[leishman]

"We do have a lot of interest in blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. We believe its application to a number of other uses besides crypto will make capital markets more efficient, and we’ve been actively involved in research to use blockchain technology."

The exact opposite is true. Blockchain "technology" is useless beyond its ability to enable Bitcoin - a monetary innovation. Using it for anything other than that is simply trying to find a problem for a solution. Crypto beyond Bitcoin is also largely useless beyond serving as a democratized casino.

[oellegaard]

While I personally don’t believe in Bitcoin or any other crypto currency, I couldn’t stop laughing about your comment on the blockchain.

I have met so many people obsessed with building things on top of the blockchain and when you ask them what it is they need it is essentially a database and they don’t want it to be public. Fortunately the recent years this has been a decreasing trend. Only now a days the requests are to replace developers with 10x AI agents.

[matwood]

Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.

[robjeiter]

Fully disagree. Tokenization enables better financial markets. Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold). Ethereum in that sense is productive because you can stake it for a yield and collaterize it natively to borrow against it and you can tokenize anything on top of it.

[leishman]

If tokenization requires a trusted party to issue the tokens (think stocks) then no blockchain is needed

[hocuspocus]

Why would you need a blockchain for tokenization?

[oa335]

> Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold).

This has hardly been proven. Gold has been recognized as source of value across several millennia and multiple cultures. I would bet that 1000 years from now gold will still have value, whereas stocks are only valuable in as much as the rights that they represent can be enforced by a court and implicitly the state backing it.

[ghoshbishakh]

I would not say useless. But blockchain has very limited use outside cryptocurrencies. Although, some of the innovations that happened around blockchains are useful in many other scenarios.

P.S. I do have a Ph.D. in trying to fit blockchain for other use cases.

[Calavar]

What are some good noncrypto uses of blockchains that you've seen?

[losteric]

This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.

Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas.

Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?

[leishman]

> This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”.

That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years.

And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".

[npoc]

It's all down to how money is issued. The tokens we have to work for are created effortless by bankers from nothing whenever they issue a loan, and then they charge interest on them. This value of the new tokens they create is sucked out of the ones in your bank account, pension etc. It's theft and it's about 7% year.

Gold didn't have this problem because it's issued through proof of work - you have to put in N kgs of gold worth of work to mine N kgs of gold. But it's a rock and in today's world we need a digital form.

[SteveNuts]

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a general purpose blockchain ledger for businesses. It seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated.

[leishman]

There is a general purpose ledger for business. It's called a SQL database

[everfree]

The major problem is that private solutions (like consortium chains) offer privacy but no standardized interoperability or neutral root of trust, and public solutions (like Ethereum blobs) offer interoperability and neutrality but no inbuilt privacy.

I believe this will change either when consortium chains figure out the interoperability problem (so they can bridge seamlessly with public chains) or public chains figure out the privacy problem (allowing consensus over entirely private transaction zones).

To me it seems like the latter is more likely than the former. We've finally got both featureful/performant Ethereum roll-ups and private Ethereum roll-ups. Now the trick is to combine all those properties and bundle them into a business ledger that's high-performance, with customizable privacy zones, with consensus and data availability provided by a credibly neutral setup such as the Ethereum validator set.

This seems to be the direction some firms are going, for example Ernst & Young with their Nightfall product, and more recently their OpsChain Contract Manager to try to bring it to enterprise customers.

[Zanfa]

It would only ensure entries haven't been manipulated after the fact, but not whether they were valid in the first place or if they reflect reality.

[hocuspocus]

Append only, immutable and signed ledgers do exist actually.

[Analemma_]

Actual businesses don’t need any trustless, decentralized storage solution, because they already heavily rely on the state monopoly on violence and state recognization of the “business” as an entity in order to function. They gain nothing from using a blockchain ledger instead of a trusted source enforced by laws and contracts.

[Almondsetat]

Guaranteed by what mechanism? This is the fundamental problem.

[plsbenice34]

>"cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated."

That is only achieved with bitcoin because of a security model that has financial value to the blocks, and a distributed system of nodes and financially-invested miners. As soon as you remove the valuable digital token from the system it all falls apart; people could just rewrite the blocks and back-date the timestamps. It's like a machine that needs all of the parts to make sense.

