That being said I think it does have good applicability to digital-only activities which require trust, a good example might be Poker, I think generally we believe that a company like Pokerstars are fair and honest so when we jump online to play a game we don’t question it, but there may come time when that’s not the case - where we don’t trust the software created by casinos and bookmakers. So I think generally speaking, right now, gambling is the number 1 use case for Blockchain in my opinion. There’s definitely challenges in this space though, for example building a Poker game on Ethereum would be impossible at the moment, transaction cost for each move would be completely cost prohibitive and there’s still challenges with random number generation, but these problems are solvable.
The other thing I think about with blockchain is generally speaking the view is that they should, in theory, outlast tech companies, as the view is that these public ledgers would be maintained collectively by society, it would be nice to be able to keep certain forever record to pass through generations of families to avoid things getting lost in the digital world, but that’s hope, hope that the blockchain you choose is maintained etc, so that’s just as much of risk as now - but it pains me I don’t know much about my great great grandparents, and would hope future generations don’t have that same problem, I wouldn’t want to rely on tech companies to help with that, it would be much nicer to have a record which is decentralized.
I think the last one is the biggest success.
Blockchain can be used as a rather expensive and crude database, so one possible application is a key-value database which is guaranteed to always be up.
I suspect that as blockchain technologies improve and better techniques for sharding are developed, this could become quite a common real-world application.
From reading the comments most people here don't have any idea about the research that's currently happening in the blockchain space. They're just making ignorant comments about ponzi schemes and money laundering.
Very exciting research happening in blockchain.
The project is based on blockchain(though it is federated) technology. In fact multiple blockchain platforms are used to achieve the overall goal. Blockchain for identity, payments, distributed verifiable but ownerless database etc.
Looking for co-developers for the project. My email is in my HN profile.
[0] Details of what the project will look like is outlined here: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org
This is because it’s better to use a database: simpler, faster, more efficient.
You can do crypto signing in a database or flat files if you really need proof that some actor approved something or other. Each actor can keep such signatures in a local db as evidence if needed.
Let's take game assets for example. I don't see any chance right now to have Steam and Epic build a gaming metaverse since one of them would have to build and own the infrastructure.
A decentralized blockchain would make talks about data transfer and collaboration much easier. I'm not sure about the whole NTF thing as of right now, but I'm still curious for the future.
What is true for game assets can be true for personal data, copyright claims, or anything else. The blockchain might gain adoption because its principles make it interesting as a standard for value transfer.
Blockchain based DNS allows people to actually own their domain, instead of the current system where we basically rent domains. It also makes it impossible for domain to be seized.
- zero-trust escrow
- distributed auctions