[cmdli]

I just don't see how that use case couldn't have been more easily served with a boring old centralized database. Why do you need a trustless system where all the users are either in-house or contractually obligated to not screw each other over?

[systoll]

Here’s a whitepaper on it https://uark.app.box.com/s/f7v6rk7xnwkjaetws7e1yaodomg883fi .

The merkle tree part of blockchains is absolutely valuable here… but that’s kind of where it ends. There’s no real consensus mechanism when there are 'merge conflicts', it needs manual overrides.

It’s more like git than bitcoin – and it helps them for similar reasons to why git helps us even when there’s a canonical source. People go offline and can’t sync immediately to the master store; people want to write events down now and deal with discrepancies later; disagreements are reified and can be formally reviewed, etc.

As best I can tell, it seems other aspects of blockchains just came along for the ride. The best open source code for their use case included it, and using it was better than building from scratch. The decentralisation is all but coded out – the central authority is the only one that can authorise transactions or resolve a 'merge conflict'.

[hunterb123]

Probably in logistics where many nodes of many companies need to record offline quite often.

Trucks, warehouses, resellers, manufacturers, all with their own systems and problems can record to the same ledger reliably.

[yashg]

And they can't on a Walmart owned database based system? You know the good old boring web application? HN is one example. Hundreds of people are using it, upvoting and commenting at at any given second. Works just fine.

[jiggawatts]

Federated database systems are totally a thing also! It's not even that hard to set up a pub-sub system, service bus, or whatever. There's entire ecosystems of vendors that have turnkey or SaaS solutions in this space also.

People just forgot that these things can be done with boring old technology in the excitement of doing something hip and cool.

[hunterb123]

It is a Walmart owned database. It's a distributed p2p database via a private blockchain.

Lots of end clients that go offline often and need to resync.