[zdw]

This assumes ideal, perfect data entry before reaching the ledger, and having immutable history doesn't prevent historical errors.

[tim333]

>seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated

Just because you write that you own 5 million litres of olive oil or what have you on a chain doesn't prove you actually have it.

[miohtama]

There was BigChainDB that tried to combine blockchains with SQL database, but it failed as it was too early.

The trick is that it must be triple accounting and the counterparty needs to share the ledger, which cannot be done without PK.

[mutatio]

I've worked on such a platform: Hyperledger from IBM et al. It was generic enough we could deploy our own "smart contract" / business logic layer via a Lisp dialect built in Go.

[nradov]

How would it make auditing simple? Auditors would still have to go out and count things to verify that the blockchain contents match assets and liabilities in the real world.

[pintxo]

It’s just not an actual problem for most businesses.

[quercusa]

Wasn't that AWS Quantum Ledger, which is closing down at the end of July?

[dboreham]

Thought experiment: if you were tasked with creating an eventually consistent distributed database where the nodes were to be run by different organizations that didn't trust each other, with predefined validity constraints on the data of some sort, and a scheme for incentivizing the operators of said database to keep operating it long term, how would you propose doing that?

Hint: if you look at similar systems such as those used for certificate transparency logs, they look quite like...a blockchain.

[axlee]

Thus, a problem in search of a solution. Who has asked for that exactly ?`It's been more than a decade and still no one has found an actually useful real-world application for blockchain besides gambling and money laundering.

[Analemma_]

Sure, but that’s not a thing any actual business needs, except in rare, esoteric situations. For all actual business purposes, a centralized database is better fit for purpose (note that pretty much all finance runs, eventually, on centralized databases like the Fed’s ACH system and the Depository Trust Company. It’s fine.)

[Almondsetat]

You cannot reply with a thought experiment to someone asking what real purpose a technology has. Provide a real example where this is needed/done

[c0redump]

Tasked by whom? In pursuit of what goal?

[irln]

So interesting how your conclusion (which I strongly agree) is a bit of knowledge that can be obtained with diligence and research, however, it's a limitation of Bitcoin that it requires that level of diligence and research to understand.

[npoc]

Not really. I just means that it doesn't grow too fast for itself and gives people chance to accumulate it - its kind of poetic.

Ultimately it will just keep going up in price relative to everything else and people will invest simply based on that without understanding why - similar to the real estate investment market.

[lawn]

Typical Bitcoin maximalistic bullshit that pretends that the only worthwhile cryptocurrency will ever be Bitcoin, ignoring the fact that for example Monero is a superior currency (being actually fungible, a requirement for a currency).

I do agree that cryptocurrencies are the killer feature of the blockchain but other use cases do exist (like trustless timestamping).

[unboxingelf]

The rare, correct Bitcoin take on HN.

[MuffinFlavored]

What about ETH/SOL stablecoin USDC and the whole "the blockchain validators/stakers can run programs/smart contracts/instructions"?

[tyre]

None of the smart contracts have done anything materially useful without huge risk of scams, rug pulls, or enabling criminal activity (e.g. mixers for money laundering.) After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles (e.g. NFTs.)

Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. Because "code is law" is either a bad idea or immediately has to compromise to meet real human uses (for example, people forget their passwords all the time and not supporting password resets—which right now requires a centralized key store—is a non-starter.)

There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential.

The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. We'll see shockingly open corruption with the president of the United States having a coin for on-chain bribery.

[leishman]

stablecoins are useful but you don't really need a blockchain. you just need enough of a rube-goldberg machine to claim it's "decentralized". The most popular "blockchain" for stablecoins is Tron, if that tells you anything about why the technology itself doesn't matter

[Jasper_]

The blockchain can't do anything with stablecoins, because that's interfacing with a financial system that's out of the reach of smart contracts. Even if we assume that a stablecoin is backed by real USD sitting in a bank account, there's nothing stopping anyone from just taking money out of the bank account, and the smart contract is none the wiser. You still have to trust someone at the end of the day.

[Ekaros]

Problem with stablecoins is that in reality they are just extremely fancy IOUs or namely debt. Issuer promises to give money back. And if they don't well best you can do is to sue them.