So in short, it is an extension of the internet (trust layer) and it will change the world. So I don't think that's nonsense to say, but I can see how these claims would appear to be exaggerated to someone with limited exposure to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
First, for blockchain to work you need trustable sources. Problem is, when the aource is trustworthy, what added benefit comes from a blockchain?
Second, having a, theoretically uninterrupted blockchain from the first raw material to, say, a car would provide way to much insight into supply chains. I pretty sure companies do not want that.
Finally, and that is IMHO the haedest point to practically solve, you need to make 100 percent sure that the physical and information flow in your supply chain are never ever seperated. One single separation and your whole blockchain is worthless. And that risk is so incredibly high in the real world it's almost laughable. So, to make sure a given blockchain matches the physical product you need a trustworthy party to assure that. And then, what value does blockchain add?
Someday someone a lot smarter than me will find a use case. At which I will say how damn obvious it is.
I could see how this would be useful for medical device manufacturing, especially something like a pacemaker.
You can not otherwise too, right? A blockchain holds interactions/transactions not the data itself. Most blockchains are incredibly small in size. For example, the size of the entire Bitcoin blockchain is 215.84 GB [0].
Also, I see a possibility for licensing/DRM of some types of media IP.
That does not mean it needs to be distributed, though.
At the expense of time. So most real-world use cases (securities trading, vehicular networks, payments) fail when you introduce a 10-minute delay required for distributed confirmation.
For time-insensitive examples you've provided - supply chain and health records - the use cases work better, but who will dedicate the resources and mine the blocks to ensure that specific blockchain's survival?
Solution: blockchain smart contracts where code is law, more secure, trustworthy and transparent than any individual, bank, government or company.
Otherwise you have a synchronization problem between the upcoming blockchain token system and the existing government deed registry, and of course the government registry would take preference, and has a history of working just fine for lower cost.
This video is an excellent overview of this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmXIgLEAIE
I haven't seen blockchain systems as being more secure or more trustworthy. I see them being overhyped, subject to lax and magical thinking, and full of theft of coins due to hacks and scams.
Also we are just talking opinions here, a lot of things seem impossible until they are actually here and in our everyday lives.
You might learn something.
As for the yacht it's easy, the ownership is transfered from your address to the buyers address on the government's blockchain. :)
The DAO issue [0] clearly showed that "code is law" doesn't really work. It's people writing cryptocurrency software and running the nodes that are "the law".
[0]: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...
The blockchain can't (or at the very least shouldn't) overwrite legal infrastructure.
But let me ask you this: exactly what problem will a database/tree/file solve for vehicles or currencies? We can agree upon that what you are asking and looking for can't be answered or will get a reply similar to: we don't have that problem. You may have asked the wrong question though.
Let me be more precise and create a problem that doesn't exist but for programming purposes I want these requirements: many users should be able to read a (hardly) modifiable data structure that gets more resilient the more use it and that is a singleton who everybody has access to (call it decentralised if you will). Blockchain sounds like a perfect fit doesn't it? Now, when we replace the data structure keyword with OS and resiliency with speed, we can agree upon that this sounds like a decentralised operating system (Ethereum or whatnot).
Don't get me wrong. I don't see any problems that need to be solved with blockchain right now either. But clearly there is a trend in cryptocurrencies and decentralisation that seems to be important to a lot of people. There are tons of problems that need solving: trust misuse, censorships, privacy issues, advertising and so on. That there is a need for a change is obvious. That this change started with blockchain technology is good. I'm also sure cryptography is important to you too. Why not embrace an emerging technology that benefit your field of study?
Almost always a blockchain is (i) useless or (ii) something kinda vaguely like Satoshi's blockchain but really more like Git.
You wouldn't need such a system for cars to communicate in the presence of authority or in the absence of value. The former is the case for Lyft or Uber, the latter is the case if we have an infinite supply of cars.
