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Comment by mradek | Hacker News Reader

How about just take the blockchain which is honestly cool on it’s own (distributed ledger) and use it for REAL WORLD applications like protocols for various types of work that can be easily audited and provide the best quality service.

Supply chain visibility, transportation and logistics, reviews, bidding, work history (commercial activity), etc.

I have some supply chain optimization experience and if I had the resources and connections I’d love to build out a blockchain based scheduling and fulfillment protocol.

Enough with the gorilla png and rug pulls.

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Because mining, staking, and various consensus protocols along those lines are useless for these applications?

Or maybe worse. A blockchain is a distributed system and is subject to the CAP theorem. And they handle it pretty badly: they are global and they are utterly intolerant of network partitions. They handle consistency by throwing out conflicting transactions, which is probably not what you want for something like supply chain visibility.

Just use a database.

> just use a database

Totally. But I’m thinking of protocols that give people insight into what’s happening and a way for them to join that protocol and start working.

Like imagine activity pub (mastodon protocol) or xmpp - both are protocols to enable real time comms.

If there were protocols to run your business that you could be a part of, and attempt to fix the issues of loads getting cancelled last minute due to dispatching errors, etc. stakeholders would know where the fault lies and payments could be adjusted based on where things went well or wrong.

Can you imagine trying to chat using an XMPP-like protocol on a blockchain? It won’t work hilariously poorly.

In any event, sticking real world logic on a blockchain is no more open than sticking code on GitHub. You still can’t interact with someone else’s deployment unless they let you.

Plenty of companies have spent the last decade trying to find alternative uses for the blockchain and failed.

I know people who worked at large FIs that were dumping millions of dollars into blockchain projects led by smart people (long before they'd ever admit it). Nothing ever came of it.

rocket engines are much cooler, if you ask me.

But I'm not completely sure we should put them in cars or motorbikes.

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