I cringe every single time someone suggests blockchain in our space. Either it's easier with other tech (even public/private key tech doesn't require blockchain), or open to potential leaks/abuse in the future (tracking how everyone voted).
There are a lot of use cases, most even, where it's not a great fit, and there are other, better, approaches.
Disclosure, I work for an election services company...
I've actually forwarded a lot of that to the higher ups... There are places that it could be useful, I just feel that most cases it creates more problems than it really solves.
I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people.
The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.
I was talking about this a few months ago with a well-meaning non-techie, who suggested that Uber - the money-burning minicab firm with an app - was an example of a "decentralised system." More than that - it was a model for how blockchain could succeed.
I think they'd never thought about the concept of distributed systems of any sort ever before in their lives.
"It's like blockchain, because anyone can sign up to be an Uber driver!"
"Uh ... anyone can sign up to be a minicab driver."
or the very concept of "open source" only being possible with "blockchain".
When I bought my first screwdriver, a lot of problems seemed like they should be solved by tightening, loosening or adding screws to things. Because I had a screwdriver and damn it, I was going to use it. But often even when we have a fantastic idea, it isn't broadly applicable. Lots of problems I had couldn't be solved with a screwdriver, many more shouldn't be.
This came up for Certificate Transparency. CT uses Merkle hash trees to provide an immutable, cryptographically-verified Log of things it has been shown - in the original application those are X.509 certificates from the Web PKI ("SSL Certificates"). None of the component parts are even modern let alone unprecedented, although arguably it would be less practical without elliptic curve crypto, but nothing like CT itself had ever been done before, and its designers deserve significant praise.
And in the subsequent years as CT was successful we saw not only uptake of CT itself which was good, but also when there was some other problem people would propose solving it with this new magic toy - let's have Whatever Transparency. None of those went anywhere, because the unique recipe for CT is not a universal multi-tool, it solves one very specific problem very well indeed and that's fine.
Sure. Which is, as the parent comment pointed out, rarely one of the things people trumpeting "blockchain" need in the problem domain they're proposing to deploy it.
I don't need global PoW or PoS consensus for my health records.
I need something my health providers and I can agree is authoritative and as accurate as the data entry makes possible. The parent comment's "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database". Something like a shared git repo. Not like a crypto currency.
Without those other "negligible" aspects there is no incentive for anyone to run nodes to validate the chain. There is no blockchain. It's those very things that allow these systems to function.
I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that there's a loophole when you're dealing with people who are obsessed with doing "blockchain for ____". If they understood blockchain from a technical perspective, they'd understand that it makes no sense for their application.
You can still work with those people if you revise the definition for "blockchain" in your mind into something that isn't really a blockchain.
The actual bit that catches the eye of enterprises seems to be solving one of these two problems:
* reconciling all the data in one place
* having a tamper-evident ledger of transactions
The second just puts logs in a 1979-style Merkle tree, and the first is 100% getting organisations working together and doing the hard tech-debt slog of cleaning up your data and formats.
If you have both problems, your problem is enough of a human/business mess that applying a blockchain won't fix any aspect, but may well make it worse.
Occasionally "blockchain" will be useful as a buzzword to get funding.
To kinda-sorta paraphrase myself from last week[1], I suspect that when people say "blockchain", what they typically mean is that they think implementation details are the most important thing, and what the product actually does is just an afterthought.
>Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining
Why would I want ANY of these things associated with the system that manages my medical records?
I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected. Clearly there should be security to control who (my provider) can update them, and perhaps turn on the database transaction log to track what updates were made by whom and when.
I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons.
Encrypted, sure, but "cryptologically verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records.
Byzantine fault tolerance? Lol. My medical records get updated maybe once per year, by my provider, and no one has an incentive to insert false data.
Public consensus? See above.
Mining? Come on.
99.9% of the time when someone says we should use blockchain, they really just need a database, this is one of those cases.
>> I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected.
Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. This is the requirement for many type of official documents, even before computers were used.
>> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons.
Distributed here means no single point of failure.
>> Encrypted, sure, but "cryptographically-verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records.
Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption
>>>Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record.
Yes, and people have been building financial systems with relational databases using this journaling principle (updates and deletes handled by inserting new records and timestamping) for decades.
>>>Distributed here means no single point of failure.
Which can be done with most standard RDBMS or NoSQL databases and clustering/sharding. Not that the scale of medical records is anywhere near requiring any of this. Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain?
>>>Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption
For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them?
Make up your mind. First, you said these properties were useless, now you're saying these properties have been in use for a long time using relational database, which means they're really useful.
>> Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain?
No I don't. This thread's starter and I never said that these properties can only provided by "blockchain", neither did we said that "blockchain" should be used. We only said that these properties were useful and people wanted them.
>> For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them?
For example, a fraudulent specialist with access to your data can modify your prescription so they can steal money from your insurance provider and also take these extra medicine to sell on the black market.
I put "true" in quotes because there are so many competing definitions for blockchain. I agree with other commenters that there is an original definition, but people rarely talk about blockchain these days without having the Bitcoin model in mind.
People tend to use the word blockchain as a near synonym for cryptocurrency, but even as the article in this thread shows, it’s not the only application for it. A blockchain is just a type of data structure, very similar to a linked list, with _some_ additional integrity features.
A lot of the pointless debate and highly opinionated grandstanding that takes place around blockchain is centred around misuse of the word. As far as data structures go, it’s a perfectly reasonable one, and has plenty of uses outside of cryptocurrency. Sure it’s a buzzword, but politicising the use of a particular data structure seems just as pointless as any other kind of dogmatic evangelism to me.
You might come up with a reasonable definition, like "append-only ledger with a consensus mechanism" - but in marketing terms, "blockchain" literally only means "whatever I'm trying to sell you today."
And then there's weasel terms like "blockchain technology", which means "I can't even claim this thing is actually even a blockchain, but it's got a few of the same parts."
I don't think it's fair or relevant to talk about hypothetical marketing definitions of a blockchain here. You wouldn't be discussing the merits of a linked list by mentioning the creative descriptions marketers can come up for it.
I think it's entirely fair to discuss the marketing of a linked list when they keep calling it "blockchain" and assigning nigh-magical properties to it, which is what is happening here.
A blockchain is just a type of data structure. Cryptocurrencies use blockchains, but mining, trustless distributed consensus, fault tolerance, and all these other things are features of cryptocurrency implementations, not essential elements of blockchains.
Volkswagen quite publicly use that very solution from IBM, and there’s numerous other examples of it being used in supply chain management, which absolutely isn’t the only useful application of blockchains.
It’s not even clear if you know what a blockchain is, and your comments on its usefulness are just as extreme and misinformed as the evangelists who say it can be used to solve any problem under the sun.
Link me to the VW thing please? Last I checked there was literally no reason to use blockchain outside of cryptocurrencies since you get the same benefits just using GIT.
Looks like they want to use it to lower traditional auditing costs in developing countries. Not sure how the blockchain tech is supposed to help tracking materials or establish trust in such an environment but that's not really my field - presumably it adds a component of different people creating a digital paper trail that's harder to manipulate. That's an application compliance people in a few sectors seem to like these days, guess we'll see if it actually makes sense over traditional efforts in N years.
> Last I checked there was literally no reason to use blockchain outside of cryptocurrencies since you get the same benefits just using GIT.
How does the data structure of a git repo differ from a blockchain? The only difference I can see is in how it’s used. A blockchain wouldn’t have more than one permanent branch.
Consensus is certainly not a necessary element of a blockchain. A blockchain can just as easily exist under the control of a central authority, as it could under any other circumstances. Unless you mean that you’re still achieving consensus by simply trusting the central authority, which I guess is technically correct, but that’s not how ‘consensus’ is generally used in relation to blockchains, it’s generally used to refer to trustless distributed consensus.
What makes git different from a blockchain? A blockchain is a data structure, and a data structure doesn’t change based on who has permission to write to it.
Those terms don’t have the meanings you’re using. Being a data structure is not a distinguishing factor – try finding a common definition which excludes Git – and there’s no definition of the term which excludes modifications.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to say. The data structure is immutable by design. You can’t modify a git commit. But you haven’t answered my question. What’s the difference between a blockchain, and git?
Blockchain in general is way too broadly prescribed. The "how" blockchain solves a particular medical system problem is very important to consider. Many sources are selling the idea but not discussing tradeoffs.
I feel its become very fashionable to dismiss the simpler applications of the tech because of how unrealistically its been applied. It's so easy to do too. Look at the insane valuations, the fraud, and hype cooked up by marketers, and the whole thing looks very stupid. But its a mistake to let this get in the way of critical thinking.
There is a reason why the topic is brought up so often and its because among all that garbage there is genuine potential. It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems.
I predict the end result won't look any where near as exciting as it is today. It's likely going to end up being a flexible and boring set of auditing tools. But that's still going to improve the transparency and efficiency of many organizations. And give how archaic some of the processes around businesses are today -- those changes are still going to look revolutionary in their context.
> It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems.
We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling.
One of the common comparisons is the internet or, more specifically the web, but those really just highlight how inappropriate those comparisons are. In both cases, within a few years there were multiple examples of real problems being solved and businesses seeing profits from adoption (not just speculation) — and that despite far greater barriers to adoption.
Okay, let’s see: how does that benefit me in real, tangible terms? What risks does it have - for example, do users take on responsibility for fraud risk?
> Okay, let’s see: how does that benefit me in real, tangible terms?
It allows you to store and transfer value in situations where you either cannot obtain, or do not trust your available banking relationships. You also have much, much lower fees for international remittance.
> What risks does it have - for example, do users take on responsibility for fraud risk?
It has two primary risks:
- Transaction finality. This is a positive and a negative, of course.
- Risk that you improperly handle your private key and have your funds stolen.
> It allows you to store and transfer value in situations where you either cannot obtain, or do not trust your available banking relationships.
This is already a small percentage of people but it’s smaller still when you realize that it requires full access to the blockchain network and a solid local network of people who accept it and/or convert into local currency at low rates, not to mention that since the model is so well-suited to support oppressive regimes you’re really only talking about people who live in countries which have collapsed into disfunction but not authoritarianism.
> You also have much, much lower fees for international remittance.
From whom? What are the actual rates?
> Risk that you improperly handle your private key and have your funds stolen.
This is a big caveat for most people since “handle improperly” actually means “never use buggy or untrustworthy software, get mugged, etc. The benefits listed above don’t apply to most people enough to be worth that big of a risk transfer.
The rates are the cost of buying/selling bitcoin on both ends, let's call that 20 bps on each side, and then the cost of a single bitcoin network transaction, which is about 66 cents at the moment, if you're willing to wait 6 blocks [1]. So, to send $1000 it'll cost you 40 bps + 66 cents = $4.66. By comparison, international wires at your local bank will run you around $50 all in [2]. That's quite a savings.
> This is a big caveat for most people since “handle improperly” actually means “never use buggy or untrustworthy software, get mugged, etc. The benefits listed above don’t apply to most people enough to be worth that big of a risk transfer.
Sure, and those are real challenges of using cryptocurrencies right now. However, they're also extremely solvable problems and people are working on them.
> The rates are the cost of buying/selling bitcoin on both ends, let's call that 20 bps on each side, and then the cost of a single bitcoin network transaction, which is about 66 cents at the moment, if you're willing to wait 6 blocks [1]. So, to send $1000 it'll cost you 40 bps + 66 cents = $4.66.
Don’t forget to add in the currency conversion fees on either side since most people transfer money to use it.
Walmart charges $8 for the same service. There is some potential savings here but it seems unlikely to argue that Bitcoin’s enormous costs can be justified by the number of people who need to regularly do international transfers and, if everything is lucky, save a dollar or two on the transfers.
> Sure, and those are real challenges of using cryptocurrencies right now. However, they're also extremely solvable problems and people are working on them.
“Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so.
> Don’t forget to add in the currency conversion fees on either side since most people transfer money to use it.
Hm? That would be factored in already. If I wanted to send money to say, India, I would buy Bitcoin with US dollars and then send it to someone's account on an Indian exchange, where they'd sell it for Rupees. The conversion is already baked in.
> Walmart charges $8 for the same service. There is some potential savings here but it seems unlikely to argue that Bitcoin’s enormous costs can be justified by the number of people who need to regularly do international transfers and, if everything is lucky, save a dollar or two on the transfers.
I'm not arguing that international wires are the only useful thing it can do. It's simply a counter-example to the idea that there are none.
> “Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so.
It's already solved if you keep your money on an exchange.
> Hm? That would be factored in already. If I wanted to send money to say, India, I would buy Bitcoin with US dollars and then send it to someone's account on an Indian exchange, where they'd sell it for Rupees. The conversion is already baked in.
Right, but if you're comparing apples to apples, you need to compare the cost of, say, going to Walmart.com (or a bunch of other places) with $1,000 and sending it to someone in India vs. starting with the same $1,000 and shipping it. Unless the conversion rates for gating in and out Bitcoin are always exactly the same you need to measure the whole cost.
> I'm not arguing that international wires are the only useful thing it can do. It's simply a counter-example to the idea that there are none.
Note that I wasn't saying that there no things which were technically possible, only that very few people have a situation where it's advantageous to use Bitcoin. A possible modest savings on international transfers does not seem like a viable foundation for a decade of big world-changing rhetoric.
> > “Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are
> not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so.
>
> It's already solved if you keep your money on an exchange.
… so, you get rid of banks by creating a new bank, putting a “not a bank” sign on it, and hoping nobody will notice a) how many people have lost money by trusting Bitcoin exchanges and b) how quick the community was to blame them for the loss and saying that they were fools to trust an exchange?
> Right, but if you're comparing apples to apples, you need to compare the cost of, say, going to Walmart.com (or a bunch of other places) with $1,000 and sending it to someone in India vs. starting with the same $1,000 and shipping it. Unless the conversion rates for gating in and out Bitcoin are always exactly the same you need to measure the whole cost.
Ya, but that only argues for even more cost to the traditional method, no?
> Note that I wasn't saying that there no things which were technically possible, only that very few people have a situation where it's advantageous to use Bitcoin. A possible modest savings on international transfers does not seem like a viable foundation for a decade of big world-changing rhetoric.
Let's take a look at what you said:
> We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling.
I'd say I provided a single example of it being competitive. And I think there's a lot more value there that isn't being properly realized yet, but the international wire use case is concrete and immediately available.
I think part of the reason people don't see the value (yet) is that they are so entrenched in the existing system they don't even realize what it's costing them. You see people on this site complaining about companies like Facebook violating their privacy rights all the time by aggregating their behavioral data. Do you know who's been doing that for decades? Credit card companies and banks. Nobody bats an eyelash when they do it, simply because they've been grandfathered in, and we had no reasonable alternative to them. Cryptocurrencies are a reasonable alternative to the banking / credit card system. And they're one that allows their users to maintain genuine autonomy and privacy. It's fine if you don't personally find that valuable, but the chorus of people here whining about corporate privacy violations ought to if they're concerns are more than performative.
> … so, you get rid of banks by creating a new bank, putting a “not a bank” sign on it, and hoping nobody will notice a) how many people have lost money by trusting Bitcoin exchanges and b) how quick the community was to blame them for the loss and saying that they were fools to trust an exchange?
This is a common criticism, but there is a very important difference. You cannot practically remove your money from the banking system. You can practically remove your crypto from an exchange. This gives you a degree of leverage and autonomy you simply don't have when your money is at say, Wells Fargo. You have a meaningful choice about where to keep your funds when you're dealing in crypto. You can keep them on an exchange and incur that risk, or you can hold them yourself and incur the risk that you'll lose them in some way. But you get to choose.
That's an overly rosy comparison of money transfer fees. To make it a little more fair, it makes sense to compare against a competitive money transfer service rather than typical bank fees... For example transferwise offer transferring $1000 to Euro for $6.86 total fees, at the mid-market rate, including the depositing fee. Depending on the bank networks on either end the transfer can be instant. In a way transferwise operate like an exchange only it's FIAT-FIAT rather than FIAT-BTC-FIAT.
To compare you would have to take into consideration the bid/ask spread of the exchange on each end of the transaction for BTC, in addition to all charges on both ends. The bid/ask spread varies wildly from exchange to exchange. I'd be impressed if it were to cost less.
> much, much lower fees for international remittance
This is patently false. My bank, Fidelity, lets me send domestic wires (which are virtually instantaneous) for free. (Fedwires actually cost most customers virtually nothing.) International wires aren't that much more expensive, with the majority of the cost for small transactions being antifraud. In that respect, every cryptocurrency is orders of magnitude more expensive than the status quo.
> This is patently false. My bank, Fidelity, lets me send domestic wires (which are virtually instantaneous) for free. (Fedwires actually cost most customers virtually nothing.) International wires aren't that much more expensive, with the majority of the cost for small transactions being antifraud. In that respect, every cryptocurrency is orders of magnitude more expensive than the status quo.
Perhaps your bank is different, but googling "international wire cost" brings up links like these:
I do see that you are correct about Fidelity. However, what's clear is that Fidelity is an outlier. I don't know why or how they are able to offer that, but it certainly isn't the norm. And sending a remittance payment in Bitcoin is cheaper than any of the others listed.
I read your comment history... something about TRS-80s. So probably older than 40 and American. I am truly amazed that someone could live that long with economic means to post here and not know what a bank wire is!
Just google it though. It's the most common way to send moderate sums of money in the world. And yes, pretty much any retail bank or credit union will offer wiring, probably for a fee.
So, if, say you own some underutilized hydropower in China it's a good way to exfiltrate value from that economy and turn it into some slightly less volatile asset, like Ferarris or beach real estate in Florida?
unless you can spend the bitcoin, raw, then you now have two intermediaries: the currency-bitcoin on your end and the bitcoin-currency on the other end.
You can spend bitcoin. With regards to the two-intermediaries point though, that can be preferable to the one in some situations (e.g. international remittance).
I suspect not too many drug dealers or gun runners want to wait around 20 mins staring at their phone (with a traceable internet connection) for 2 confirmations before declaring the deal "done"...
I've read that it's done more like escrow. The buyer creates a new wallet, the seller verifies the amount in the wallet, and then the buyer hands over the keys when the merchandise is transferred.
The seller still needs to make sure the buyer can't get a transaction transferring the coins back into a wallet under their control confirmed before the seller can move them out.
(I'm now vaguely curious about how the financial transactions on shipping container sized sales of guns/drugs work. But I'm not about to Google _that_...)
* Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company.
* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.
* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.
These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.
All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.
Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.
Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.
None of which you have listed can be proven by blockchain as it has proofs for today. All would rely on external sources of truth which entirely live outside the verification of the blockchain. The blockchain in these cases would be an immutable chain of unverified facts.
* An anonymized reputation system is the equivalent of a transaction ledger. It needs no external source, as long as the involved actors agree to enter into evaluation of each other.
* Digital assets ownership ultimately only require external sources of truth for storage of whatever digital asset they intend to provide. I concur that this would be impossibly expensive to provide via an existing blockchain implementations, without an external point of truth, but still a technically possible feat.
* An entire company on the blockchain? Sure, it's not reasonable at the moment. It was just an attempt to paint a bigger picture. The fact that it's 'not yet reasonable' is why many people are starting to try. By the time it's 'reasonable', someone will have done it.
China's social credit score is centralized and not anonymous. So, there's not really much to compare.
An decentralized credit score would have you scored by your peers. An anonymized one would only be evaluable when you chose to use it.
Could it present some heretofore unimagined dystopian situation? Sure, but the question was whether there was an application, not whether it was a good idea to build it :)
Moreover, reputation systems aren't inherently dystopian (or all encompassing like a social credit score, ftm), or we wouldn't have the long standing real-world ones.
> Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company
This reputation system is one application I'd really like to see in the future. It's silly that we have sepearte silos of reputation (eBay, Amazon, credit scores, etc.) that are each controlled by a company. In our increasingly global world, who would we trust to govern this system? Seems like a legitimate application for a blockchain (including consensus).
Have you considered the downside of an attack against such a DNS system? That is a severe drawback to handshake that limits trust in such a system. This exemplifies the argument you are trying to refute, that using a blockchain as a solution is often poor design.
The link you posted doesn't even aim for replacing DNS, by the abstract and landing page it seems to be an experimental setup to replace the root zone which has been signed for nearly 10 years now. DNSSEC is a thing.
Don't really see what's hand-wavy about your parent comment tbh, the link you posted doesn't seem to address common scenarios like 51% attacks or even why our current system is flawed. The only tangible thing I can find in there is that they don't like trusting verisign - which is fine but really a weird narrative to demonstrate why the world needs that particular implementation.
It isn't hand-wavy. However, it is problematic when people propose solutions to fundamental design issues, without knowing the threat model.
In the link that was posted, a pollution of a distributed root zone will vitiate the entire Internet's DNS. That is the vulnerability, and there are many attacks that will achieve that for the link that was posted.
Do you mean outside of any involvement with currency, or just outside of simple transfers of currency? Because a lot of things are applications of programmable money, like derivatives, exchanges, and gambling.
Beyond that, some games are using public blockchains to track ownership of game items.
None of which seem to intrinsically need a blockchain or be more competitive for using one. All of the real volume in those activity classes not using blockchains would need some explanation.
For example, property records. Right now there are considerable checks and balances needed to ensure there aren't funny things going on with the books when they are locked away at night.
This isn't as pressing an issue in the US, but it is a massive problem worldwide. Central governments in some countries want to be able to track property without the record keepers stealing it.
I don't think we'll see this widespread for the next 20-30 years. But imagine when existing power structures have absorbed this tech and they can then sell it - like VISA selling a block chain property registry to countries where the money is auto transferred in local currency from one end user to another while communicating to the countries central bank... maybe with tie in to bio metrics for ID and transaction verification and automatic tax payments.
Hardly a disruption from existing nation state and corporate power structures, but definitively a disruption in the possibilities of what can be offered.
It's just computation and storage, so of course you can do it on a server. Three things blockchains provide: you don't need to trust anyone with custody of your assets, you have censorship resistance, and users pay for all the resources they use so don't need a business model just to keep it running.
Land parcel record management. Especially in developing countries like India there are often cases of 'double spending' motivated by bribery. having open distributed records would make use & validation of such records more robust.
Maybe if the transaction rate can be increased by a few orders of magnitude.
The biggest problem is that decentralized systems tend over time toward recentralization. That pressure will not go away, and it can only be fought against if there is no friction in the decentralized system.
As someone who is a CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases, I agree 100% with the conclusions of this post.
(finding actual convincing use cases in the medical space for this tech is hard)
so...why are you still the CEO of a medical blockchain startup? Surely you escorted yourself off the premises by now? ;)
But seriously, isn't this putting the cart before the horse? The usual order is "find a problem, build a solution", not "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve". How's that working out for you?
> The usual order is "find a problem, build a solution", not "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve".
Well, there is a whole industry of universities of finding a technology and then licensing it out or spinning a company off to do something with it. It may be that it's very hard to do if you don't have all the things a university does going for it, but it does work in some cases.
Another way to look at it is to consider that if a technology excels at offering capabilities in a certain domain, and a certain industry is known to require capabilities in a certain domain, if there is a good fit for it, it will probably eventually be deployed there. But if you can be first, there's likely money to be made. In that respect, I imagine a "CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases" is really just someone (or a small group of people) doing intensive research to try to locate the match if it exists and be the first to provide it. A gamble, but one okay odds given the potential payoff.
> there is a whole industry of universities of finding a technology and then licensing it out or spinning a company off to do something with it.
Kinda sorta, but that's a difference in kind.
Most university research tends to be "basic research", meaning that it tends to be focused on understanding how things work rather than developing anything that is immediately useful.
In the course of doing that, sometimes something immediately useful is developed -- but that's not the most common case.
This sort of research is not "finding a solution, then looking for a problem to solve". It's simply trying to figure out how our world works.
If you look at all their research, sure, but then you might as well include all their education too, which muddies it more. They definitely seem to also go for directed advances in specific areas. For example, battery technology. Usually, what's developed isn't something to replace the current best choice for most applications, but sometimes it does have features that make it extremely useful for specific applications (such as a very quick charge or discharge time). Was the university research intended to increase the understanding of the topic overall? Likely. Were they also hoping to develop something they could make some revenue from? Surely.
> Were they also hoping to develop something they could make some revenue from? Surely.
That depends on who you mean by "they". The researchers themselves generally don't give this any thought. The university administration, however, is always hoping for additional revenue streams.
There might be potential uses for distributed ledgers in an industry that is required by law to share your care history. This specific company not having arrived at a concrete product does not negate the potential upside. All it takes for them to do is develop a technology that can be of interest to an industry giant and become acquired. Im not saying this is the case here, but it is a real option.
ahh, I see... so more like speculative R&D, developing a technology to the point where it's saleable to a larger organisation. So there's no need for a customer problem to solve, it's just about building enough capability with the tech to become acqui-hirable, is that right?
not sure that works in many places outside Silicon Valley. I've been working in the startup scene in Perth, Western Australia, for years now, and the opportunities for getting bought areslim. A startup there needs to have a global customer base to stand a chance of making revenue, let alone equity growth.
Why is that not done at a tiny fraction of the cost using PKI? None of the parties are secret and there’s a clear line of ownership for every bit of information. What does a blockchain add other than scaling challenges and the opportunity to create an irrecoverable HIPAA violation?
We're only required to share the history of care you have with us, which is easily achieved with a standard database. We communicate with other providers using standard protocols that are implemented by every EHR system.
I struggle to think of a use case for this in healthcare.
That's interesting, and refreshing honesty :) thanks
If you don't mind me being more nosy, are the long-term opportunities in this exact line of business? (i.e. do you think that one day medical records will be routinely stored on a blockchain?) or is it more than developing skills and capability with both blockchain and health tech will be valuable in the future?
Tracking employee identities in The medical space should be done in a much more rigorous fashion, there are significant benefits in doing this on a public blockchain. Medical records MAY someday end up on a blockchain, but the benefits of this are more hazy and may never outweigh the switching costs.
I find the private blockchain technologies (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth) superior for these types of applications especially since Fabric implemented private data.
Because they offer consensus among multiple organizations.
Also is good for supply chain tracking.
But I understand why people avoid the blockchain space altogether. There was so many bad projects that were not suitable for the tech when all the hype was going on. Not to mention all the cryptocurrency scams. Fortunately a lot of the private blockchain tech has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
Yeah I used to think this too at one point, but it's much easier to just have multiple companies share a database- the idea that a consortium chain is somehow better than this hasn't born out empirically so far, in my opinion. Things are different with true public blockchains, they really do have some novel use cases.
I work in this space and I am hard pressed to see where blockchain could improve patient control of data. The real problem that I have is that health data rules and workflows are completely unlike any other type of data I have worked with. Ownership of data, attribution of information, interoperability, all of these elements are context dependent.
Centralised, independent storage of information so that all healthcare providers (with the patient's permission) can access critical records is a much simpler solution. It is still complex, but at least you don't have the byzantine bullshit of the blockchain sitting beneath it.
