It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?
Its main purpose is internet currency. The only serious uses surround that via smart contracts, like decentralized exchanges or provably fair gambling (unsavory as that is). Any time someone says "the currency aspect is separate from blockchain," I'd be wary, seeing how the entire point of blockchain is decentralization via proof of work or stake.
NFTs can make sense in theory as an alternative to the already-popular video game collectibles, as silly as that premise is, but they never really got traction, and again that's related to currency. There's been a lot of vaporware around things like corporate blockchains to track assets, which don't even make sense in theory.
Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk. Because of this insane system of credit cards, where you give the other party a "secret" which enables them to take the money from you.
If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
Most websites pay the bills via ads. And make less than $0.001 per visitor. If they could sell a monthly membership for a one-time payment of $1, they would have a way better business model.
There are traditional ways to send money without giving out a secret, like Apple Pay. But there's plenty of fraud in the other direction, people accepting charges with stolen payment info that end up being reversed. It's always a little the merchant's job to decide whose "money is no good here," and that's because of laws.
No, that's not how it works at all. Apple is neither in the authorization nor the transaction clearing/settlement flow.
> How do you pay Apple without giving them a secret?
Credit cards being effectively unrestricted bearer tokens isn't nearly the only way to do payments. For example you could send a signed message to your bank instructing them to pay Apple (in a world in which you'd be paying them; again, Apple Pay is not that).
I think Apple has some special relationship with banks, so it's not this simple. But yeah, one way or another you're trusting Apple Pay, which presumably is more trustworthy than a gas station sale terminal.
And if you were signing your own payments, you'd still have to trust your computing device and the bank.
With crypto, you would not have to trust your computing device nor your bank.
You would send $100 to your computing device every now and then. And use that for day to day spendings. If the device turns out to be malicious, you lost only the $100 and stay away from the brand that made the device.
But you're sending that $100 from another computing device, and if you're not trusting a bank-like entity to hold the cryptocurrency for you, you're responsible for securing all your money on that device without locking yourself out.
On the other hand, having some money outside a bank is nice. I've had them freeze my assets before just cuz they felt like it, until I spent a whole day telling them to fix it.
Having a couple hardware wallets in different places + a paper backup split in a couple pieces gives you enough redundancy not to worry about this. Source: my own experience of close to 10 years now.
Unfortunately I will never be willing to entrust my financial safety solely to an algorithm.
An algorithm cannot be reasoned with, it cannot understand that your house burned down and destroyed your ID. It cannot accept liability for it's actions.
If I lose my bank card I go to a branch, verify my ID, and get a replacement. The bank is liable if they allow somebody other then me access to my accounts, regardless of how convincing the fraudster might have been.
Exactly. I've held large amounts of Bitcoin for years but always been too intimidated by hardware wallets or the fancier security schemes. It takes time to learn and try that stuff to the point of 100% trusting it, and I'd rather be called obtuse than overconfident like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/s9lgyy/5eth_bounty_...
My solution in the end hinged on a paper recovery phrase, stored in... a bank.
Yes, the barrier is high because paying is a high-friction activity whenever cards are involved. That's why the various quick checkouts are all the rage the past 10 years or so.
This has very little to do with the original claim of "Users dislike paying on the web because it is a security risk". Users have no issues paying for stuff online.
> If you could just send the money, the barrier to pay would be 100x lower.
We can already do that here in Brazil: the web site displays a QR code (plus its contents in text form), the user scans the QR code (or copies the text) into their banking app, and confirms it on the app to send the money.
I hasn't AFAIK made any meaningful difference for websites. What people dislike isn't the inconvenience of credit cards, it's the inconvenience of having any paywall at all.
That was possible 30 years ago. There have been probably been a dozen schemes that tried something like that over the decades, starting with DigiCash from before the WWW existed.
They all failed not because of fees, not because of security concerns, but because even having to think about whether you want to pay for something and how much incurs a mental cost that people avoid.
Free beets cheap by a margin that has nothing to do with how cheap or how easy.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
It will change absolutely nothing whatsoever.
> So many ideas are infeasible right now because CC fees are high, and making any payment is extremely high friction.
Making payments will always be, is inherently high friction, and reducing the amount does nothing below a threshold that is much, much higher than $0.001.
There have been lots and lots of micropayment schemes, and they have all failed because the very fact that there is a payment already introduces mental friction that's effectively higher than current CC fees.
Any idea that is infeasible because there is no way to reliably send $0.001 is in fact easily feasible today by monetizing it some other way, usually via ads.
