Re:Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchai...
by sebmellen on Saturday October 24, 2020 @08:59PM
(#24883067)
The trusted source of time is the Stellar blockchain, and the last Bitcoin block hash, giving us a ~10 minute period wherein the photo must have been taken. Essentially, we abstract the time synchronization issue away from the photo taker to an external trusted source.
The Bitcoin block hash cannot be known before it's calculated, and a new one is calculated every 10 minutes. Works great.
Re:Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchai...
by vinni2 on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:37PM
(#24882460)
It also reminds of this paper I read which uses blockchains to capture the video frames from car dash cam for insurance purposes. I wondered about the same clock synchronisation issue https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8752067
Re:Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchai...
by michaelt on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:39PM
(#24882466)
Presumably each car handover is conducted with an internet-connected cellphone, making it trivial to get a trusted timestamp accurate to a second or two.
It's complex to synchronize clocks perfectly, but to within a few seconds is easy and there aren't many cars that could rack up an appreciable mileage in such a short time.
Edit: synchronising clocks is one of the hard problems in distributed computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization