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Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020

7 points by snug ↗ HN
I've been getting further and further into researching blockchains, and how the entire ecosystem works, and works together as an ecosystem. However it all just seems to be about trading cryptocurrencies either from fiat or other cryptocurrencies, and there are some small things out there like gambling and basic games, but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.

Getting away from the building blocks, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, smartcontracts etc. What are things like Chainlink, Cosmos, etc. really enabling us to do today? I found Orchid on coinbase, but there seems to have been little movement past its initial hype. It would be great to have a blockchain that can do anon VPN service, but doesn't seem there today.

12 comments

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giantg2
Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.
snug
> For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses.

Yeah, IM looking for other examples, this has been kinda going on from the very beginning.

> I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for, but where are the real world examples?

I brought up Orchid, which seems interesting, any maybe promising at first, but the hype has died down. It's also not user friendly, as in I need both ETH for the smartcontract to work and OXT (Orchid Cryptocurrency) for the bandwidth I want to use.

I do think that blockchains can be useful, and will be useful, but it still seems like it's a solution looking for a problem, and maybe it's creating more problems first (i.e. need for smartcontracts, oracles, etc.)

davidajackson
A lot of it is the due to high expenses at this stage (SISP debate aside), see https://ethgasstation.info/ for example. Gas price is so high that adding any complex logic on chain is often really costly--there are few real world applications that merit this, and certainly for micro txs it's not ready. That will probably change but I think it will take 5-10 years before tech improvements + adoption start to really move the needle.
alexmingoia
Signed records/messages don’t require a blockchain.
giantg2
True. The benefit of blockchain would be the transparent and immutable record. The blockchain becomes an official check sum for the continuum of documents. This ensures no documents have been added or removed in addition to validating authenticity no changes (signed documents only cover these second two).
AlexITC
About what's being built, look into the https://identity.foundation, there you will find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication.

Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase how everything works: https://atalaprism.io/

Another use case where I know someone working on it relates to auctions for cars being sold by insurance companies, the problem is that external people is bribing employees from the insurance companies to win the auctions, the goal is to remove this possibility by using smart contracts.

On the previous case, it's a common problem on public auctions conducted by the government and I would love if they use a system where auctions could be audited by anyone, so that participants trust that no one is cheating.

alexmingoia
What about those cases uses a blockchain?

Any public/private key pair is a decentralized identity.

AlexITC
In the case of identities/credentials, the blockchain is mostly used as the decentralized timestamp service, used to know the relative orders of events, like when a credential was issued, which key signed the credential, whether the key was revoked by that time, etc.

Any public key could be seen as a decentralized identity but you don't have a way to certify if the key was ever rotated, where you usually go to centralized servers, a hacker may compromise a centralized service to change certain information about the public keys but it's unlikely it will compromise Bitcoin, these decentralized identities I mention are on practical terms, mutable, which is where the decentralized timestamp shines.

On the auctions, a trust-less smart contract is what shines, as you can get the participants to bid there, and in case of disputes, everyone is able to audit the smart contract to make sure the outcome wasn't manipulated.

alexmingoia
The purpose of Bitcoin is to have a fixed-supply digital asset that can be used as money, and which has no central authority to inflate the supply or censor transactions.

Bitcoin is not a building block to a blockchain. The purpose of a blockchain data-structure is to ensure the monotonicity/order of transactions in a distributed decentralized context such as the bitcoin protocol. A blockchain is just a list of transactions where each one references the previous one.

Orchid is a VPN network where participants are paid to route traffic with an Ethereum token. I don’t see any advantage to this over just paying a VPN provider directly. It does make VPN chaining easier, but you can still do VPN chaining without Orchid.

thinkingemote
>but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.

I don't think there are any, but what you will find is a lot of enthusiasm for the potential of it. Such hype also help sells various crypto currencies or raise funding for startups, but might not be the same thing.

It's hard to separate the enthusiasm for the pure technology and persuasive opportunism to make a quick buck. It has been around a decade now so the core tech should be less on the edge.

I would suggest that the lack of actual normal day to day stuff indicates something important.

[dead] sivler
Apologies for being off topic, Can anyone here suggest a good course/ book for blockchain?