But if one wishes to have peer-to-peer value (and cars ain't cheap) without a central authority (and Uber is evil) a proof-of-work blockchain is better for that than Git or a server run by some guy is.
There may of course be superior social or technical forms for this use case. But once you have added the qualifier that the system should be decentralised (and for everyone making a career out of pretending not to understand what this word means: I mean here that there should be no central point of control at the point of transaction) a blockchain may make more sense than some of the alternatives.
Bitcoin has a throughput of about 3 tx per second. Ethereum a little better at 7 tx per second. Confirmations are on the order of minutes at best.
Why do you think this would be a good idea?
Vehicle purchasing/financing paperwork.
Inspection tracking.
Yeah, they don't really though. They allow a few extremely specific applications requiring decentralized trust. The trust guarantees only hold if no single party can, even momentarily, control more hashing power than was collectively used to generate the last X blocks, where X is number of updates made since the data you want to tamper with was inserted.
To put it in concrete terms, pretend we have a blockchain for publishing PGP keys, and that your public key is 10 blocks down in the chain. If I want to maliciously replace your key with one of my own then all I need to do is rent a few dozen servers off of AWS for a day or two and use them to generate a modified chain that has my key instead of yours in the 11th block down and then rehash all ten blocks spending slightly more compute power each time than the original committers did. The network will recognize my fork as the authoritative one because it's got more proof of work. That's expensive, but it's certainly not infeasible.
This trust mechanism works out for cryptocurrencies because their only value is monetary. That means that people are incentivized to set up mining rigs to spend a lot of real resources on mining because they automatically get compensated. It also means that there's a bounded maximum amount of effort that a rational actor will spend to tamper with the chain, because there's a finite limit on the available profit to be gained.
Neither of these are true for PGP keys. Publishing a secure update to a PGP key database is not, in and of itself, a profit generating enterprise, meaning fewer miners and far less resources spent per mining rig. And the potential upside of successfully tampering with the right key is enormous.
The actual mechanism which produces the security guarantees in blockchains isn't cryptographic, it's economic. Tampering with a cryptocurrency's blockchain isn't actually impossible, or even difficult, it's just by definition more expensive than it's worth. When you try and move to an application other than financial assets the economics break down, the security guarantees go out the window, and all you're left with is an extremely inefficient git clone.
Consensus doesn't work like you're implying. If it did, I could spin up a peer on N+1 AWS servers, where N is the current number of peers on the network, and now my version has the majority of peers supporting it.
The whole idea behind proof of work is that it's impossible to fake. The version that took the most net computing power to generate is by definition authoritative. This means that the only way to make a malicious version of a chain is to actually, genuinely do more total work than the legitimate actors collectively did. The other side of this coin, though, is that it explicitly allows me to generate a malicious version of the chain by actually, genuinely doing more total work than the legitimate actors collectively did.
Or, since manufacturing an automobile is already centralized just use existing PKI.
Can you explain this step?
To avoid the verification process being gamed we split up the data and send pieces to random people across the across the network. So, someone may be asked "Is this article about Trump?" and the next person may be asked "Which state is this sentence about?". They may not even see the whole original article.
Asking humans to review the accuracy of all published text will never scale.
I don’t really understand your business. It’s a business, but also dencentralised. Are you trying to verify if news is fake or not? Why do you need a blockchain or machine learning for this? Do you have your own coin?
To do fact checking you first need to know what has been reported. We verify that a source reported that Trump was involved in a news event where he gave a speech, and convert that to data (For example: Trump, gives speech, text of what he said, location etc, with links to the sources). Anyone can then use that data combined with their own algorithms or external data to evaluate the quality of the data -- primarily by evaluating the sources -- to create quality scores for that news event.
> don’t really understand your business. It’s a business, but also dencentralized.
We are setting up a foundation to oversee the blockchain, but it really only exists to distribute the initial funds and to provide initial guidance, until on-chain governance can be set up. Companies and individuals run the apps that use the data on the blockchain.
