What applications of blockchain do you envision? I have not yet encountered a use that is better served by blockchain than, for example, an append-only DB.
Without giving you a monologue, I'll give you some food for thought in a very few statements.
1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally.
2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge.
3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem.
4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable.
5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation.
In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level.
On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime.
> we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge
> We have no way to deal with digital assets
Are you writing an ad for a new crypto platform that is definitely not a scam?
There are literally people on the Internet who are able to deal with data, media, information and knowledge without ever touching crypto. Amazing, right?
Because the question needs to be revised. It is not about what you can do with an append only database vs. blockchain. That's not reflecting its purpose.
* Insurances (e.g. your travel insurance) are contracts. They should be digital, standardized, on a public ledger, so that I can travel anywhere and prove that I have one instead of having to bring, a fakeable piece of paper.
* If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo.
* If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary.
There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.
As usual, all of these "use cases" suffer from the problem at the boundaries (see also Oracle problem), namely that you can automate everything on the blockchain you're using, but once you're back in the real world you no longer have any guarantee. Your new layer of abstraction just leaves you with a more brittle system.
* insurances: you still need somebody outside the smart contract that needs to connect it to what happens. You've just moved the trust from one place to another, and you're not better off.
* transferring money is faster in many countries than it is with (e.g.) BTC when you include the wait for the confirmation blocks. It's also bound to become faster and cheaper, while many blockchains (especially BTC) seem stuck with their processing time. Even countries with slow bank transfers now tend to have a fast solution, like Zelle in the US. Add problems like volatility of the cryptocurrency with the respect to the currency that actually matters, high (and volatile) fees, and transfers via cryptocurrencies is only attractive in a few countries and will only remain so as long as these countries do not improve.
* with art you again have the same boundary problem: the blockchain you use doesn't know what's happening, and only the law will resolve your conflicts.
> efficient, transparent and enforce standardization
So far the blockchain systems have been less efficient than non-blockchain ones they purported to replace, see the usual comparison with the Visa network for example.
Transparency and standardization are orthogonal to the use of a blockchain: using one doesn't mean you can't be opaque or follow any standard.
All blockchain proves is that you have access to someone's insurance key. While it would be a bit more difficult or costly than faking a card, it's not impossible. And most places I've been to don't even care about the card or the insurance number, they just ask for my regular ID and insurance provider to verify with.
> resell my phone
Two things:
1) The status quo could be that the new owner has the serial number of the phone. The fact that it isn't this simple (if it really isn't this simple) is because the seller doesn't want to make it that simple.
2) Insurance is particular to a person and their activities. For things such as aftermarket phone insurance the price you pay for the insurance will be based in part on your individual risks. This is obviously not transferable.
> If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too.
This is far from axiomatic[1].
Also, presumably you can move up a level of abstraction and sell the identity that bought the artwork for $10000. The blockchain doesn't need to know that the keys have changed hands.
It's preferable where there's a reason to distrust a custodian of the data. Of course, most of the use cases dreamed up don't fit that description, and much of the hype may have eroded confidence in the term.
Presumably the equivalent to the Brazilian notary blockchain would be a centralised entity (in this case, probably Growth Tech[1], or perhaps the central government or a key sharing scheme between the both of them), since that's a private permissioned blockchain.
IMHO, the whole private permission based blockchain thing is just a poor attempt at a very slow database. This concept really hasn't caught on, primarily because of the centralized aspects.
While we are very far way from this concept in the real world, I'd prefer my proof of identity documents to live on something that isn't controlled by any single entity other than myself. Sure makes them a lot more difficult to revoke or modify without my consent.
Even with a hypothetical maximally decentralised system, there's always a centralised chokepoint where a specific organisation (including and perhaps especially, a state) that you wish to prove your identity to chooses to unconditionally accept records from the system.
> What applications of blockchain do you envision?
"digital store of value" which is: not controlled by any centralized entity and thus immune to corruption of the said entity, easily transferable, fungible, easy to divide into sub-units. I have compiled various usage examples of such a technology here[1], but primarily it boils down to "shitty governments", which covers a vast portion of humanity.
Traditionally, this was Gold but BTC is better at transfers than Gold. Maintenance burden is lighter for BTC on the one hand because you just have to memorize 12 words, but it is also susceptible to hacks on the other hand compared to Gold.
Gold market cap is >12T$, which is nowhere close to its actual intrinsic value. A lot of that market cap is due to the collective myth we have bought into that Gold is a store of value.
If you don't see that, then probably you also won't be able to see the usecase of BTC. Moreover, if you do not see a need for a store of value in general (which is totally based on collective myths and less so on actual intrinsic values), then you are probably in a cute bubble somewhere.
They can handle 5 transactions a second while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with, even if you bribe or threaten all 5 lawyers? Those are some superhuman lawyers.
Remittance, anonymous payments, proof of authorship, decentralized DNS, international financial contract enforcement, provably fair gambling, immutable digital asset ownership, publicly accountable donations... just off the top of my head.
It takes little imagination to see many use cases for a computing system that no single party can control. It is the difference in a dictatorship vs a democracy.
If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so... and yet it is still a representative democracy which is a decentralized form of governance.
This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage. Even if they did most of the public would likely just ignore the decision.
It will cost something like $1m/hour to attack Bitcoin, but to even do that you would already need to actually convince 51% of miners to light their profits on fire for no reason.
Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well.
> "If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so..."
You don't understand how things work in the US. There are multiple checks and balances. And if push truly came to shove enough of those politicians would be assassinated to make it 49% (dear FBI: this is a hypothetical as to what a few members of the public would do, not what I, personally, would do). Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.
> "This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage."
No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.
> "Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well."
Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?
> Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.
No need. We distribute it on an IP blocklist and carry on, just like we handle bad actors on other decentralized systems like email.
Remember that chain splits have happened before and the minority chain and those that agree with its rules and history continue on. Eth Classic is still a thing.
Modern Eth was literally an -intentional- 51% attack to erase a hack. The majority agreed to erase that and on the main ETH network, it became so.
> No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.
Once again, we can easily detect and block nodes that are repeatedly trying to lie. It would be annoying, but so is dealing with spam. This is inevitable but manageable and without violence I may add.
> Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?
The community could ban all of their nodes and assign higher trust to nodes that did not participate. Any fullnodes that agree they are on a fraudulent chain could agree to go back to the minority chain.
If it happened often we would get better at doing this quickly.
In short, you can temporarily disrupt the Bitcoin network with enough money, but you will never be able to stop those that wish to continue maintaining an honest history.
> "In short, you can temporarily disrupt the Bitcoin network with enough money, but you will never be able to stop those that wish to continue maintaining an honest history. "
If your goal is to make regular people want to avoid using it all you need are sufficient temporary disruptions.
Bitcoin is by far the most secure and decentralized crypto to date.
If you have ideas on how to build an even more decentralized or secure money, then please do so. Regardless, there is definitely need for money outside of the control of centralized actors.
I want crypto to die in a fire. It is 100% a Ponzi scheme with no real world use case. If there was a use, we would have seen something useful come out of the Etherium project by now — other than a demonstration that majority group consensus can rewrite an “immutable” ledger.
1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally.
2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge.
3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem.
4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable.
5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation.
In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level.
On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime.
If you want to learn more, you need to dig in.