[gumby]

My company actually does have a use case where a blockchain makes sense, and we are proceeding that with it. Unfortunately we have a buzzword trifecta of "blockchain", "AI", and "cloud" so we are careful about the words we use when we talk about it publicly.

We never utter the work blockchain because if you say "a blockchain" most people hear ** THE blockchain!! ** and either think we're a yet another bunch of scammers or worse, get tremendously excited thinking we're doing web3 or some other scam they want in on. Instead we say "we protect the data using Merkel trees."

We have the other buzzword problem too: we use some machine vision (for some safety matters) and use RNNs to determine some local operating parameters and to crunch data for some lab experiments. Even though we have two former AI research scientists on the team, none of us want to be lumped in with the big langage model folks, since that's not what we do (and the hype is insane).

The blockchain application: we have a shitload of sensors monitoring equipment we'll be deploying all over the world. Our revenue depends on the performance of this equipment. So every sensor is built into a little box that signs and timestamps its data. The data are aggregated by the equipment and streamed up to our servers (cough "the cloud"). Connectivity can be intermittent, so machines can offload data to topologically nearby installations.

It's actually pretty nice to be outside the hype bubbles. We just concentrate on our work instead, and mostly the prospective customers don't understand any of the tech, much less what those buzzwords mean.

[eska]

If I understood your use case correctly, then you don’t actually have a decentralized deployment since there’s a central server, and you’re literally not employing the blockchain though?

[gumby]

Yeah, we only need a distributed chain at the edge, and even there there aren’t “competing” changes in the sense there could be in an implementation of a currency. But it’s a block chain like any other Merkel tree.

But it’s to prove chain of custody / lack of tampering since revenue ultimately depends on the data.