I recently worked on a yellow paper that outlines a data exchange with no centralized authority that puts ownership and encryption responsibility of that data back onto the users of the network. It's a data exchange not a blockchain because all data should be mutable and nullifiable. Blockchain is the wrong technology for so many things that it's been hyped for.
Perhaps your comment was meant to be tongue in cheek, but it sounds like this data exchange is a replacement for the World Wide Web? It's not IPFS is it?
Never have I seen someone so angry that a college student gave a vague talk, a startup made some exaggerated claims, and a university research project wasn’t completed.
I hope he doesn’t read hacker news. The vague talks, exaggerated claims, and unfinished research projects here would give him an aneurism!
To be generous to those proposing blockchain for health records I think their intent to suggest that it be used for the access/authentication layer of a more conventional secure database, but that's just a guess.
When I look at the first flowchart - there’s no way a PMI-certified Project Manager would say No to any question on the flowchart - so Blockchain it is !
It would provide an auditable, tamper-proof database with an immutable history, accessible by all health companies and not controlled by any one health company.
Cool.. what about the attached records, are they also accessible by all health companies? And if not, how do you know the ledger is really tied to the records, and if so, isn't this a breach waiting to happen?
Since the actual data in this scenario would still be hosted by the individual companies, what guarantee is there that they’d correctly log all access into this shared ledger?
When a technology does an unexpected thing, something you'd never thought would be possible, it is tempting to think that it is magic and it can do all the other impossible things.
Visually looks a little messed up. Could be improved IMHO paying attention to some standard typographic rules.
Do not use a mix of several fonts and sizes in the same article
Choose good fonts. I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available and put it in an low contrast gray tone. It puts a innecessary strain in the eye of your public
Cheap fonts have a badly designed character spacing. The same problem happens here. Some letters look more closer than other and this is plain wrong in typography. All characters must create an uniform word and all words must have clear boundaries.
Fix your line spacing. Needs more height here for the same reason.
Plan your design and take care of the flow of your text. Do not randomly displace the beginning of some paragraphs over the other paragraphs without a good reason. Split your page using some strong vertical lines. Not a vertical zigzag pattern.
I am personally grateful for every blog which does not go out of it's way to follow "standard typographic rules" because so many of them end up looking identical.
Editors have extensively tested what works and what not for thousands of years. You might notice that I didn't talk about the ideas expressed in the text. Is because the chosen format is too cluttered and distracting. I was expelled in the first two paragraphs and personally couldn't care less about what was written here. I'm not probably the only one.
The lack of knowledge (or care) about basic typography is particularly surprising among web page creators (one of the groups of people that produce more written texts currently). This hurts everybody in many unexpected ways. We enjoy gray text over white background for some reason, jumpscare videos playing suddenly when you enter a web page, diminutive fontsizes by default guaranteeing to damage your eyes, and too long lines of text that are just the incorrect way to do it (but nobody cares).
"I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available"
I am pretty much an amateur at making web pages, and after I used Garamond for something, I read an article about how terrible it is for the WWW because it's so thin and you should only use it for print. But I thought, hey, my phone has more resolution than early laser printers, so is this advice really still relevant?
Hard not to imagine a pompous Brit spraying saliva everywhere while reading this.
To the content - there is only one way to place data on the cloud that is impervious to all global state, corporate and nefarious actors. That is with a robust blockchain. Whether or not you think that is useful in medical records is another story.
I've been a medical doctor for 10 years and think that it is.
How do you use this and not allow for anyone with access to the block chain to also have access to all medical records? How do you secure this data without also securing the block chain access itself? How do you provide this security without effectively losing the usefulness of the block chain in general? How do you do this in a way that is effective in terms of performance/speed?
I don't have a side in this fight, and in general I absolutely agree with "solution in search of a problem", etc, but, if I had to think of an application:
All medical records are encoded as transactions between doctors and patients - that is, if person A is diagnosed with medical issue A by Doctor A, a public transaction is sent from a patient, via anonymized address, with a few bits of information:
- Amount (public due to nature of transaction on blockchain)
- Doctor (public due to complexity of anonymized destination addresses on blockchain, lets not solve impossible problems)
- Encrypted with the public key of the Doctor, the medical record
- Encrypted with the public key of the Patient, the medical record again
- Public, well-known "code" for some medical transaction, for example "code 1" could be a checkup, "code 2" could be a heart-transplant - I'm completely unfamiliar with the medical world so I suspect this system most likely already exists
- Encrypted with the public key of the Doctor, a random UUID identification code
This would allow Doctors offices to collect all their records by reading thru all transactions. Offices could validate that the patient correctly filed the transaction before accepting the transaction, and one can imagine software such that patients could easily file the transaction without having to copy the medical records, etc.
Additionally, using the public key of a doctor, one could verify that similar medical procedures were priced fairly compared to their own (ie: you could see the average cost of checkups, etc). This is most likely a naive assumption about pricing in healthcare, but maybe a good feature thanks to blockchain?
It would be particularly neat if it was powered by a contract, via something like Ethereum - You'd still need a bit of government help, but:
- Retrieval of medical data by the Doctors office is signed by a secret key contained in a contract oracle. When data is retrieved, it's signed with a timestamp indicating when the data was obtained.
- Laws requiring that valid signatures for valid timestamps from the contract oracle accompany _any and all_ use of medical records.
- Assuming the fines were steep and enforced, medical records could not be used for longer than a certain date, could be invalidated, and could be "observed being observed" by the patient.
In other words, assuming minor changes in the legal/medical system, the blockchain could actually be used to create immutable records of medical transactions, protect patient privacy, etc.
But if to accomplish this blockchain _also needs_ a trusted 3rd party and law enforcement... Then i'm not sure how it's better than any other application, except that it comes with a free globally available API, which is not actually a bad feature. Just not world-changing is all.
"I'm a medical doctor" is, in most cases outside of hospitals and clinics, entirely superfluous to the issue at hand. And it's frequently less relevant than you might think inside a hospital or clinic. If you hear someone saying this in any situation outside a medical emergency, I hereby give you permission to deduct 1 point from their debate score.
I say this having also been a medical doctor for 10 years.
> I hereby give you permission to deduct 1 point from their debate score.
I already did, because it looked like a clear invocation of the "appeal to authority" fallacy.
While being an MD can provide insight (depending on the nature of the doctor's practice) in terms of how things impact the practice of medicine, being an expert in a field only really matters when discussing topics that are in that field. Outside of their field, an expert's evaluation carries no more weight than anybody else's.
I cringe every single time someone suggests blockchain in our space. Either it's easier with other tech (even public/private key tech doesn't require blockchain), or open to potential leaks/abuse in the future (tracking how everyone voted).
There are a lot of use cases, most even, where it's not a great fit, and there are other, better, approaches.
Disclosure, I work for an election services company...
I like to provide people the NIST Blockchain Overview pdf. Particularly the decision flowchart.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf
P. 42 for the chart.
(But of course.)
I've actually forwarded a lot of that to the higher ups... There are places that it could be useful, I just feel that most cases it creates more problems than it really solves.
Thanks for sharing this. Really insightful
I prefer this decision flowchart ;) https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/93264913325659750...
I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people.
The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.
(author here)
I was talking about this a few months ago with a well-meaning non-techie, who suggested that Uber - the money-burning minicab firm with an app - was an example of a "decentralised system." More than that - it was a model for how blockchain could succeed.
I think they'd never thought about the concept of distributed systems of any sort ever before in their lives.
"It's like blockchain, because anyone can sign up to be an Uber driver!"
"Uh ... anyone can sign up to be a minicab driver."
or the very concept of "open source" only being possible with "blockchain".
Blockchain became a "new favourite toy".
When I bought my first screwdriver, a lot of problems seemed like they should be solved by tightening, loosening or adding screws to things. Because I had a screwdriver and damn it, I was going to use it. But often even when we have a fantastic idea, it isn't broadly applicable. Lots of problems I had couldn't be solved with a screwdriver, many more shouldn't be.
This came up for Certificate Transparency. CT uses Merkle hash trees to provide an immutable, cryptographically-verified Log of things it has been shown - in the original application those are X.509 certificates from the Web PKI ("SSL Certificates"). None of the component parts are even modern let alone unprecedented, although arguably it would be less practical without elliptic curve crypto, but nothing like CT itself had ever been done before, and its designers deserve significant praise.
And in the subsequent years as CT was successful we saw not only uptake of CT itself which was good, but also when there was some other problem people would propose solving it with this new magic toy - let's have Whatever Transparency. None of those went anywhere, because the unique recipe for CT is not a universal multi-tool, it solves one very specific problem very well indeed and that's fine.
So they _really_ mean git.
Right. When the biggest advances in blockchain are really in consensus.
Sure. Which is, as the parent comment pointed out, rarely one of the things people trumpeting "blockchain" need in the problem domain they're proposing to deploy it.
I don't need global PoW or PoS consensus for my health records.
I need something my health providers and I can agree is authoritative and as accurate as the data entry makes possible. The parent comment's "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database". Something like a shared git repo. Not like a crypto currency.
Without those other "negligible" aspects there is no incentive for anyone to run nodes to validate the chain. There is no blockchain. It's those very things that allow these systems to function.
I completely agree with you. I'm just saying that there's a loophole when you're dealing with people who are obsessed with doing "blockchain for ____". If they understood blockchain from a technical perspective, they'd understand that it makes no sense for their application.
You can still work with those people if you revise the definition for "blockchain" in your mind into something that isn't really a blockchain.
The actual bit that catches the eye of enterprises seems to be solving one of these two problems:
* reconciling all the data in one place
* having a tamper-evident ledger of transactions
The second just puts logs in a 1979-style Merkle tree, and the first is 100% getting organisations working together and doing the hard tech-debt slog of cleaning up your data and formats.
If you have both problems, your problem is enough of a human/business mess that applying a blockchain won't fix any aspect, but may well make it worse.
Occasionally "blockchain" will be useful as a buzzword to get funding.
To kinda-sorta paraphrase myself from last week[1], I suspect that when people say "blockchain", what they typically mean is that they think implementation details are the most important thing, and what the product actually does is just an afterthought.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699807
>"immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database"
>Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining
Why would I want ANY of these things associated with the system that manages my medical records?
I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected. Clearly there should be security to control who (my provider) can update them, and perhaps turn on the database transaction log to track what updates were made by whom and when.
I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons.
Encrypted, sure, but "cryptologically verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records.
Byzantine fault tolerance? Lol. My medical records get updated maybe once per year, by my provider, and no one has an incentive to insert false data.
Public consensus? See above.
Mining? Come on.
99.9% of the time when someone says we should use blockchain, they really just need a database, this is one of those cases.
>> I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected.
Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. This is the requirement for many type of official documents, even before computers were used.
>> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons.
Distributed here means no single point of failure.
>> Encrypted, sure, but "cryptographically-verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records.
Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption
>>>Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record.
Yes, and people have been building financial systems with relational databases using this journaling principle (updates and deletes handled by inserting new records and timestamping) for decades.
>>>Distributed here means no single point of failure.
Which can be done with most standard RDBMS or NoSQL databases and clustering/sharding. Not that the scale of medical records is anywhere near requiring any of this. Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain?
>>>Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption
For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them?
None of this makes any sense for medical records.
Make up your mind. First, you said these properties were useless, now you're saying these properties have been in use for a long time using relational database, which means they're really useful.
>> Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain? No I don't. This thread's starter and I never said that these properties can only provided by "blockchain", neither did we said that "blockchain" should be used. We only said that these properties were useful and people wanted them.
>> For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them?
For example, a fraudulent specialist with access to your data can modify your prescription so they can steal money from your insurance provider and also take these extra medicine to sell on the black market.
> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons.
Technically, you do. If you go to see a different health care provider than usual, you want them to access your medical records.
I don't see how the blockchain is the best solution for this, but the distributed part isn't really the problematic part.
If something goes wrong, you don't want tampered data, hence immutability.
But fault tolerance, consensus or mining are not a necessary part of blockchain either.
I put "true" in quotes because there are so many competing definitions for blockchain. I agree with other commenters that there is an original definition, but people rarely talk about blockchain these days without having the Bitcoin model in mind.
People tend to use the word blockchain as a near synonym for cryptocurrency, but even as the article in this thread shows, it’s not the only application for it. A blockchain is just a type of data structure, very similar to a linked list, with _some_ additional integrity features.
A lot of the pointless debate and highly opinionated grandstanding that takes place around blockchain is centred around misuse of the word. As far as data structures go, it’s a perfectly reasonable one, and has plenty of uses outside of cryptocurrency. Sure it’s a buzzword, but politicising the use of a particular data structure seems just as pointless as any other kind of dogmatic evangelism to me.
I had a good old rant about that previously: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/06/28/ibm-the-gdpr...
You might come up with a reasonable definition, like "append-only ledger with a consensus mechanism" - but in marketing terms, "blockchain" literally only means "whatever I'm trying to sell you today."
And then there's weasel terms like "blockchain technology", which means "I can't even claim this thing is actually even a blockchain, but it's got a few of the same parts."
I don't think it's fair or relevant to talk about hypothetical marketing definitions of a blockchain here. You wouldn't be discussing the merits of a linked list by mentioning the creative descriptions marketers can come up for it.
I think it's entirely fair to discuss the marketing of a linked list when they keep calling it "blockchain" and assigning nigh-magical properties to it, which is what is happening here.
Consensus certainly is.
Mining too
Mining simply refers to rewarding nodes that work to verify transactions. A blockchain can exist without distributed verification, and without mining.
Example?
Example of what? You’re quite clearly thinking about a mine-able crypto currency, of which blockchain tends to be an underlying data structure.
You want a blockchain without mining? You could set one up in a couple of minutes.
https://aws.amazon.com/blockchain/
Do you want a real world example? It seems to be getting some use in supply chain management.
https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/industries/supply-chain
A blockchain is just a type of data structure. Cryptocurrencies use blockchains, but mining, trustless distributed consensus, fault tolerance, and all these other things are features of cryptocurrency implementations, not essential elements of blockchains.
Nobody is actually using 'blockchain' in production except to tick the buzzword box.
That IBM page is just a puff piece and they have no clients using anything like that.
Volkswagen quite publicly use that very solution from IBM, and there’s numerous other examples of it being used in supply chain management, which absolutely isn’t the only useful application of blockchains.
It’s not even clear if you know what a blockchain is, and your comments on its usefulness are just as extreme and misinformed as the evangelists who say it can be used to solve any problem under the sun.
Link me to the VW thing please? Last I checked there was literally no reason to use blockchain outside of cryptocurrencies since you get the same benefits just using GIT.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/volkswagen-joins-ibm-backed-b...
Looks like they want to use it to lower traditional auditing costs in developing countries. Not sure how the blockchain tech is supposed to help tracking materials or establish trust in such an environment but that's not really my field - presumably it adds a component of different people creating a digital paper trail that's harder to manipulate. That's an application compliance people in a few sectors seem to like these days, guess we'll see if it actually makes sense over traditional efforts in N years.
Here you go.
https://www.coindesk.com/volkswagen-to-track-minerals-supply...
> Last I checked there was literally no reason to use blockchain outside of cryptocurrencies since you get the same benefits just using GIT.
How does the data structure of a git repo differ from a blockchain? The only difference I can see is in how it’s used. A blockchain wouldn’t have more than one permanent branch.
The project it links to is not used in production yet, it's just a pilot at this stage.
Consensus is certainly not a necessary element of a blockchain. A blockchain can just as easily exist under the control of a central authority, as it could under any other circumstances. Unless you mean that you’re still achieving consensus by simply trusting the central authority, which I guess is technically correct, but that’s not how ‘consensus’ is generally used in relation to blockchains, it’s generally used to refer to trustless distributed consensus.
How is this different from git?
What makes git different from a blockchain? A blockchain is a data structure, and a data structure doesn’t change based on who has permission to write to it.
Those terms don’t have the meanings you’re using. Being a data structure is not a distinguishing factor – try finding a common definition which excludes Git – and there’s no definition of the term which excludes modifications.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to say. The data structure is immutable by design. You can’t modify a git commit. But you haven’t answered my question. What’s the difference between a blockchain, and git?
Blockchain in general is way too broadly prescribed. The "how" blockchain solves a particular medical system problem is very important to consider. Many sources are selling the idea but not discussing tradeoffs.
I feel its become very fashionable to dismiss the simpler applications of the tech because of how unrealistically its been applied. It's so easy to do too. Look at the insane valuations, the fraud, and hype cooked up by marketers, and the whole thing looks very stupid. But its a mistake to let this get in the way of critical thinking.
There is a reason why the topic is brought up so often and its because among all that garbage there is genuine potential. It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems.
I predict the end result won't look any where near as exciting as it is today. It's likely going to end up being a flexible and boring set of auditing tools. But that's still going to improve the transparency and efficiency of many organizations. And give how archaic some of the processes around businesses are today -- those changes are still going to look revolutionary in their context.
> It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems.
We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling.
One of the common comparisons is the internet or, more specifically the web, but those really just highlight how inappropriate those comparisons are. In both cases, within a few years there were multiple examples of real problems being solved and businesses seeing profits from adoption (not just speculation) — and that despite far greater barriers to adoption.
You think that dis-intermediating banks for electronic funds transfer is not an application?
Okay, let’s see: how does that benefit me in real, tangible terms? What risks does it have - for example, do users take on responsibility for fraud risk?
> Okay, let’s see: how does that benefit me in real, tangible terms?
It allows you to store and transfer value in situations where you either cannot obtain, or do not trust your available banking relationships. You also have much, much lower fees for international remittance.
> What risks does it have - for example, do users take on responsibility for fraud risk?
It has two primary risks:
> It allows you to store and transfer value in situations where you either cannot obtain, or do not trust your available banking relationships.
This is already a small percentage of people but it’s smaller still when you realize that it requires full access to the blockchain network and a solid local network of people who accept it and/or convert into local currency at low rates, not to mention that since the model is so well-suited to support oppressive regimes you’re really only talking about people who live in countries which have collapsed into disfunction but not authoritarianism.
