blockchain. Its right under your nose.
It is a benefit of the blockchain, in the same way that transporting people is a benefit of a dump truck. That doesn't mean it's appropriate for that job.
There are many, many tools for storing and pushing messages to remote servers. The blockchain clients can do it, but it's absurd to use them unless you need the rest of the blockchain stuff. Even an email server (MTA) would be a better option.
The same goes for quality data, mostly because even if the vendor provides it, basically any industry partner will absolutely insist on doing sample tests on the quality anyway. That also doesn't remove the factor where the quality results are cheated before being put on the blockchain.
A blockchain is not very useful when
A) all participants are trusted or
B) there is no incentive to cheat or
C) if there is incentive to cheat there are already countermeasures available that are more useful (ie, doing samples and having a contract that specifies damage payments in case quality does not match)
Second, you have yet to actually provide any motivation for end clients to spend money or hardware on a manufacturer's blockchain. Chances are the manufacturer would have to maintain all the miners, which is silly.
Third, the manufacturer in this case would have all of the signing keys, since they're the only ones that can make parts. This also damages the selling point of the blockchain.
So no, this does not work.
If you somehow managed to persuade an industry to get on board, for the most part, those with nothing to hide are the ones a decentralised quality database is the least useful for - anyone trying to hide anything (manufacturer / buyer) is going to avoid taking part or cut corners anyway.
bonus points if you can work out what it is.
One obvious use case is collectible items for games. People spend thousands on games like Hearthstone or Clash Royale. Imagine if the cards you collected in such a game were ERC20 tokens. Instead of all that value being locked up within Blizzard or Supercell's servers, you could freely trade or sell your in-game items. I think that would encourage players to spend even more money on these types of games, and could open up huge new marketplaces for digital goods.
There's also a lot of technical issues here. What happens if I sell a card while I'm in the middle of playing a game?
And of course the usability issues. What happens if I get hacked and someone steals all my cards? Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right short of giving out free copies of cards to people (which would quickly become an avenue for fraudulently duplicating cards by having various accounts get "hacked"). And more generally, in order to participate, I need a private key that I keep secure. What happens when I lose that key, because I'm not a crypto nerd but am just an average computer user playing a game? Now I've lost access to everything I spent my hard-earned money on, and once again, Blizzard / Supercell would have no way to make things right (short of giving out free copies of cards, which leads to fraud, etc).
About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
The blockchain is a distributed public ledger, but everything in the actual game itself is controlled by the game developer's centralized servers.
The provenance of any token can be known just by looking in the ledger, and the game's developer could simply blacklist that token on their game's servers, rendering it useless.
The blockchain does next to nothing in this game token scenario. It's still mostly a centralized system.
> About the only benefit here is the ability for users to trade items without the involvement of the company in question, but there's very little benefit to the company to allow that, and it carries far too many serious issues.
Exactly. Although, given that you can't use the tokens when the game servers are down, being unable to trade them when servers are down is probably not a big loss.
The Blockchain is an awesome technology for an incredibly niche market. So his article is right - in most cases, you probably don't need a blockchain.