Lower fees are only relevant for high-volume fully automated transactions with a substantial financial incentive behind them, and those can already be done basically for zero marginal cost, see HFT. The only micropayments that people are willing to engage in individually is when they involve addiction, and that as well can and is already done in gambling apps masquerading as games.
This is something that feels pretty lost in most modern crypto discussion.
It's evident in literally the first line of the bitcoin whitepaper:
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution"
If paying a random person online was as easy as dropping a quarter in a cup the internet could be a very different place.
I think the part about not going through a financial institution is brought up pretty often, but that line doesn't mention the payment being especially small or quick.
> The day a network exists where you can reliably send like $0.001 of value with little/no fees is the day the internet changes forever.
Why do you set the bar at $0.001? Even sending $1 reliably and with low fees (which has been doable with crypto since its inception) would be revolutionary in my opinion.
Then it could be way shittier because every GET request will be monetized. Also your whole browsing history will be public if you're ever tied to a wallet address.
Are you talking about SCT Inst? It seems like there are no fees built into the protocol itself, but your bank can still charge you to use the service, and it seems many banks charge between 1 and 7 euros:
I didn’t mean a specific protocol, just based on my experience. But where do you see 7€ in this document? I see lot of banks offering zero or below 1€ fees. The highest I see is Novo Banco at 5.20€ (page 18).
Besides SEPA which mandated the upper ceiling and an upcoming regulation which forbids banks from de-prioritising payments to/from other banks (can't remember what it's called now) many European countries have had instant bank transfers locally. For example, Swish in Sweden: https://www.swish.nu/about-swish
NFTs make absolutely no sense for video games collectables. As it is, video game collectables work just fine, NFTs add nothing except cost and complexity.
It took work by a large parent company. And I don't know how third-party websites can trade those, but it must mean either Valve is managing an API or people are doing something hacky to work around that.
It's what I said above, it's a lot of work for a new game to create/maintain its own collectibles marketplace that people can trust, and even a well-established game like Counterstrike doesn't properly support third-party trades. Ethereum provides all that out of the box with NFTs.
There's also the issue that Valve controls all the assets, but that's mostly a moot point because they control the game anyway. I guess someone could honor NFT skins in a separate game if they really wanted, but that's getting theoretical.
They can't. There are third party websites but there is no way for them to initiate trades. They work around this bysome crazy peer-to-peer trust-me-bro scheme.
I’ve been paying multiple people and teams remotely via btc in the past years. Even if you can send a wire, sometimes it can be cheaper/easier to send crypto. But in many cases it’s not even possible to send large amounts of money without incurring massive fees (international paypal, western union, etc). Moved hundeds of thousands of dollars this way by now for purely legal economical reasons, helping a bunch of people make money they would not make otherwise.
Edit: relatedly, not everybody wants to pay their local taxes (and who am I to judge people in various life situations?). This itself is a _massive_ saver for the folks. Send somebody $5k usd a couple times and their bank will start asking complicated questions.
Seems pretty easy. My country's tax forms dont distinguish between how you got paid, just that you got paid. Gov doesn't care if it was through a bank, in gold bars, bitcoin, etc (capital gains they care more about of course)
Reading through the page, that sounds super complicated though.
Couldn't the podcasts simply put a lightning invoice (Which is just a string of text I guess?) on their website with a text like "Support us via Lightning: 1f73ac220b9..."?
A lot of the work with Podcasting 2.0 is moving things into apps like Fountain or Castamatic. By all accounts, people are way way more likely to engage if they don't have to leave their app.
There's crypto-less features that Podcasting 2.0 adds like livestream notifications and transcriptions. Apple actually just added transcriptions to their app officially!
What's wrong about the web for listening to podcasts? Why do I need an app?
And couldn't the "Support us via lightning: 1f73ac220b9..." link have a protocol like "lightning://" prefixed, so when the users clicks it, their preferred payment method pops up?
With a regular cryptocurrency they could just post an address or QR code and anyone can send it using a wallet at any time (no need for them to be online or anything).
Lightning allows single sats worth of micro-payments in real-time, perfect for tossing a few bucks someone's way vs. paying much higher fees and waiting for blocks.
The Podcasting 2.0 spec also includes the "Boostgrams" feature allowing you to send messages to the creator with your payment.
Speaking of offline support the recently announced Hedgehog protocol builds off of lightning and is much more asynchronous.
