Blockchain (simplified) is a giant excel spreadsheet that you can never edit, only add to. I struggle to think of any applications that is a benefit for, and even then append only databases would already do it better.

One of the benefits is supposed to be decentralization, but people tout that as a benefit for things like house deeds, or identification, or whatever. Imagine how massive an append only excel file of every house with every owner change etc etc included in it would be. Then we once again only have the people who can afford to store that much data storing it, and we are back to where we are now.

It doesn’t really solve any problems, it just is a worse version of what already exists.

I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that it’s completely useless. I’ve never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn’t be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There’s no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn’t going to care that you’ve got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can’t unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you’re not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn’t useful for anything important, and it’s not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it’s a dead-end technology.

Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn’t require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.

A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Were the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player’s character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.

Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve’s ecosystem? How about a decentralised, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.

Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don’t require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organisations or individuals with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.

The “blockchain” I use on a daily basis is git, where the sha of the previous commit affects the next.

I thought Git was a blockchain. Isn’t it?

My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

To break that down further:

• “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
• “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.

You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.

So the actual tech behind could lead to some interesting ways to utilize it, but it’s admittedly squandered on cryptocurrencies and shitty NFT “art”.

Like, you could probably get rid of identity theft being an issue if you had unique tokens that would have your personal info like your legal name, birthdate, SSN, etc to ensure that it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you. Instead of entering in this info, you could just share the necessary tokens with the other party - so if a bank needed your info, for example, you could just give them the tokens containing the different info they need into their wallet. No idea how feasible that would be, but I do think there’s more actually creative and useful ways to utilize the blockchain tech versus just relegating it to shitcoins and ape art.

If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.

The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.

In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?

I see blockchain technology and it’s potential as analogous to a globally shared spreadsheet where nobody can go back and change history.

Now, just imagine what billions of humans could do if they could all work on the same spreadsheets without needing to trust each other.

• Many financial institutions would be unnecessary
• Ownership can be verified without need of paper and it’s risks of destruction, or trusting corporate computer networks. This applies to houses and boats just as much to movies and songs. Imagine commodity/utility music streaming validating your ownership of music via NFT ownership, not locked down by Apple, Amazon, or anyone else?

So Google, Amazon, Apple, and many other large companies in the IoT space are using a blockchain as a federated data store: https://github.com/zigbee-alliance/distributed-compliance-ledger

It stores the data needed for Matter [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) ] device attestation.

I think its an interesting use case on how entities that don’t particularly trust each other can operate a federated system. Accounts are linked to an identity out-of-band in order to have write permissions to the chain. When an account writes, all the readers of the chain have reasonable assurances of the author of that write. No company can inject false state as another company without that company’s guarded private key. All transactions are also auditable as an additional assurance the data isn’t undergoing a malicious act.

tl;dr; interesting use cases for tamper proof federated ledgers.

I’ve heard of a couple interesting applications (interesting doesn’t necessarily mean good)

1. I’ve been out of the industry for a couple years, but at the time I left both the US’s NAR and CA’s CREA were looking to create blockchains that would eventually hold an immutable history of every salable property in North America. The sales pitch is that no one will ever be able to hide things like flood damage or zoning changes if they’re all those events are in a trusted database. Carfax, but for buildings.

2. Several US states with legalized Marijuana have what are known as Seed To Sale laws. One company was trying to move into this space and eventually into all of agriculture. The idea being that if you buy pot, scanning a QR code would tell you what clone# the seeds were from, where and when it was planted, what pesticides/herbicides were used on/near it, when it was harvested, any tests it had gone through, etc.

Could be used for coordinating large scale decentralized projects. Say we want to organize logistics of food so that everyone gets some. After calculating need for each locale independently, Blockchain could be used for people to commit to, for example, bringing 4 crates of carrots to a location for shipping. Additional blockchain ledgers might keep track of space on the transportation vehicles etc. The ledger’s main job here would be to ensure that a given task (or a given cubic foot for the space example) is not double booked, and to allow interested parties to see where there needs to be more commitment in order to feed everyone (or fill up the ship in the space example).

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and would love to have other, more knowledgeable (hopefully!) opinions on this:

I’ve been dwelling on how we might be able to enforce some sort of set of rules or widely agreed upon “morals” on artificial general intelligence systems, which is something that should almost certainly be distributed in order a single entity from seizing control of it (governments, private individuals, corporations, or any AGI systems), and which would also allow a potentially growing set of rules or directives that couldn’t be edited or controlled by a singular actor–at least in theory.

What other considerations would need to be made? Is this a plausibly good use of this technology?

As we see here on the Fediverse, decentralization works fine without monetization using an actively anti-scaling append only database that emits the pollution of a medium sized country.

The only other good thing that came out of it is it increased the prevalence of digital payment system in the world, but I struggle to think of anything that would actually directly benefit from blockchain.

I haven’t been able to quite figure it out. But I keep having this idea that blockchain would be really good for journaling and validating elections. I haven’t been able to solve how you handle both anonymity and spam bots simultaneously because you can only give each person one vote. But the concept of peer 2 peer journaling sounds perfect for handling trust