> You also have much, much lower fees for international remittance.
From whom? What are the actual rates?
> Risk that you improperly handle your private key and have your funds stolen.
This is a big caveat for most people since “handle improperly” actually means “never use buggy or untrustworthy software, get mugged, etc. The benefits listed above don’t apply to most people enough to be worth that big of a risk transfer.
> From whom? What are the actual rates?
The rates are the cost of buying/selling bitcoin on both ends, let's call that 20 bps on each side, and then the cost of a single bitcoin network transaction, which is about 66 cents at the moment, if you're willing to wait 6 blocks [1]. So, to send $1000 it'll cost you 40 bps + 66 cents = $4.66. By comparison, international wires at your local bank will run you around $50 all in [2]. That's quite a savings.
1. https://bitcoinfees.info/ 2. https://smartasset.com/checking-account/average-wire-transfe...
> This is a big caveat for most people since “handle improperly” actually means “never use buggy or untrustworthy software, get mugged, etc. The benefits listed above don’t apply to most people enough to be worth that big of a risk transfer.
Sure, and those are real challenges of using cryptocurrencies right now. However, they're also extremely solvable problems and people are working on them.
> The rates are the cost of buying/selling bitcoin on both ends, let's call that 20 bps on each side, and then the cost of a single bitcoin network transaction, which is about 66 cents at the moment, if you're willing to wait 6 blocks [1]. So, to send $1000 it'll cost you 40 bps + 66 cents = $4.66.
Don’t forget to add in the currency conversion fees on either side since most people transfer money to use it.
Walmart charges $8 for the same service. There is some potential savings here but it seems unlikely to argue that Bitcoin’s enormous costs can be justified by the number of people who need to regularly do international transfers and, if everything is lucky, save a dollar or two on the transfers.
> Sure, and those are real challenges of using cryptocurrencies right now. However, they're also extremely solvable problems and people are working on them.
“Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so.
> Don’t forget to add in the currency conversion fees on either side since most people transfer money to use it.
Hm? That would be factored in already. If I wanted to send money to say, India, I would buy Bitcoin with US dollars and then send it to someone's account on an Indian exchange, where they'd sell it for Rupees. The conversion is already baked in.
> Walmart charges $8 for the same service. There is some potential savings here but it seems unlikely to argue that Bitcoin’s enormous costs can be justified by the number of people who need to regularly do international transfers and, if everything is lucky, save a dollar or two on the transfers.
I'm not arguing that international wires are the only useful thing it can do. It's simply a counter-example to the idea that there are none.
> “Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so.
It's already solved if you keep your money on an exchange.
> Hm? That would be factored in already. If I wanted to send money to say, India, I would buy Bitcoin with US dollars and then send it to someone's account on an Indian exchange, where they'd sell it for Rupees. The conversion is already baked in.
Right, but if you're comparing apples to apples, you need to compare the cost of, say, going to Walmart.com (or a bunch of other places) with $1,000 and sending it to someone in India vs. starting with the same $1,000 and shipping it. Unless the conversion rates for gating in and out Bitcoin are always exactly the same you need to measure the whole cost.
> I'm not arguing that international wires are the only useful thing it can do. It's simply a counter-example to the idea that there are none.
Note that I wasn't saying that there no things which were technically possible, only that very few people have a situation where it's advantageous to use Bitcoin. A possible modest savings on international transfers does not seem like a viable foundation for a decade of big world-changing rhetoric.
> > “Extremely solvable” but unsolved a decade later suggests that they are > not in fact that easy and will end up making the cost even less competitive. People have been preaching that Bitcoin will take over for years but even most advocates don’t use it for a non-token percentage of their transactions because it’s simply not financially sensible to do so. > > It's already solved if you keep your money on an exchange.
… so, you get rid of banks by creating a new bank, putting a “not a bank” sign on it, and hoping nobody will notice a) how many people have lost money by trusting Bitcoin exchanges and b) how quick the community was to blame them for the loss and saying that they were fools to trust an exchange?
> Right, but if you're comparing apples to apples, you need to compare the cost of, say, going to Walmart.com (or a bunch of other places) with $1,000 and sending it to someone in India vs. starting with the same $1,000 and shipping it. Unless the conversion rates for gating in and out Bitcoin are always exactly the same you need to measure the whole cost.
Ya, but that only argues for even more cost to the traditional method, no?
> Note that I wasn't saying that there no things which were technically possible, only that very few people have a situation where it's advantageous to use Bitcoin. A possible modest savings on international transfers does not seem like a viable foundation for a decade of big world-changing rhetoric.
Let's take a look at what you said:
> We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling.
I'd say I provided a single example of it being competitive. And I think there's a lot more value there that isn't being properly realized yet, but the international wire use case is concrete and immediately available.
I think part of the reason people don't see the value (yet) is that they are so entrenched in the existing system they don't even realize what it's costing them. You see people on this site complaining about companies like Facebook violating their privacy rights all the time by aggregating their behavioral data. Do you know who's been doing that for decades? Credit card companies and banks. Nobody bats an eyelash when they do it, simply because they've been grandfathered in, and we had no reasonable alternative to them. Cryptocurrencies are a reasonable alternative to the banking / credit card system. And they're one that allows their users to maintain genuine autonomy and privacy. It's fine if you don't personally find that valuable, but the chorus of people here whining about corporate privacy violations ought to if they're concerns are more than performative.
> … so, you get rid of banks by creating a new bank, putting a “not a bank” sign on it, and hoping nobody will notice a) how many people have lost money by trusting Bitcoin exchanges and b) how quick the community was to blame them for the loss and saying that they were fools to trust an exchange?
This is a common criticism, but there is a very important difference. You cannot practically remove your money from the banking system. You can practically remove your crypto from an exchange. This gives you a degree of leverage and autonomy you simply don't have when your money is at say, Wells Fargo. You have a meaningful choice about where to keep your funds when you're dealing in crypto. You can keep them on an exchange and incur that risk, or you can hold them yourself and incur the risk that you'll lose them in some way. But you get to choose.
That's an overly rosy comparison of money transfer fees. To make it a little more fair, it makes sense to compare against a competitive money transfer service rather than typical bank fees... For example transferwise offer transferring $1000 to Euro for $6.86 total fees, at the mid-market rate, including the depositing fee. Depending on the bank networks on either end the transfer can be instant. In a way transferwise operate like an exchange only it's FIAT-FIAT rather than FIAT-BTC-FIAT. To compare you would have to take into consideration the bid/ask spread of the exchange on each end of the transaction for BTC, in addition to all charges on both ends. The bid/ask spread varies wildly from exchange to exchange. I'd be impressed if it were to cost less.
> much, much lower fees for international remittance
This is patently false. My bank, Fidelity, lets me send domestic wires (which are virtually instantaneous) for free. (Fedwires actually cost most customers virtually nothing.) International wires aren't that much more expensive, with the majority of the cost for small transactions being antifraud. In that respect, every cryptocurrency is orders of magnitude more expensive than the status quo.
> This is patently false. My bank, Fidelity, lets me send domestic wires (which are virtually instantaneous) for free. (Fedwires actually cost most customers virtually nothing.) International wires aren't that much more expensive, with the majority of the cost for small transactions being antifraud. In that respect, every cryptocurrency is orders of magnitude more expensive than the status quo.
Perhaps your bank is different, but googling "international wire cost" brings up links like these:
I do see that you are correct about Fidelity. However, what's clear is that Fidelity is an outlier. I don't know why or how they are able to offer that, but it certainly isn't the norm. And sending a remittance payment in Bitcoin is cheaper than any of the others listed.Is "wires" the technical term, as I can't find this at my bank.
I read your comment history... something about TRS-80s. So probably older than 40 and American. I am truly amazed that someone could live that long with economic means to post here and not know what a bank wire is!
Just google it though. It's the most common way to send moderate sums of money in the world. And yes, pretty much any retail bank or credit union will offer wiring, probably for a fee.
So, if, say you own some underutilized hydropower in China it's a good way to exfiltrate value from that economy and turn it into some slightly less volatile asset, like Ferarris or beach real estate in Florida?
You could use it for that, sure. Though i'd probably recommend the standard channels of offshore corporations for something like that.
unless you can spend the bitcoin, raw, then you now have two intermediaries: the currency-bitcoin on your end and the bitcoin-currency on the other end.
You can spend bitcoin. With regards to the two-intermediaries point though, that can be preferable to the one in some situations (e.g. international remittance).
The obviously convincing argument would be - after ten years - "something to show for it all."
That is, something that blockchain is clearly and obviously the use case for.
"Potential" goes only so far. Eventually you need kinetic.
Buying and selling illicit products on the internet.
Or in-person. Any criminal transactions, really (drugs, weapons, people, etc.)
> Where cash is still a better alternative.
I suspect not too many drug dealers or gun runners want to wait around 20 mins staring at their phone (with a traceable internet connection) for 2 confirmations before declaring the deal "done"...
I've read that it's done more like escrow. The buyer creates a new wallet, the seller verifies the amount in the wallet, and then the buyer hands over the keys when the merchandise is transferred.
That's smart.
