Ask Lemmy

GREAT PFP🔥🔥

Just fraud. Nothing else.

I'd say in theory it could be used something like public records of proof for ownership of immaterial or intellectual property and the transfer thereof. Say the rights to music, writing, digital art and whatnot. Like the essence of NFT without the hyped up crypto bro speculation and pump'n'dump.

The difficulty would be to get it recognized as legally valid and the bigger difficulty that as there is no central authority there is also nobody being able to rectify fraud or user mistakes. If you implement central authority it's basically just any old list of transactions with some extra crud so then the question would be why even bother.

It's a good way to pay for illicit drugs, weapons, anything really, that you ordered using TOR, or your favorite unattributable communications technique. If you believe there are laws that should not be, that's good. If you are in favor of those laws, not so much.

The general category of potential use case is when you want some information to be public, undeletable, and outside of corporate or government control.

While I can’t think of a compelling use case at the moment (other than whistleblowers, maybe), given the direction our corporations and government are going it seems like the sort of thing that might become increasingly useful in the near future.

Fraud!

It's not even good as a bank. On the other thread you mentioned I commented that blockchain is an immutable ledger visible to everyone. That is a nightmare for privacy reasons.

Audit logs is genuinely the only application I see it may be good for, but we have other systems that have a smaller environmental and technical impact making them a better fit than blockchain.

The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.

I feel like greater minds than mine could come up with a way to use that to fight government corruption. Every transaction is a matter of public record.

I doubt it's really a practical solution though. Each transaction makes each subsequent transaction more computationally expensive. Plus all these vendors and contractors and everything are accustomed to fiat currency. Likely, they'd just immediately exchange it for cash.

This of course doesn't tackle the issue of under-the-table corruption where you invite a senator out for lunch and kickbacks. I'm also sure that the government would want to maintain their own ledger, or that conniving people will find a way to cook the books anyway.

I know several privacy focused apps use it for syncing data between multiple clients. For example Google Chrome syncs user data to your Google account, but Brave browser syncs user data using block chain.

I don't know if it's actually the best way to do that, but it's an option.

Its only real use is as dark money. Which isn't always a bad thing - there are a lot of activists in oppressive countries who rely on bitcoin donations, Anarchist Black Cross comes to mind.

But, as you said, it's not really as "dark" as people think.

I seem to recall someone developing a "game" that was based on the blockchain but used to crowdsource protein folding models or something like that? I could be mixing two memories though. I could see how the concept could possibly be implemented for something like that, but I wonder if it couldn't be handled more energy-efficiently by like a single quantum computer doing calculus.

I'm going to say "no", at least in the practical sense.

Before "AI" was the current hype, there was an equally annoying "Blockchain all the things" hype (and associated cryptobros partially fueling it). Aside from the various crypto scams, I'm not entirely sure if/where it found its niche. The fact that everything today isn't running on blockchain like the hype of yesteryear predicted is pretty solid evidence that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.