No, thank you.😆

This is exactly what happens when you take a hammer hoping you could nail anything and everything fine

@Haxk20 Cryptos aside, yet to hear a good use case for it. And I've been looking pretty hard.

Most other use cases I hear of it are people getting confused between blockchains and Merkel trees. The latter is of course very useful, but certainly isn't a blockchain, and has been around for decades.

@AlmondSauce one application that one of our regional Governments wants to apply Blockchain is to secure the land registrations and transfers. Right now, the system is fraud-ridden and loads of money are lost

Best TedTalk ever.

@asgs I fail to see how blockchain can solve that issue.

@Haxk20 mapping travels? Not sure what you mean there.

@AlmondSauce if you see the problem with the fraudulent registrations, then you'd see the solution it offers

@asgs Granted, if the fraudulent activity is at the highest level of government or those maintaining the systems, then it *may* help (though at that point you've got bigger problems imho.)

If the fraud is happening with those *using* the system though, which is what it sounds like, I fail to see how it offers any advantage whatsoever.

@AlmondSauce it is at the level of maintaining the systems. There is no proof of record whatsoever and no audit trails. Record tampering is the norm

More info at https://undp.org/content/undp/...

And

https://coindesk.com/andhra-pradesh...

@asgs Touche, in that case you've got a point.

But damn, with that level of fraud going on, there seriously needs to be more getting around staff. And even then, it only works if you've got non-corrupt people in power who are able to check it.

@AlmondSauce yes, who maintains and admins the BC is the next big question.

Hopefully, it will be accessible to public and not like Amazon's BlockChain as a Service ;-)

@asgs I think that's the biggest problem though - the trusted people maintaining this should be, well, trusted. If you use a blockchain, then you just shift the trust elsewhere, so could easily have the same problem.

Making it available to the public is great, but you still don't avoid the problem. If someone in the public reports a discrepancy in the chain, then you need someone trusted in government to investigate. If they're corrupt, then again, nothing will happen, whatever the evidence shows.

Reminds me of the peer-to-peer hype in the early 2000s. Peer-to-peer this, that, and even wiping one's ass because of Napster.

All while completely ignoring that Napster wasn't a thing because of peer-to-peer, but because you could have any song just a mouse click away.

@asgs well, block chains whole purpose is to ensure that history cannot be rewritten.

And for that to be effective you need reliable trusted storage.

Public block chains achieve this by distributing it to thousands of users making it virtually impossible for anyone to get to and change all copies or even a majority.

But even if some one did change a majority, the fact that there was a change will be visible.

For other cases when the chain is not distributed you could add signatures.

If you sell your house you have to sign the new registration and since no one else can use your signature and you probably have a receipt of then you bought the house no one can “fake a sale in your name” so any false registration will be visible in the history as broken or missing links.

And once you know there is something wrong you can almost always dig out the truth.

But without the history it can easily be word against word with little or no proof of any wrong doing.

Bloch chain is just a verifiable log of transactions, noting more, nothing less, anything else is just built on top.

@Voxera exactly my points. Public visibility with reliable storage and authorized validation what make it fool proof, theoretically

But how it is implemented matters in the end

@AlmondSauce what you said is correct. But someone ignoring the discrepancies reported won't go unreported, so it would atleast raise doubts as to the legitimacy of the records being maintained

In the end, human minds can act criminal and can only go criminal to a certain extent

@asgs It's certainly not foolproof. Even assuming it's reported and acted upon, which I'm doubtful of in your scenario, an externally verified blockchain can only prevent historical modification of transactions. It can do sod all against fraudulent *new* transactions however. They'd just go into the chain the same as anything else.

@asgs Sounds like an easy DOS plot hole because attackers can just intentionally seed so much discrepancies and doubt that the staff can't possibly review all of it anymore, which would bring you back to square 0.

@Fast-Nop couldn't disagree. But that problem lies everywhere else

@AlmondSauce yes, but our intention of using BC in this case is only the preventionof tampering the history

Computers are still machines, so they are only good at doing what they are instructed to

@Fast-Nop that sounds similar to spamming bogus transactions on a cryptocurrency blockchain. In that case, those txes never make it onto the chain because the nodes discard them by default, since they don't pass the validation process. A crypto signature cannot be faked - you either have the real key, or you don't. Of course you can steal keys from the real owner, but that's a different scope of problems, which a node does not deal with. The individual user has to take care of his own keys.

I don't really see the point of people manually reviewing and approving stuff that's already on the chain - it would be like buying a Ferrari and replacing the engine with foot propulsion, Flinstones-style. The chain itself is trustless, that's the key feature of public blockchains.

@Haxk20
People who understand it dont need slides

Heard smart contracts is what is actually usable for pretty much anything.

From access control in anything, voting, to banking and transactions.

The problem is the mass surveillance doesn't like annonimity and blockchain was built for it.

So, whoever says blockchain has no use is a brain washed sheep ;)

.. except Blockchain is not the only way ti achieve that..

@mundo03 Utter tosh.

Believe the hype and be a "brainwashed sheep" if you want, but blockchain is *terrible* at anonymity. As soon as a UUID / ID / address / whatever you want to call it becomes known, then anyone with access to the chain (which kind of by definition, is everyone) can, by its nature, view all details of all transactions for that particular ID. Use another ID if you want, sure. But then any transactions between those IDs also become public.

@Haxk20 Mapping how many transactions? As in financial transactions? Surely that's just using it as a cryptocurrency ledger?

@AlmondSauce true that

@AlmondSauce you are thinking of Bitcoin's implementation (and all its clones, ie 95% of the relevant crypto space).
However, it is not the only way. There are methods to achieve actual anonimity though, hence why I've always been an avid fan or Monero (and no, it's not "just run it over Tor", that's nonsense and pointless from a chain-anonimity standpoint).
(Zcash would also be an interesting alternative, if it weren't for the fatal flaw of its 'trusted setup')

@endor I was for the sake of simplicity ;) Blockchain certainly wasn't *built* for mass anonymity as claimed; at best it's been adapted by some implementations (such as Monero) to shove it in.

Monero's not a half bad effort, but its privacy creates problems elsewhere - it no longer becomes publicly examinable by design, so anyone who *does* manage to uncover an exploit can near endlessly profit off it without it becoming public. Sure, if the chain's nodes head into hyperinflation it's pretty obvious someone's doing something wrong, but in this scenario it's perfectly possible for someone to be fraudulently generating nodes for years under the cover without anyone catching on.

Depending on your blockchain use case, that may or may not be an acceptable trade-off, but it's certainly not a free lunch.

I have no fucking clue what you guys are saying.
I need to read more...