The seller still needs to make sure the buyer can't get a transaction transferring the coins back into a wallet under their control confirmed before the seller can move them out.
(I'm now vaguely curious about how the financial transactions on shipping container sized sales of guns/drugs work. But I'm not about to Google _that_...)
Programmable money is not a thing to show?
so far its overwhelming use case has been selling people questionable ICO tokens, so you'll excuse me if I'm not convinced by the observable outputs
Interstellar BBS log
If you could tell me even one application of this technology outside of cryptocurrency, I'd genuinely be interested.
* Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company.
* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.
* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.
These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.
All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.
Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.
Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.
None of which you have listed can be proven by blockchain as it has proofs for today. All would rely on external sources of truth which entirely live outside the verification of the blockchain. The blockchain in these cases would be an immutable chain of unverified facts.
* An anonymized reputation system is the equivalent of a transaction ledger. It needs no external source, as long as the involved actors agree to enter into evaluation of each other.
* Digital assets ownership ultimately only require external sources of truth for storage of whatever digital asset they intend to provide. I concur that this would be impossibly expensive to provide via an existing blockchain implementations, without an external point of truth, but still a technically possible feat.
* An entire company on the blockchain? Sure, it's not reasonable at the moment. It was just an attempt to paint a bigger picture. The fact that it's 'not yet reasonable' is why many people are starting to try. By the time it's 'reasonable', someone will have done it.
* Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company.
There are about 500 articles every week about China's "social credit score" dystopia, and you want to put that on the block chain?
China's social credit score is centralized and not anonymous. So, there's not really much to compare.
An decentralized credit score would have you scored by your peers. An anonymized one would only be evaluable when you chose to use it.
Could it present some heretofore unimagined dystopian situation? Sure, but the question was whether there was an application, not whether it was a good idea to build it :)
Moreover, reputation systems aren't inherently dystopian (or all encompassing like a social credit score, ftm), or we wouldn't have the long standing real-world ones.
> Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company
This reputation system is one application I'd really like to see in the future. It's silly that we have sepearte silos of reputation (eBay, Amazon, credit scores, etc.) that are each controlled by a company. In our increasingly global world, who would we trust to govern this system? Seems like a legitimate application for a blockchain (including consensus).
DNS -> https://handshake.org
Have you considered the downside of an attack against such a DNS system? That is a severe drawback to handshake that limits trust in such a system. This exemplifies the argument you are trying to refute, that using a blockchain as a solution is often poor design.
Care to explain that hand-wavy downside?
The link you posted doesn't even aim for replacing DNS, by the abstract and landing page it seems to be an experimental setup to replace the root zone which has been signed for nearly 10 years now. DNSSEC is a thing.
Don't really see what's hand-wavy about your parent comment tbh, the link you posted doesn't seem to address common scenarios like 51% attacks or even why our current system is flawed. The only tangible thing I can find in there is that they don't like trusting verisign - which is fine but really a weird narrative to demonstrate why the world needs that particular implementation.
I didn't post the link. I'm just asking for details about an unspecified attack in your comment, or really any pointed criticism at all (:
It isn't hand-wavy. However, it is problematic when people propose solutions to fundamental design issues, without knowing the threat model.
In the link that was posted, a pollution of a distributed root zone will vitiate the entire Internet's DNS. That is the vulnerability, and there are many attacks that will achieve that for the link that was posted.
Do you mean outside of any involvement with currency, or just outside of simple transfers of currency? Because a lot of things are applications of programmable money, like derivatives, exchanges, and gambling.
Beyond that, some games are using public blockchains to track ownership of game items.
None of which seem to intrinsically need a blockchain or be more competitive for using one. All of the real volume in those activity classes not using blockchains would need some explanation.
I see it being used in public registry points.
For example, property records. Right now there are considerable checks and balances needed to ensure there aren't funny things going on with the books when they are locked away at night.
This isn't as pressing an issue in the US, but it is a massive problem worldwide. Central governments in some countries want to be able to track property without the record keepers stealing it.
I don't think we'll see this widespread for the next 20-30 years. But imagine when existing power structures have absorbed this tech and they can then sell it - like VISA selling a block chain property registry to countries where the money is auto transferred in local currency from one end user to another while communicating to the countries central bank... maybe with tie in to bio metrics for ID and transaction verification and automatic tax payments.
Hardly a disruption from existing nation state and corporate power structures, but definitively a disruption in the possibilities of what can be offered.
It's just computation and storage, so of course you can do it on a server. Three things blockchains provide: you don't need to trust anyone with custody of your assets, you have censorship resistance, and users pay for all the resources they use so don't need a business model just to keep it running.
Land parcel record management. Especially in developing countries like India there are often cases of 'double spending' motivated by bribery. having open distributed records would make use & validation of such records more robust.
Maybe if the transaction rate can be increased by a few orders of magnitude.
The biggest problem is that decentralized systems tend over time toward recentralization. That pressure will not go away, and it can only be fought against if there is no friction in the decentralized system.
As someone who is a CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases, I agree 100% with the conclusions of this post.
(finding actual convincing use cases in the medical space for this tech is hard)
so...why are you still the CEO of a medical blockchain startup? Surely you escorted yourself off the premises by now? ;)
But seriously, isn't this putting the cart before the horse? The usual order is "find a problem, build a solution", not "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve". How's that working out for you?
> "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve"
Sadly, I feel like this could be used to describe most applications of "blockchain technology".
> The usual order is "find a problem, build a solution", not "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve".
Well, there is a whole industry of universities of finding a technology and then licensing it out or spinning a company off to do something with it. It may be that it's very hard to do if you don't have all the things a university does going for it, but it does work in some cases.
Another way to look at it is to consider that if a technology excels at offering capabilities in a certain domain, and a certain industry is known to require capabilities in a certain domain, if there is a good fit for it, it will probably eventually be deployed there. But if you can be first, there's likely money to be made. In that respect, I imagine a "CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases" is really just someone (or a small group of people) doing intensive research to try to locate the match if it exists and be the first to provide it. A gamble, but one okay odds given the potential payoff.
> there is a whole industry of universities of finding a technology and then licensing it out or spinning a company off to do something with it.
Kinda sorta, but that's a difference in kind.
Most university research tends to be "basic research", meaning that it tends to be focused on understanding how things work rather than developing anything that is immediately useful.
In the course of doing that, sometimes something immediately useful is developed -- but that's not the most common case.
This sort of research is not "finding a solution, then looking for a problem to solve". It's simply trying to figure out how our world works.
If you look at all their research, sure, but then you might as well include all their education too, which muddies it more. They definitely seem to also go for directed advances in specific areas. For example, battery technology. Usually, what's developed isn't something to replace the current best choice for most applications, but sometimes it does have features that make it extremely useful for specific applications (such as a very quick charge or discharge time). Was the university research intended to increase the understanding of the topic overall? Likely. Were they also hoping to develop something they could make some revenue from? Surely.
> Were they also hoping to develop something they could make some revenue from? Surely.
That depends on who you mean by "they". The researchers themselves generally don't give this any thought. The university administration, however, is always hoping for additional revenue streams.
There might be potential uses for distributed ledgers in an industry that is required by law to share your care history. This specific company not having arrived at a concrete product does not negate the potential upside. All it takes for them to do is develop a technology that can be of interest to an industry giant and become acquired. Im not saying this is the case here, but it is a real option.
ahh, I see... so more like speculative R&D, developing a technology to the point where it's saleable to a larger organisation. So there's no need for a customer problem to solve, it's just about building enough capability with the tech to become acqui-hirable, is that right?
To a point. I cant comment on regards to this being the goal of the company above.
We should consider the following:
A startup can have a product offering and also be the product itself.
not sure that works in many places outside Silicon Valley. I've been working in the startup scene in Perth, Western Australia, for years now, and the opportunities for getting bought areslim. A startup there needs to have a global customer base to stand a chance of making revenue, let alone equity growth.
Why is that not done at a tiny fraction of the cost using PKI? None of the parties are secret and there’s a clear line of ownership for every bit of information. What does a blockchain add other than scaling challenges and the opportunity to create an irrecoverable HIPAA violation?
We're only required to share the history of care you have with us, which is easily achieved with a standard database. We communicate with other providers using standard protocols that are implemented by every EHR system.
I struggle to think of a use case for this in healthcare.
> How's that working out for you?
It's a slow process, for exactly the reasons you describe- in fact, I've quoted that exact same line of reasoning many times myself.
The reason to work in this area regardless is because there are definitely large opportunities long term.
That's interesting, and refreshing honesty :) thanks
If you don't mind me being more nosy, are the long-term opportunities in this exact line of business? (i.e. do you think that one day medical records will be routinely stored on a blockchain?) or is it more than developing skills and capability with both blockchain and health tech will be valuable in the future?
Tracking employee identities in The medical space should be done in a much more rigorous fashion, there are significant benefits in doing this on a public blockchain. Medical records MAY someday end up on a blockchain, but the benefits of this are more hazy and may never outweigh the switching costs.
Maybe it could be used to track the certification process for pharmaceuticals or medical software?
What blockchain technology are you going with?
I find the private blockchain technologies (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth) superior for these types of applications especially since Fabric implemented private data.
