I had professional experience in an industry where we had to go to the plants to ensure rolls of paper certified from suppliers using responsibly-managed forests were physically separated from the non-certified ones. We needed the paperwork coming from China, then another one from the transformation plant in Morocco, then in customer warehouses across Europe.
An external protocol that would provide universal tracability, usable by any actor of the chain, seem like a great solution to a real problem. Blockchain provides some "neutrality", ie no need for each actor to find its own certificate provider (I imagine that service shops would help larger companies set up their systems, but the back-end would be common across all actors).
I'm not very convinced by pseudo-decentralized apps in most domains, but in logistics... very bullish !
Say you want to trace eco paper rolls around the globe. What could the blockchain do for you? Who are the nodes/miners/coins in this application?
When you suspect some intermediate in the paper chain to exchange eco paper for cheaper ordinary paper, how does distributing the information that he has X rolls on store prevent this scenario.
Another feature is not related to inventory. Ledgers that have acute accountability features attached, where some stakeholders may have incentives to fake the records.
Like, for example transport truck driving schedules. Drivers are allowed only to drive so much, and there are penalties involved if the drivers don't rest enough. The main accountability measure here is the driving ledger. Whose maintainer has incentives to fudge it (the driver or the employer of the driver).
To understand this, first you have to understand why we structure mining. In the case of Bitcoin or Ethereum, you need a method that allows any arbitrary computational device to verify and add to a given blockchain. In lieu of trusting that device, the blockchain makes it do a massive amount of busywork, called mining, to prove it isn't bullshitting the network. Different implementations have different busywork, but it's designed to make it hard to change the network by arbitrary devices. This is why we can allow any untrusted device on the network.
In the case of logistics, we are already operating under some amount of trust. This is through a mechanism of certification of goods, suppliers, verifying the goods are what they say they are, and the verification of those approvals and certifications. Even in a trusted environment, managing that coordination of certifying and verifying is slow, bureaucratic, and grows with the size of the logistic network. Additionally, many supply chains generally certify new entrants before allowing them to contribute. This creates a barrier to entry when establishing trust in the same way busywork creates a barrier for devices. Then there are whole units of auditors that go through and recheck all those certifications to make sure the whole chain is authentic with regards to the goods moving through it.
Blockchain technology is a mechanism of creating certifications (signing a transaction) and verifying those certifications (miners/verifiers on a chain) that can operate in a decentralized but coordinated way. It allows for the whole system to better coordinate information and certification that used to be done manually.
Did you notice I never mentioned tokens?
In this model, I'll refer to it as Proof of Reputation (PoR), an actor might be a certified as a reputable party in the network. You might be a certified producer of bananas, verified and certified as fair trade and humane organic hand-crafted conditions by other organizations. I'm a buyer of bananas, but I want to make sure I'm buying fair trade bananas. I can look at your certification-of-origin and verify that you are reputable as fair trade. A port authority can confirm that I bought your bananas and put them on the USS Boaty McBoatface destined for Los Angeles to meet the huge banana split market. You as a consumer can check these certifications at the store.
As it stands, all of these processes operate haphazardly and it's insanely difficult for major countries to coordinate and verify what is going on. The coordination technologies, like Ethereum's GHOST implementation, combined with public-key infrastructure helps reduce the "deadlock" time of coordinating these large public and private bureaucracies.
I know I'm not explaining this well. I'm still working on a more concrete model. In my mind the process of creating, signing, and verifying a cryptotoken transaction is eerily similar to what logistics management is all about. You need to prove the origin, verify they made the transaction, and then have a reputable actor process said transaction. There's still a lot of manual work, but the system of sharing and coordinating that work is also painful and manual. The technologies that power cryptotokens can help with the latter problem.
How do you verify that the physical objects the digital certificate is attached to, is actually attached to the things it is meant to certify, and not replacement counterfeit?
At it's heart logistics is a global concurrency problem. The "locks" we use now are large sprawling bureaucracies that manually coordinate the transfer of information among many independently moving agents. Getting information into and out of this organization is a tedious, labor-intensive, and time consuming process. The technology that empowers cryptotokens is an alternate computerized concurrency management for this kind of information transfer and lookup that doesn't rely on a central organization or system.
