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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

> I remain enamored with the special qualities of blockchains and would like to put them to use in a non-financial manner.

Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

I remember one of the original ideas was a trustless logistics system for things like shipping, but even then all the blockchain proves is that someone said they'd shipped you a box, you could still open it and find it full of rocks. And the smart contract stuff is very clever, but seems to be essentially techno-escrow except that you just have to trust your smart contract broker and the authors of the blockchain rather than your escrow agent, and also if everything goes sideways there's no legal system to interpret the contract "sensibly".

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> Can you think of any practical uses of a blockchain? I also think they're a fascinating concept, but I cannot think of a killer application for them.

Identity / authenticity. As we head into a world of digital (deep) fakes, being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important. Block chain seems well positioned for this?

I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful (after these short term stupids).

I'm not a fan of blockchain currencies mostly due to the preponderance of bad actors. Maybe some day, but it's a bit of a shit show atm, and not nearly as practical as originally hoped for.

> being able to authenticate the source of information/media will be very important

What would stop an actor with enough resources (Russia, China, USA) to put deepfakes onto the chain?

What would stop them from blackmailing service providers who act as gatekeepers / market platforms to put deepfakes into the chain?

Why would they even accept any single "Blockchain X" as the source of truth? Why wouldn't they just say "Oh that's the evil state Y, of course they're pretending that their fakes on their state-governed propaganda blockchain are authentical, whereas OUR blockchain tells the TRUTH!"

How would you correct honest mistakes on the chain? By a correction update? Then what would stop an evil actor (Taliban) who overturns the government, or takes over a giant corporation, from "correcting" an unpleasant truth, and rewriting history?

Once again, a social problem is attempted to be solved with technology. This never works.

> I think NFTs will settle down eventually and they'll be useful

What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

NFTs are nothing but a scam and provide no intrinsic value (other than cover for money laundering).

I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.

> What would be different, given some time, from now? What needs to change for NFTs to become useful?

I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses. Practical in the same way as identifying originals in meatspace. I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market), but suspect that'll eventually settle down. I don't see any issue with the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original if we (society?) all agree that it as an original, same as a material painting.

Maybe NFTs are a misstep on the way to that, I don't know, and I don't care to be honest (I'm not invested in anything crypto related). There's at least a useful idea there.

> I think being able to identify and authenticate original works is a good idea that has practical uses

I agree. I don't agree that blockchain, or NFTs, can ever deliver on their promises to contribute to that matter, because of their nature. How do you think would the blockchain, or NFTs, help to identify and authenticate original works?

> I believe there's a ton of hype and bad actors (as usual in a new market)

Can you name an example of another market where this was the case - i.e. bad actors were the majority of actors, and then something (what?) happened that made the market unviable for scams?

> the idea of purchasing the Nyan cat original

What does the "original" .gif of the Nyan Cat do for you that my copy of it doesn't?

> same as a material painting

I see 2 purposes of the "original" in a material world: 1. speculation, 2. paying the original artist. Since 2. isn't possible for e.g. the Mona Lisa, what remains is that it's a pure speculation object. You could argue that experts could distinguish the orginal Mona Lisa from any copy, but that wouldn't work in the digital world, where my copy of the Nyan Cap .gif would gif just as your original would.

What is the problem statement here, and how would NFTs, or blockchain, contribute to a solution here?

What does it practically solve that a normal cryptographic signature does not?

Even distributed trust doesn't need a blockchain; web of trust is an example of that.

This is all fairly irrelevant anyway as people do not do not check things before sharing them anyway, and/or trust authenticated information from untrustworthy sources (if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth).

> if Fox News put their reporting on a blockchain, it doesn't suddenly become truth

There's two problems / truths here; 1) the source (E.g. Fox), which is what I think we'll need to verify, and 2) the truth of the content, which is an age old problem with no technical solution I'm aware of (or would even believe if presented with one).

Right, but for (1), what does blockchain specifically bring that, say, a normal cryptographic signature does not?

I had an opportunity to get something going on Amazon once they started hosting Hyperledger Fabric (the stack that I used). I could not come up with a commercially viable service to launch on there.

I've got some fuzzy notions on identity management and other non monetary things but it still needs thinking through.

git is a fantastic usage of blockchain, no?

Only if you redefine what is usually meant when people say "blockchain" to mean "some kind of linked data structure with checksums", then yes, git is a fantastic use of a linked data structure with checksums.

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