So we have this great world changing idea which will transform, reinvent and disrupt ... and it uses a blockchain to keep track of ....
Why the blockchain ? Because ... distributed ... anonymous ...
But you have user accounts on your servers.. your project is centralized by design. Why not save yourself the trouble and use a mysql database ?
People like being involved in things which sound cool and they try to bend reality so that they can find a use for a cool sounding technology.
There are so many problems in government. A vast majority are not sexy, but if you care about impact the roll up your sleeves.
This is almost always the wrong way to solve the problem. Trying to automate a human-friendly interface is far more trouble than it's worth, when you can easily use a machine-friendly interface to begin with.
For example, dishwashers aren't robots which stand in front of a sink, squeezing bottles of detergent on to a cloth and rubbing it over a stack of dishes. Instead, they're self-contained beige boxes with a well-defined input/output mechanism (racks to hold the dishes; standard plug for electricity; standard plumbing connections).
It's like screen-scraping your own application. Or writing a CLI's main loop with `expect`. Or when sci-fi films show robots typing on computer keyboards.
Let's take your example. Unless you're living in a backwards universe I'll assume that you want to put bread in the toaster. There are existing solutions to this, e.g. many hotels have toasters with a conveyor belt; rather than having to line anything up, there's a large catchment area to plonk the bread on to. A harder problem would be separating the slices of the loaf; this can be entirely avoided if the user "loads" a whole loaf at once, like a cartridge. E.g. by inserting paddles between the slices, they won't be exposed enough to go bad, but are easily separated as needed.
With everything roughly lined up there's not really anything to control other than turning it on. Plugs with timers are easy to get hold of (I use them for switching on lights in the evening). You could use something smarter like a clapper. Even if you use a "smart plug", there's no need for the toaster itself to be any different.
Has disintermediation ever been overhyped? Currency disintermediated trusted community members who you knew would do you a favor in return. The printing press disintermediated the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful entities of its day. The internet disintermediated... lots of people. Blockchains disintermediate everyone else.
This need for trust demands politics, and that's why we have Bitcoin's crisis de jur.
Block chains are a neat technology with limited application.
So from the miner's perspective the incentive is there. There's the "wasted bandwidth" angle there as well but that's a different story...
I was asking what the incentive would be to go through the computational effort of creating a block in a system that doesn't involve money. The author gave the example of using blockchain to maintain a shared calendar. What incentive would I have to go through all the computational effort to create a block of calendar entries?
Or let me know if I misunderstood your reply.
- Fully user owned identities
- Eradicating information asymmetry in mutually beneficial ways
- Transparent update rules, i.e. an evolving but never deprecated API
Thus different roads will lead to those economic gains. Essentially you take mongodb, encapsulate any write access into UDFs (=smart contracts) with permission to execute based on a public/private key, a second set of keyholders able to read and validate the log and et voila, all promises of blockchain tech fulfilled.
Forms? Where we're going, we don't need forms.
Are you envisioning a system like Keybase, but completely distributed?
We could also say that blockchains can be useful in principle when people are afraid of retroactive modification of history (for example because they get hacked, or because of governmental pressure to falsify their records). This is sort of an instance of this article's mutually-untrusting writers issue, but it's an interesting one because the writers are saying that they don't want to be trusted.
I think this is the case now for software distributors and certificate authorities, among others (I gave a talk related to this at CCC); they are saying "it's bad for us and you if you just believe whatever we say, without at least a way to know if a larger audience has heard it and whether we're denying what we said before".
So we can also say that blockchains (or perhaps another kind of distributed consensus mechanism; clearly Ben Laurie and others are claiming that blockchains are too heavyweight some or all of the time) can be useful when people are afraid that they're going to be made to emit writes that they didn't want to, or to deny writes that they previously emitted.
Now if you put multiple CAs in the game it start to become interesting to use a distributed ledger like the blockchain. If all the signed certs are distributed as part of the ledger it becomes easier to track who issues certs for what domain. Something we cannot do with the current SSL CA system.
https://www.certificate-transparency.org/
Sorry I didn't mention it explicitly -- I was trying to draw an analogy to show why blockchain-esque mechanisms are relevant here, and I thought readers would already be aware of this system.
As much as I am fascinated by the Blockchain, Bitcoin and all related matters the Blockchain shows how random projects are created around some tech just for the sake to do something with this new tech.
People fell in love with the Blockchain and desperately try to find a use case. Bitcoin was and I still think is a killer use case for the Blockchain. But in the last 24 months I met so many founders of blockchainy startups—exceptional smart guys, after 15 minutes of listening to them I felt so stupid like I missed the past five years of tech. But once you ask them what is the use case of their new shiny blockchainy tech they don't give a proper answer. Instead they shotgun more words with even higher confidence.
Again, absolutely nothing against the Blockchain and I am highly impressed by Ethereum. And I understand that people often need to play around with new tech some while to find proper use cases. But especially with the Blockchain I feel that people do not find many more killer use cases beyond currency.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