>Are you trying to verify if news is fake or not?
See above. You can use the data for lots of things. Detecting fake news is just one application.
>Why do you need a blockchain or machine learning for this?
There is no way to ensure that the data is verified independently across the network, and stored in a censorship and tamper-resistant way without a blockchain.
>Do you have your own coin?
The coin (NewsBlocks Tokens) will be used by apps to pay for the data. The payments are then sent to the people who added the data, without any need for middlemen or news agencies, using Smart Contracts.
But I think Block chain can succeed. It matters less that it works, as long as the rich and powerful believe it can help then sustain their status.
(I can imagine some genuine uses, but I'm not interested in explaining them to people, especially not technical people with an axe to grind. So boring! Much quicker and easier just to say nothing, sit tight, see what happens, and find out that way whether I'm wrong or not. Most technical people are myopically technical anyway, and the technical side is just not the interesting bit here.)
Permissionless and trustless digital payments truly has the power to change the world.
It arguably already has with the rise of darknet markets and cryptojacking. Think of all the movies where a suitcase of cash must be delivered to a drop off spot, this now all goes away.
But the bigger picture includes making it much easier and safer for business which cannot take credit cards to accept payments. Think donations to wikileaks, porn and marijuana businesses.
Think about what it means for people to control their own money in case of a crisis. In places like Venezuela people are already using cryptocurrencies to avoid inflation, a corrupt government and to cross the border with their wealth intact. Charities like eatBCH uses cryptocurrency to send people money into the country in order to buy food.
Yet another step back, if cryptocurrencies would truly catch on and replace government backed fiat for general use, then it's not as easy to simply "print more money" to get away from financial troubles. Banks might then have to take responsibility for their actions instead of getting bailout after bailout.
1) Some people are ignorant;
2) Some people are trolls;
3) And some people have an agenda e.g. they're trying to get folk in 1) to buy something.
But if you're talking specifically about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin then I assume you're a bit salty because you think you missed the hype. Don't worry tho, we are still early adopters.
If you are a small producer and you send a shipment of your widgets to Wal Mart, and Wal Mart then say "what widgets?", the efficiency of their SQL Server installation isn't a benefit that will bring you much comfort.
If you are a small producer and you send a shipment of your widgets to Wal Mart with little rfid stickers on tracked by a blockchain system that you, the shipping company, border security, Wal Mart's warehouse and Wal Mart's stores run nodes for, you have a system that may bring you a bit more comfort. Running a node is simpler (or at least more efficient - pen and paper is simpler than SQL Server...), and the outcomes more encouraging for all participants, than some of the alternatives.
The question "Why not just banks using computers?" is where distributed timestamp servers came in and there is an extensive literature devoted to both the ideological and practical arguments around this. Briefly because banks are untrustworthy, expensive and slow. Banks themselves using blockchains is recuperation ideologically speaking, and FOMO technologically speaking. It is less silly to the degree that it does improve banking transparency and trustworthiness, but abandoning proof-of-of-work for the nonsense of "permissioned" blockchains restores it to being very silly.
> little rfid stickers on them ...
If the problem you're trying to solve is the one you say, you might as well just run a few servers across different organizations / companies which replicate between themselves, like certificate transparency does, or like the gpg web of trust does... which isn't a blockchain because it's vastly more efficient.
We could have one big CT-style log system host many applications, but as the number of participants grew, we would want some mechanism to prevent spam. Even if there was no outright spam, some users would generate a large volume of logs with questionable utility, and humans would need to get together to decide if those users should be blacklisted or what.
Ethereum gives us spam control via gas costs. I can't imagine a good, low-maintenance solution that doesn't resemble some cryptocurrency. Paying fees from a ledger isn't absolutely necessary -- we could proof of work to discourage spam, like iota -- but charging fees in a ledger seems like the better solution, and isn't that much more complicated.