Now how do you get "the blockchain" to know which paper rolls went into which shipping container.
The blockchain would be a decentralized papertrail accessible to all actors of the supply chain, down to the end consumer ideally, instead of the current nightmare of shipment papers, siloed ERPs and so on
bad actor: I manufacture the cheaper rolls, and stick labels for the expensive ones on, and scan them
How will "the blockchain" prevent either scenario
Bad actor: unless you intend to use rolls by yourself, what do you gain? You can't sell the better rolls as such, because you have broken chain of trust.
But such arguments lead nowhere. Of course you can come up with scenarios which can be misused. The real challenge (and one that is being solved by lots of people in crypto world - well, at least those that aren't consumed by greed) is finding scenarios that work. The ability to store information cheaply and immutably can change many industries, but technology must be deployed in such way that it makes sense.
To paraphrase -- "if you discount everything a blockchain does, what can you only do with a blockchain". This is not a reasonable approach.
Yes, blockchains are (now, at least), trivial. A merkle tree or simile distributed database with multiple writers and time-based consensus...a lot like git, really. There are an enormous number of potential uses of such a technology -- security and land ownership, contracts, etc. Virtually anything where you want an auditable, immutable historical record and where the data has many interested parties. This historically was accomplished via a centralized trusted database, but that doesn't mean that's the only solution.
HN, in many ways, is overly cynical at times, and is too eager to try to knock down the hypesters, throwing the baby out with the bath water to make a point.
Mathy Database, and yea just buzzwords and hype.
The next big thing, won’t have people standing around looking at it and wondering where it goes.
- Seamless global payments
- Store of value
- File storage
- Decentralized exchanges
- DNS lookup
- Prediction markets
- International contracts
- Untraceable payments
- e-Voting
- Copyright or proof of ownership
- Distributed computing
It simply gets tiring for people to argue ad infinitum about this with every non-believer.
Your language is inadvertently quite revealing: “non-believer” isn’t how you talk about technical issues with well understood tradeoffs. It’s how you talk about something which you’d like to be true but isn’t.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1043.pdf
Also, https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf Section 4.4.2
>storage
https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
^ Detailed analyses that explain why blockchain is an appropriate solution
But please do elaborate how they are "known to be worse." By whom and can you cite the analysis that proved so? Certainly not known by Google if they invested in a blockchain-based storage solution?
>well understood tradeoffs
That's definitely not the case if you take the time to read any blockchain-related thread on HN. But, please, feel free to tell me what are better solutions for the cases I mentioned.
File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
I thought the point was that "they are known to be worse."
>Every solution proposed so far is a huge regression for privacy or coercion
Can you please elaborate how is the solution proposed in the paper linked in the first URL a regression over non-blockchain solutions?
>it’s dishonest to claim that
I replied to the question of "what problem is this technology solving," and the paper you mentioned claims that "it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties." What exactly am I being dishonest with? I cited a paper where a protocol is proposed to help solving the eVoting problem. It directly answers the question I was aiming to answer--I never said my list was about already working, deployed, tested solutions.
>File storage is similar: lots of people want you to buy their pet project but if you want reliable, secure, and cost effective it’s all “maybe sometime in the future when we have something different”. Talk about it as an advantage when it’s competitive for most people.
Right... so your counter-argument is that "it's not yet ready" despite claiming that "they are known to be worse." No one said they're ready. They're using experimental technology and they're small teams. They already have beta implementations out if you want to test them. Yes, they're not polished and ready for consumers, is this your entire point?
Yes, for example, here's the full quote about voting including the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:
> Due to the requirements, it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no solution has been proposed that has been shown to be secure, verifiable, and private and there are still many open challenges.
There's simply no proposed system which is not worse than the status quo, and that's ignoring the additional challenge that even in the event of a major academic advance you'd have the additional concerns of having to be cost-competitive and establishing public trustworthiness before you could call it better. That kind of work is measured in decades.
The situation is less severe for file storage since you don't have as many attacks but, again, there just isn't something which is comparable on cost, performance, or reliability. I'm comfortable saying that's “known to be worse”.
And the true believers are the ones who will be lambo rich as long as they keep buying and holding, right? Just keep hyping up all these empty promises... some rube out there will buy into it.