Why not just store the data privately in a traditional database? A blockchain needs to be public to offer significant benefits compared to databases.
Because they offer consensus among multiple organizations.
Also is good for supply chain tracking.
But I understand why people avoid the blockchain space altogether. There was so many bad projects that were not suitable for the tech when all the hype was going on. Not to mention all the cryptocurrency scams. Fortunately a lot of the private blockchain tech has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
Yeah I used to think this too at one point, but it's much easier to just have multiple companies share a database- the idea that a consortium chain is somehow better than this hasn't born out empirically so far, in my opinion. Things are different with true public blockchains, they really do have some novel use cases.
Case in point is Nightfall by Ernst and Young.
I work in this space and I am hard pressed to see where blockchain could improve patient control of data. The real problem that I have is that health data rules and workflows are completely unlike any other type of data I have worked with. Ownership of data, attribution of information, interoperability, all of these elements are context dependent. Centralised, independent storage of information so that all healthcare providers (with the patient's permission) can access critical records is a much simpler solution. It is still complex, but at least you don't have the byzantine bullshit of the blockchain sitting beneath it.
I recently worked on a yellow paper that outlines a data exchange with no centralized authority that puts ownership and encryption responsibility of that data back onto the users of the network. It's a data exchange not a blockchain because all data should be mutable and nullifiable. Blockchain is the wrong technology for so many things that it's been hyped for.
Perhaps your comment was meant to be tongue in cheek, but it sounds like this data exchange is a replacement for the World Wide Web? It's not IPFS is it?
IPFS was a technology we evaluated but decided it was not appropriate given specific requirements of all parties that will be using it.
I had to look up IPFS, because I confused it with IPoAC.
Never have I seen someone so angry that a college student gave a vague talk, a startup made some exaggerated claims, and a university research project wasn’t completed.
I hope he doesn’t read hacker news. The vague talks, exaggerated claims, and unfinished research projects here would give him an aneurism!
Of all the crazy applications that I've heard for the blockchain, medical records are easily the craziest.
Elections on a blockchain are probably in the same ballpark
To be generous to those proposing blockchain for health records I think their intent to suggest that it be used for the access/authentication layer of a more conventional secure database, but that's just a guess.
I've found this diagram to be extremely helpful for thinking about why/why not to use blockchain: https://i.redd.it/uu0qg8t28tq11.png (p.42 https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf)
One problem is blockchain is good for identity but not so much access/authentication.
When I look at the first flowchart - there’s no way a PMI-certified Project Manager would say No to any question on the flowchart - so Blockchain it is !
How would it actually solve a problem that couldn't be solved more conveniently with current standards?
It would provide an auditable, tamper-proof database with an immutable history, accessible by all health companies and not controlled by any one health company.
Ok... but a database of what?
If it's the access/authentication layer activity, I don't see what blockchain really brings to the table.
Cool.. what about the attached records, are they also accessible by all health companies? And if not, how do you know the ledger is really tied to the records, and if so, isn't this a breach waiting to happen?
Not an advocate for this tech, but the obvious answer is a hash so that someone could verify the data was added to the chain
I believe there were technologies before blockchain that enabled that.
Since the actual data in this scenario would still be hosted by the individual companies, what guarantee is there that they’d correctly log all access into this shared ledger?
May be of interest to some: In recent years healthcare has adopted centralized PKI in the Direct project. https://www.directtrust.org/
When a technology does an unexpected thing, something you'd never thought would be possible, it is tempting to think that it is magic and it can do all the other impossible things.
Gosh I love David Gerard....
I really appreciate being made aware of this author, so that I know in the future to avoid his writing.
He desperately needs an editor (an editor other than his spouse).
Could you please try to be less rude and also tell us something we can learn from?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Visually looks a little messed up. Could be improved IMHO paying attention to some standard typographic rules.
Do not use a mix of several fonts and sizes in the same article
Choose good fonts. I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available and put it in an low contrast gray tone. It puts a innecessary strain in the eye of your public
Cheap fonts have a badly designed character spacing. The same problem happens here. Some letters look more closer than other and this is plain wrong in typography. All characters must create an uniform word and all words must have clear boundaries.
Fix your line spacing. Needs more height here for the same reason.
Plan your design and take care of the flow of your text. Do not randomly displace the beginning of some paragraphs over the other paragraphs without a good reason. Split your page using some strong vertical lines. Not a vertical zigzag pattern.
I am personally grateful for every blog which does not go out of it's way to follow "standard typographic rules" because so many of them end up looking identical.
Editors have extensively tested what works and what not for thousands of years. You might notice that I didn't talk about the ideas expressed in the text. Is because the chosen format is too cluttered and distracting. I was expelled in the first two paragraphs and personally couldn't care less about what was written here. I'm not probably the only one.
The lack of knowledge (or care) about basic typography is particularly surprising among web page creators (one of the groups of people that produce more written texts currently). This hurts everybody in many unexpected ways. We enjoy gray text over white background for some reason, jumpscare videos playing suddenly when you enter a web page, diminutive fontsizes by default guaranteeing to damage your eyes, and too long lines of text that are just the incorrect way to do it (but nobody cares).
"I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available"
I am pretty much an amateur at making web pages, and after I used Garamond for something, I read an article about how terrible it is for the WWW because it's so thin and you should only use it for print. But I thought, hey, my phone has more resolution than early laser printers, so is this advice really still relevant?
Really sad seeing people bashing people who still run websites and blogs. No wonder everyone's using the spyware funded centralizes sites.
Editor for personal blog? Are you serious? It was a great read, we need it instead of tweeting 90 char snarky tweets.
Hard not to imagine a pompous Brit spraying saliva everywhere while reading this.
To the content - there is only one way to place data on the cloud that is impervious to all global state, corporate and nefarious actors. That is with a robust blockchain. Whether or not you think that is useful in medical records is another story.
I've been a medical doctor for 10 years and think that it is.
How do you use this and not allow for anyone with access to the block chain to also have access to all medical records? How do you secure this data without also securing the block chain access itself? How do you provide this security without effectively losing the usefulness of the block chain in general? How do you do this in a way that is effective in terms of performance/speed?
I don't have a side in this fight, and in general I absolutely agree with "solution in search of a problem", etc, but, if I had to think of an application:
All medical records are encoded as transactions between doctors and patients - that is, if person A is diagnosed with medical issue A by Doctor A, a public transaction is sent from a patient, via anonymized address, with a few bits of information:
- Amount (public due to nature of transaction on blockchain)
- Doctor (public due to complexity of anonymized destination addresses on blockchain, lets not solve impossible problems)
- Encrypted with the public key of the Doctor, the medical record
- Encrypted with the public key of the Patient, the medical record again
- Public, well-known "code" for some medical transaction, for example "code 1" could be a checkup, "code 2" could be a heart-transplant - I'm completely unfamiliar with the medical world so I suspect this system most likely already exists
- Encrypted with the public key of the Doctor, a random UUID identification code
This would allow Doctors offices to collect all their records by reading thru all transactions. Offices could validate that the patient correctly filed the transaction before accepting the transaction, and one can imagine software such that patients could easily file the transaction without having to copy the medical records, etc.
Additionally, using the public key of a doctor, one could verify that similar medical procedures were priced fairly compared to their own (ie: you could see the average cost of checkups, etc). This is most likely a naive assumption about pricing in healthcare, but maybe a good feature thanks to blockchain?
It would be particularly neat if it was powered by a contract, via something like Ethereum - You'd still need a bit of government help, but:
- Retrieval of medical data by the Doctors office is signed by a secret key contained in a contract oracle. When data is retrieved, it's signed with a timestamp indicating when the data was obtained.
- Laws requiring that valid signatures for valid timestamps from the contract oracle accompany _any and all_ use of medical records.
- Assuming the fines were steep and enforced, medical records could not be used for longer than a certain date, could be invalidated, and could be "observed being observed" by the patient.
In other words, assuming minor changes in the legal/medical system, the blockchain could actually be used to create immutable records of medical transactions, protect patient privacy, etc.
But if to accomplish this blockchain _also needs_ a trusted 3rd party and law enforcement... Then i'm not sure how it's better than any other application, except that it comes with a free globally available API, which is not actually a bad feature. Just not world-changing is all.
> I've been a medical doctor for 10 years and think that it is.
Can you explain how blockchain is useful for this in a more nuts-and-bolts way?
"I'm a medical doctor" is, in most cases outside of hospitals and clinics, entirely superfluous to the issue at hand. And it's frequently less relevant than you might think inside a hospital or clinic. If you hear someone saying this in any situation outside a medical emergency, I hereby give you permission to deduct 1 point from their debate score.
I say this having also been a medical doctor for 10 years.
> I hereby give you permission to deduct 1 point from their debate score.
I already did, because it looked like a clear invocation of the "appeal to authority" fallacy.
While being an MD can provide insight (depending on the nature of the doctor's practice) in terms of how things impact the practice of medicine, being an expert in a field only really matters when discussing topics that are in that field. Outside of their field, an expert's evaluation carries no more weight than anybody else's.
> nefarious actors
hey, it's me, your blockchain developer