Hello,
I have been researching about blockchains and stuff and it all seems like a big scam. It’s not sustainable and can be replaced by a simple database.
is there any legitimate use cases of blockchains or it is all just a big scam?
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Any application where you want to record something publicly without the possibility to alter it and in absence of a central authority.
A database requires a central authority so it doesn’t cover the same use cases.
The lack of a trusted central authority is key. If you have at least one authority you can trust just barely enough, the whole idea of a blockchain collapses. There needs to be an urgent trust crisis for this to work.
Also, if you have no trusted parties, you have a huge “First Owner” problem.
If we were to set up a blockchain to track the ownership of fluffy hats, what’s to stop me from seeing your fluffy hat, and quickly registering it as mine?
That is a good point. If there’s a dispute about the first owner, there’s no clean way to solve it. However, the current owner is clear, so we could just start tracking the history from the current time onwards, and ignore the history that’s shrouded in mystery and controversy.
That’s not the first-owner problem. I’ll try to explain in more detail. The problem arises when you’re using the blockchain as a “reciept”. You can only ever trace the ownership of the reciept, not the item it represents, without a trusted party.
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Say we made a blockchain that determines the ownership of all fluffy hats in the world. It starts at june 1st 2026. Lets just assume there’s a trivial way to perfectly describe fluffy hats that we can put in a token. Or hell, pretend it’s super complex, that changes nothing.
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You bought a fluffy hat in 2002, and made one for yourself in 2008. You own both, wearing one to bed when you go to sleep on may 31st, 2026.
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At 1 second past midnight, june 1st 2026, I make two tokens, one for each of your hats.
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I am now officially the first owner of those hats. You are suddenly a thief holding my property, even though it never left your head.
That’s the first owner problem. Without a trusted source, there is no way to ensure the first owner in a blockchain is actually the owner under the current legal definition (as in, you made the hat from homespun wool, it’s on your head right now). It gets even worse though, because I can even make tokens for nonexistent fluffy hats that haven’t been made. As soon as someone makes it, i’m already the owner.
The ONLY application for a blockchain with a trustless system is if the entire property is directly on the blockchain, and that doesn’t work.
Oh… Well that’s pretty bad. It’s like Wild West at that point. Anyone can make these fraudulent tokens. Someone would need to prove that there exists a connection between the token and the real world item it represents.
I guess therein lies the problem. These tokens shouldn’t represent physical objects. If you really want them to, you need a certification authority. If you can find one, it means that you actually can trust someone, so you don’t even need to use a blockchain for tracking these things. Why not just use a trusted authority to handle a traditional database.
So what does that leave us with? What can you do with a blockchain that doesn’t require the tokens to be connected to real world objects?
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It’s also a problem of ownership. For exchanges between banks, a blockchain is better because no bank would be the owner of the database.
Plus it’s safer because altering a database is usually trivial while altering a blockchain is virtually impossible.
That was… Very well said
this was a no nonsense answer, unlike the others discussing Cryptocurrency ;~;
Anything that requires a public, immutable database. Land registry would be one example. Notary public for electronic documents would be another.
You can leverage the majority consensus to create a trusted software build system. Each block would be a package build
If you have to have someone enforce the land registry or the documents, what is the benefit of the database being zero trust?
land registry
Yes! No more need for title insurance if ownership records are clear and public.
They already are in most countries. E.g. in Poland land registry is maintained by court system and any changes are made only as a result of court order or a filing made by a notary public, who has a real incentive to check all the documents, because they are on the hook financially for any false filings.
In other words, this is a solved problem without any blockchain nonsense.
Updates lag 4-6 months after filing, so not 100% solved.
also you can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
Usually, lag like that is due to an ancient codebase, database, and process setup. If you were to solve that, you still wouldn’t need blockchain. The software and process engineering does need careful consideration–almost all the stuff like this has had at least one major attempt to replace it over the decades, and it obviously failed–but again, nothing you would be able to solve just because blockchain.
But them the government can’t unilaterally take your property from you for a pittance under eminent domain. Who wants a system like that?
You can only guarantee the records have not been tampered with if you maintain a full copy of the records to compare. Even if you do have that full copy you will have a problem proving your copy is the correct one. A full crypto-verified ledger solves that.
If you empower e.g. every change filer (court, notary public) to run a node fudging records becomes effectively impossible.
Using it as a currency which requires no third party for transactions is a legitimate use case. See current payment processors vs Steam conflict for why it may be a good idea. There are a lot of times when it’s not a good idea either.
However the price must be reasonably stable and transaction cost low. Don’t think any of the major CCs qualify.
Some countries are considering using blockchain in the future for their land title registry.
I read something about potentially using blockchain the future while using onland (ontarios land registry service) but i can’t seem to find the page that mentions it.
Yes. Tracking stock shares would prevent dark pools and naked short selling to some degree.
That’s also why it will never happen.
In theory, yes. I can’t think of a practical example, but it’s basically a decentralized, public, write-only database. I’m sure there are niche applications for use as a public ledger or similar.
Honestly, cryptocurrency is an example. Some cryptocurrencies don’t have mining and so aren’t all that bad, and there is a use case for it, even if most of what we see today is hype.
Another example might be something like a way of proving something happened before a certain time. Like how people can send themselves sealed letters in the mail, and claim that the postmark proves that it was sealed before that date. If you put cryptographic signatures only into a public blockchain, that could be used as evidence that the document existed at that time.
Yes. Decentralised certificates (NFTs) for the likes of digitally owning something non fungible (think like a concert or plane ticket that isn’t tied to Ticketmaster, etc), or more commonly, cryptocurrency. A way of storing wealth digitally without anyone controlling it centrally.
I would argue against this stance, but not completely. The need for decentralized authorities only comes about due to a lack or trust or failure of the custodians of the product.
From your example, you could turn concert tickets into verifiable tokens (I do think this would be a good idea), and it would solve a lot of after market sale and validation issues. The only reason we have these issues in [checks current year] is because monopolies like LiveNation/TicketMaster have so throughly turbo-fucked the system that venues and customers cant do anything about it.
IMO, blockchains are a cool concept, and I love that cryptography is now a common topic of discussion because of it. However, its a solution looking for a problem and the problems up until this point are manufactured by the people selling the product or straight up ponzi schemes.
Most techbros trying to sell the Blockchain are just ponzi schemes/scams. It does have a legitimate use. But not for whatever the techbros are yapping about. It is essentially a decentralised database under nobody’s control.
Exactly, and such things that require or could be improved by decentralized systems tend to be managed by companies (monopolies, or close to it) that already are acting like enshitifying goblins instead of responsible curators.
The ticky part is that when these decentralized systems are involved, the true costs (power, hardware, network, etc.) are distributed and not easily collected.
You’d still have risks with a centralized db of the tickets which the tokens would solve.
Ticket master recently had an incident being hacked and that could literally happen to any company.
Granted a user could be hacked as well because of improper storage of the NFT. To really solve the problem it would also require everyone to be using good hardware wallets which I think is where things are going long term, but it’s yet another complicated step which will slow adoption.
One day having a hardware wallet will just be normal.
Like most of the tech bro industry, they take something with real value, completely misunderstand it, creates fake value, pumps.
LLMs are awesome, but the current AI industry is terrible and completely misses the actual value of LLMs.
NFTs are actually a great way to digitally prove ownership, basically the future of digital ownership certificates.
Crypto is a way to make money for the people by the people, and not for the rich, by the rich, through the people.
Blockchain is the core idea that makes crypto and NFTs possible. You can think of it as a decentralized DB, it’s useful because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Imagine that the government decided to print a million dollars and give it to some politician, it’s small enough to not be noticed by the market, but it still devalues the money. They could only do it because they own the money management system. In Blockchain each transaction is confirmed by external parties (often multiple ones) and it has to align with the already existing db (which everyone has a copy of) so in that scenario if the government tries to “print” money it will be conflicting with the existing db and it will not be accepted, so they will have to either continue with an incompatible db (making it as worthless as monopoly money) or cancel the transactions by realigning with the common db.
Blockchain is not meant to be a database like the ones in web servers, it is meant to be a database for a consensus of users.
because it means that the majority controls the data and not a centralized authority.
Only until it doesn’t. A centralized authority could overwhelm and become the majority. Or more concretely, the US government has the resources to more than double the contribution to Bitcoin, thus giving it complete control.
Nothing is perfect, but once a blockchain network is big enough it becomes near impossible to overtake.
Maybe currently, if the US government really wants to, they could dedicate a few trillion dollars to take over the bitcoin network. But it would make no sense to put that much effort into what would be mostly pointless. And if bitcoin ever reaches a point where it is a full on threat to the dollar then it’s network would probably be too big for any nation to overtake alone.
So you are not wrong in theory, but in practice it is near impossible.
The money required to double the bitcoin hash rate and maintain double is immense. It’s specialized hardware that would need to be manufactured (lead time while network continues to grow, plus who even has the capacity to do that other than TSMC or Samsung) and the network would see it coming and have a chance to do something about it.
It was a risk when it was smaller, but the ability to pull an attack off like that now and maintain the attack isn’t practically in the realm of possibilities. (Edit and that’s not even getting into where they’d get the power to power the network which is estimated at 173Twh a year and the need to keep expanding that power to maintain the attack in adversarial conditions.)
Attacking the network in other ways via corrupt laws with multi government cooperation would be far easier.
It’s cheaper and easier to manipulate the stock markets through politics than to build/take over the majority of the distributed ledger.
People will easily list a lot of credible legitimate usecases
that are hypothetical
and have remained hypothetical for 18 years.
Being on Lemmy, I like the idea of decentralized and permissionless stuff, including money. The problem I have with crypto is that they’re either clearly scams (Trumpcoin, Melaniacoin etc) or they were not intended as a scam but the market fails to fairly price them because they speculate (e.g. Bitcoin).
Also I don’t understand why people keep insisting in buying Bitcoin when the energy to “produce” it is enormous and is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions when there are greener cryptocurrencies.
The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.
If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.
But with that system, you would lose these features:
- partially-anonymous participants
- service of all customers, even illegal ones
- immunity to court orders
Besides money laundering, you mean? Not as such.
Merkle Trees were thought up in the 70ies or so. A blockchain is a Merkle Tree without branches. They are used in a number of application; for example git which predates bitcoin.
The actual innovation behind bitcoin is mining. A payment system needs someone who runs it. Bitcoin introduced a way for these people to get paid by creating new currency for themselves. That way, there is no single entity in charge. There is no contractual relation that would require government enforcement.
If a Merkle Tree is the only thing a blockchain is to you, then it has legit uses. But that was already widely used before a simplified version became called blockchain.
If you’re thinking about a bitcoin-type blockchain, then evading government oversight is its sole use. The technical overhead and the economic inefficiencies exist only to obscure identities and legal responsibilities.
Not really, blockchain technically has been around for almost two decades and there still isn’t a good use for them. It’s very interesting piece of tech that could potentially be useful, but still isn’t in a practical sense.
Think of it this way, blockchain tech is a solution looking for a problem to solve rather than the other way around.
Basically, no. At least, not until everyone has the knowledge and resources to run their own compute, which is never.
Decentralized systems must be accessible and maintainable by the majority. Blockchain is neither of these. It’s also why the internet moved to platforms rather than remaining as many niche forums.
Additionally, network effects and economies of scale make decentralized systems difficult. See Lemmy. Even here, World is the biggest because it’s simpler and easier to do everything in one place. People don’t have to make decisions. People don’t have to do their own work.
Basically, human psychology and economics suck
since a lot of replies branched towards Cryptocurrency, which is where blockchains are implemented the most in. But it isn’t the sole purpose of blockchain.
It’s a distributed, append only(theoretically), tamper proof data structure. Look up merkle tree, certificate distribution, etc. These comes in different shapes and sizes for storing transaction logs, to keeping track of online identity and false impersonation.
You can implement a blockchain that might not get as power hungry as crypto block chains(because mining), and it’s a cool solution in distributed systems
It absolutely can’t be replaced by a simple database, saying that makes me question that you truly understand the technology. Here’s the important question, who owns the database and how do you know you can trust them?
Would you trust me to manage a database that holds your money? What about someone who’s actively opposing you? How about a foreign nation? That’s the thing blockchains solve, a decentralized 0-trust way to have an append only ledger, yes a database can be an append only ledger, but it can’t be decentralized or 0-trust, that’s the important thing here.
Let me give you a very recent example, Steam has been censored, and has had to remove certain games from their catalog, this happened because PayPal and other payment providers forced their hand. This is the sort of problems that arise from having someone own the database, they can dictate what you do or don’t. Let me be extra clear, this sort of censorship is essentially impossible in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because no one controls the database.