Can you please support your position? Bitcoin promised a digital decentralized payment solution, and it delivered the first solution in history.
Monero promised anonymized payments, and they delivered the most private solution for untraceable digital currency.
Can you point me to the superior non-blockchain alternatives?
Credit cards, p2p payments in various countries, and cash.
All digital currencies in one form or another are inferior to existing financial instruments.
Not anonymous nor decentralized
> p2p payments in various countries
Such as?
>cash
Not digital.
>All digital currencies in one form or another are inferior to existing financial instruments.
Then please explain to me how do I make an anonymous payment online without a third party using existing financial instruments.
Random examples:
- Brendan Eich was purged for being found to have donated to anti-gay marriage campaigns. Therefore, donating anonymously is obviously desirable for many people as your current beliefs may affect your career when the general rhetoric changes. Similarly, anonymous donations, which are very common, may be your preferred choice simply because you don't want the receiver or anyone else to know
- You were diagnosed with a mental disorder in your home country, and you move to a different country. In the new country, the medication you were prescribed is not available for pharmacies to sell. All the alternative medications you tried do not work, and it's illegal to buy your medication that was legal in the other country. With non-anonymous payments, buying the medication through financial services would put you at a high risk, so you would be forced to sacrifice your wellbeing/mental health.
- Your government is aggressively hyperinflating your national currency or capital controls limit the amount that you can cash out daily to $X. Use of credit or debit to pay out of the country is banned. You want to use a decentralized currency that need not be approved by the government or any other third party that you need to trust. Anonymity is optional, but perhaps you don't want to risk having your digital wealth traced back to your real ID.
- You value your privacy. Maybe because you don't want companies to sell your data for machine learning algorithms to track your payment behavior and apply "price discrimination" algorithms to you. Maybe you believe that it is only your business who you pay and what you pay for, and you don't trust that any of these will not be used against you in the future if used via a centralized entity.
All based on real events.
>I think that's where we disagree
We disagree that situations that are not relevant to you may be relevant to others?
I love how the takeaway from this is always, "We need more private ways to exchange money!" rather than, "You know, maybe you should have opinions that respect the human rights of others."
A mere 10 years later you are insulting someone you likely don't know for 'not respecting human rights'!
Example 1: It's possible that eating non-labgrown meat will be considered a crime within fifty years. Who knows? Are you sure you want all of your current actions judged by some unknown future values?
Example 2: How sure are you that future society will agree with the current 'clump of cells' argument? Would you want to be on the record forever donating to abortion clinics? Your political ideology may not always be in charge either (Mike Pence).
Example 3: Society in a decade might consider us brutes for driving cars manually. How do we accept ~1/X000 high school students dying in car crashes, mostly by preventable causes (drinking, distractions, speeding, seat belt, etc).
We have not reached moral perfection as a society. Future society practicing moral relativism is not guaranteed. So, protect your future self, and protect your privacy.
It's a very good point.
It's not perfect for that either. There have already been cases where tokens were stolen and blockchains were forked to recover them. The very last thing I want for my money is for errors and/or malicious acts to be permanent and uncorrectable.
EDIT: it also protects you in cases where someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to make a transaction.
Best takedown of cryptocurrencies that I've seen. Explains, as succinctly as possible, the fatal flaw in the idea. I'm gonna steal this line for the future.
> and guess what, someone can hold a gun to your head and take it.
Those are contradictory statements. The government can absolutely reverse a criminal taking your money by arresting them and returning the stolen cash.
No. The only case when someone ever threatened to hold gun to my head and demanded money was taxation. With cryptocurrency it's possible to avoid that, because they don't know how much money you have. And even when they do know, it's much harder for them to take it, they need to know password.
Tax evasion is a crime and you should go to jail (you are exploiting the benefits you have received from society). But big companies find tax loopholes all the time and they go to white-collar prisons or get away with it anyways.
No reason why this can't be implemented on top of a cryptocurrency for anyone who wants it.
Just like banks were able to add that feature on top of gold and cash.
It is important to note that "they" is usually the company that charged the card, not the bank or merchant processor. It is very similar to receiving a refund.
E.g., courts can transfer ownership of your car from you to someone else for a variety of reasons, without your consent. How does this work in a blockchain world?
