Comment by LAMike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LAMike | Hacker News Reader

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For some business needs, the Blockchain makes no sense.

That being said, here's my devils advocate for your 3 complaints:

1.) Yes, you can make your servers redundant, and keep them up 24/7, or you can use the pay as you go model with the Blockchain. The difference is like keeping a car idling vs. using an electric car.

2.) Writing things to the Blockchain can be very beneficial compared to your own database. Ownership of offline things like bikes can be done with a Bluetooth/NFC chip and a bitcoin address. Also for online transactions, it provides a tamper-free source of truth.

3.) You argue that someone would still have to write the logic for the Blockchain apps. That's definitely true but the impact of a Blockchain startup might replace a higher ratio of jobs than you expect. (Like Kodak vs. Instagram numbers)

Give it time, it's still early to call it a bust just yet.

1) Servers costs barely anything to run these days. Heck I've got several just for messing about with code.

2) My patent is about something like this. Sure, it works, I actually did this with NFCs and an Andriod app. But it's a heck of a lot easier just to ask a REST API who owns this NFC. Tamper proofing can be done using pieces of bitcoin (like ECDSA) without using the blockchain. Then you're just back to using a PKI.

3) The question is whether there's anything actually new here. Computers came to wall street a long, long time ago. You'd think most of the gains have already been made. Back office has been decimated over recent decades. It might continue, sure, I'm open to that suggestion.

I'm not declaring a bust; I think something will come of it. But the things I've seen up to now don't seem to need it. Something like that DNS idea, that wasn't bad. But I do see a lot of business types hyping the blockchain, and I don't think it's entirely thought through.

currently creating a smart contracts application on a private blockchain and came to a similar thought as your #2

> using pieces of Bitcoin

ECDSA is great, have you run across any db's using it? Seems like a great component to extract from the blockchain craze

Well, you can just glue a signature to a row of data manually. As long as you know how to concat/Merkle/hash the info together it provides the same guarantees.

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