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Comment by a2800276 | Hacker News Reader

"It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today."

Granted, Hedera is digital, but from the description in the link you posted it's neither autonomous nor decentralized. "Target and General Mills" may have access to it, but I certainly can't post a "50% off my hand knitted sweater"-Coupon to it. I may also need some convincing that Hedera users are able to verify the cryptographic integrity of a coupon without running "any computer".

"Ignoring web3, how could you solve this?"

Roughly in the way you describe, with a database. You even go on to say "that's essentially what Hedera does", I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

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The hedera network is autonomous and decentralized - TCB built on top of it. So to issue or redeem your coupon you'd need to participate in TCB, but as a result you'd be able to issue your coupons directly to consumers and then any retailer also in TCB would be able to redeem them.

> I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

Mainly being able to run this as a service and having assurance that the data you put onto it is correct, like a digital notary. And to provide assurances like no double spend and transaction ordering. A way to verify that something happened and not rely on an intermediary to decide that or to have custody of that data.

So for example Amazon could easily implement this, and do it at scale. Would you trust Amazon? To both keep custody of your data, ensure that it will always be available, that it would not be meddled with? Would an enterprise like Wal-Mart trust that?

That's essentially TCB's problem. Wal-Mart doesn't necessarily trust the TCB, either, even though it is industry non-profit. So TCB uses Hedera as its data layer - it does not own the data.

And how can Wal-Mart trust Hedera, ultimately? The governing council

https://hedera.com/council

> So for example Amazon could easily implement this, and do it at scale. Would you trust Amazon? To both keep custody of your data, ensure that it will always be available, that it would not be meddled with? Would an enterprise like Wal-Mart trust that?

Yes, far more so because Amazon will give you a legally binding contract with things like SLAs.

The problem with decentralized systems is that serious apps cost more to run but people generally don’t want to pay for things which don’t benefit them. You can ameliorate the performance and reliability problems of a blockchain by throwing capacity at it but there’s always the question of why you wouldn’t spend less to run your own private system to avoid the possibility of having problems caused by people you don’t even know about.

SLA is simply an intent to provide a level of service. If that can't be met, then there'd be an agreement on what the consequence of that was. Don't meet an availability SLA and maybe you get some credit back. You can't offer a best effort for non-repudiation of data. It either is or it isn't.

Maybe trust is the wrong word. Like - yes they might say they intend to provide this level of service, but the only way they can actually guarantee that level of non-repudiation of data is with cryptographic proofs and decentralized consensus and now you've basically got a cryptographic ledger.

PoW Blockchain isn't the only technology to accomplish this, either. There's a whole host of blockchain and post-blockchain technologies seeking to corner that market - a more efficient blockchain. Hedera for example uses the hashgraph algorithm.

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