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Ask HN: What is a real life use case for Blockchain?

5 points by Ilikeruby ↗ HN
So I was thinking of what was the difference between Blockchain and traditional DB.

After googling and reading up on it, the biggest difference is the "Decentralization" ( I will come back to why I put it in "" ).

The second difference is the immutability or the way the data is handled, you can only append new data/blocks to the blockchain. Once added it cannot be modified, edited or removed from the chain.

there are more features to the blockchain, I would like to focus on these and ask, what would be the point of me using this?

So the decentralization is nice in theory but all Blockchains are in the end hosted in big cloud providers. Why? Because it gets ridiculously large because of the blockchain and updating everything. The transactions between the different blockchains is also super slow. especially if there are multiple things that need to be appended.

So what I see is I have a DB which is scattered, huge and slow.

So can someone elaborate this to me?

11 comments

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gregjor
I recommend David Gerard's book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. Then you can ignore the hype and move on with your life. Other than various forms of fraud and financial manipulation no one has found a "real life use case" in a decade and a half. At least no real-life use case that has any clear advantage over traditional databases.
Ilikeruby
> ignore the hype and move on with your life

Ignored it as long as I could it never really interested me, but my company starts to flirt with the idea of blockchains and I was curious if it really is better then some traditional approach, turns out nope.

But thanks, I think thats a healthy mindset to have.

anm89
There's no productive conversation that hasn't been hashed out on this point literally 100s of thousands of times on the internet. Google it if you are interested. If you disagree then you disagree.
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_448
Finance, Healthcare and Land Registry are the domains I can think of. Blockchain is useful when history of the record is important and there is a possibility of fraud/tampering. So having multiple entities involved in record keeping that is distributed and append-only helps.

If a single entity is using Blockchain then the only usecase I can think of is for audit and, fault-tolerance and high-availability.

jqpabc123
audit and, fault-tolerance and high-availability.

All of which can be achieved in a more efficient manner without blockchain.

About the only reason I can think of for a single entity to use blockchain is if they wanted the *appearance* of decentralization.

_448
> All of which can be achieved in a more efficient manner without blockchain.

Agreed, but you never know when people can get on a hype train and use it even when there is no need.

> if they wanted the appearance of decentralization.

Even that is not required for a single entity. Why would a single entity want to be decentralised?

jqpabc123
Why would a single entity want to be decentralised?

Marketing. They might want to *appear* this way to help them sell something.

jqpabc123
So what I see is I have a DB which is scattered, huge and slow.

And beyond anyone's control. If anyone does gain control over a majority of nodes, then it is no longer "decentralized" as it's integrity depends on the controller --- just like any other db. Back to square one.

The central, crucial problem of blockchain is how to incentivize others to operate a node since it is not cost free to do so. The primary solution being employed currently is to "mint" crypto in order to reward the operators.

Is anyone aware of a truly "decentralized" blockchain that doesn't involve crypto?