Your answer might be that the State (or the judicial system, I suppose) should have some special private key that lets them sign transactions transferring anything to anyone, even if the previous owner doesn't consent.
If so, why is that better than just having a plain old centrally controlled, publicly accessible database that the State signs with their private key? What does blockchain technology give you over that?
Currently, if you want to buy or sell real-estate, you have to record that transaction on a central government database. These "databases" used to be paper documents, but are now slowly moving to electronic systems. But they are still centrally controlled, and often even new systems are horribly out-of-date and require specialized real-estate companies to record transactions and pull transaction history, with hefty service fees, often several thousand dollars per sale.
If this real-estate system was based on the blockcahin, it could remove the government as a central source of trust and title companies that specialize in interacting with it would face far more competition. In theory, it could reduce transaction costs to buy and sell real-estate. Admittedly, this may solve some problems but create others, but the benefit is quite clear.
You need to connect that transaction to a contract and the contract in turn needs to be verified by some third-party and some process. In a develop country, that process is going to be tied to government.
That said, you should take a look at the current system. In many counties, it's still a large ledger of transactions in pencil and paper. In "modernized" counties, but with with extremely restricted access, made intentionally hard-to-access to keep title insurance companies in business.
Title insurance companies charge thousands of dollars on every sale to insure legal claims to property. Any trustworthy publicly accessible database, crypto-based or not, would be a huge improvement over the current system.
blockchain are immutable and public. therefore the government can’t be corrupt and steal/funnel people’s property like they do in the real world now. we can all scrutinize the transactions.
How does that work in a blockchain world? If I stole the car's digital title (via hacking, coercion, etc.) and after getting caught, I refuse to cough up my private key... I can effectively prevent any transaction returning the car to its rightful owner. At that point either the ledger is broken and useless OR you need a judge to be able to force a hard fork, and system is no longer decentralized.
Your second paragraph about having an immutable public record to prevent corruption seems like it could be solved more simply by just having the government continually publish a record of transactions, which anyone can archive or mirror to verify the government never tries to secretly rewrite the past. I.e., a public git repo could solve that, no?
More generally, modern blockchain technology brings a lot of capabilities besides this replicated, ownerless consensus that personally I see as building blocks for your architecture. Most of them are not necessarily exclusive to blockchain, in fact lots are cryptography capabilities, but are enabled or facilitated by blockchain architecture or by each other. These are things like:
- Immutability, which is the guarantee that you have a historical record of data stored, and it won't be further changed, accidentally or maliciously.
- Notarization, which is the ability to record and identify the authencity of the originator of the information, even if you don't want to reveal the infromation or the originator identity.
- The balance between transparency, anonimity and privacy: you have tools when designing your solution to make all transactions and information trackable or not. For example you can design it so you can record transactions without revealing sender, receiver and values and still guarantee the consistency of the whole, that there's no double spending or creation of resources. Or you can design it so you can track the whole history of a resource from its creation to its consumption.
- And the coins/tokens per se, particularly when you are not looking at them as general currency or toll tokens that you simply buy and spend somewhere but when you look at them as incentives where you can control how they are created, distributed, deposited, what it means to hold/deposit them, and how to spend them. You can change who the stakeholder is and monetize user's attention, his data, behaviour. I don't think people quite figured it out yet how to properly apply this for things like social networks, journalism or creative work ("patreonism"), but it's being explored and moving along.
Everything is still quite immature and moving at breakneck speed with uncountable new projects and ideas appearing all the time, which I see them as proof of concepts of the capabilities above, variations of them, of even new different ones. And lots of scams or profiteers wanting to get into the blockchain/ICO hype.
It's quite hard to find the balance between the exagerated hype and the naysayers (which I feel lots are just an exagerated reaction against the hype), but I assure you, it's way more than just what anyone with a CS background can come up with.
If we strip away the consensus mechanism, all that is left is a trivial data structure that anyone with a CS background could come up with. So, the question becomes where the real value proposition is in "blockchain technology" outside of the realm of crypto currencies. What are the things you can only do with "blockchain technology" that cannot be achieved with existing technology? It looks more like a marketing buzzword than anything that has actual merit for the average use case.