I use it everywhere where it's an option (so not very often, let's say once a month). I also only use privacy services (vpn for example) where you can pay using cryptocurrency, otherwise what's the point
There was a sketchy looking file sharing website where someone had posted some incredibly hard to find audio tracks that I really wanted, but the website required a subscription. Paying with a cc meant automatically-recurring payments, but I paid with bitcoin, got my files, and knew the website couldn’t get any money from me after that.
If anything will get us out of this ad-ridden hellhole of the centralized internet, I think it'll be cryptocurrency that allows users to transfer tiny amounts of money to a site instead of an ad platform paying the site fractions of a cent for my view.
Like if all I need to do is transfer $0.00001 to the site for my view and it's guaranteed to be free from ads or data hoarding, sign me tf up.
Once you set that up as crypto, thats it, thats the price. With the present model ad agencies can play all sorts of games with this price, inflating or deflating it to suit immediate business needs. Its a whole meta that will poof into smoke. So unless the new crypto meta captures the benefits to ad agencies the current “estimate” model of pricing has, it won’t see daylight.
I think it could be used for some kind of permissioned, collectively crowdsourced database that's (mostly) free from the control of a single group of administrators/gatekeepers. I guess kind of like a decentralized wiki.
In my view, blockchains shine where you need auditable global state, bonus points if you don't want central control in your operations (obviously this then kicks the can to the core devs). This use-case is fairly miniscule for most applications, though.
As far as currency, I think they also have their use-cases as well but most people don't want a global audit trail of all their purchases. Things like Monero and Zcash shine here. The value fluctuations are obnoxious, though.
I'm saying this as a big blockchain skeptic. I think most of the things people use them for are silly.
I think a shared, "slow" database could be useful for property deeds. Give the state admin access to override the typical transfer process in case of theft, and then you're left with a 24/7 accessible public database of property deeds, where the current owner and full history of a deed (transfers, liens, easements) can be accessed and verified by any joe with a computer.
It could be useful for professional licenses, too. Everyone could have a verifiable history of someone's professional license - when it was issued, when it was revoked, again mathematically verifiable. You could be sure that someone's record was never changed or deleted without leaving an audit trail.
Though to be fair, the important part of this is the chain of cryptographically signed and timestamped events. It could work without strictly being a blockchain. You could imagine something that behaves more like a git repository with a flat file database in it.
My non-techie brother has been staking his 1 ETH he bought couple of years ago and has earned today, in his words, “slightly more than from my insurance savings account in the past 10 years”. I think that’s a really nice use case.
I have personally used cryptocurrency (Monero) to buy small quantities of substances for personal use from darkweb marketplaces a while ago.
This has been a great experience, I think the system of public vendor reputation , reviews, user discussions, independently published test results etc. adds a significant layer of safety to this process compared to random local 'street' type transactions of this sort.
Whether you approve of this or not, crypto is a very important layer in this system, I feel like this is the only actual use it has currently, although it's obviously not something crypto advocates like to advertise.
There's many more. Many don't have a lot of adoption, and I don't know if they will. But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs (with humans interacting at the perimeter) to fulfill roles which would traditionally be filled by centralized, trusted intermediaries (often humans).
If for no other reason than getting a front seat as many of them fall apart spectacularly but also because it's intellectually fascinating to see problems approached in an inverted manner.
> But at the very least it's often interesting to see how traditional systems are reimagined in order to enable decentralized, trustless, computer programs
They are not re-imagined. It's a combination of a still on-ongoing gold rush (well, the end tail of it) and people pretending there are purely technical solutions to all problems.
Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
Whatever your feelings on the impact of the technology are, you can't possibly know this
> Almost every single of those "interesting re-imagining" projects rather quickly rediscovers why traditional systems are the way they are, and end up being shittier versions of those.
I pretty much agree with this, though I'd suggest "most" rather than "almost every".
Most scientific studies may fail to support their hypothesis also, that doesn't make them uninteresting.
Some days ago ICP showed it can run ML on a blockchain.
While this is nice and does show that distributed computing is a real possibility I also don't think that anyone is going to switch from Amazon/Azure to ICP any time soon.
But I must say the idea is really nice. It's very easy to develop Actor model based software and deploy it on ICP.
I would actually love it if you had a link with more info on that. Don't take this the wrong way, but my first guess would be that that basically isn't true; either it's not actually machine learning (as is understood today) or it isn't actually a blockchain but rather normal distributed computing being "verified" via blockchain somehow?
There are basically two approaches to on-chain inference: consensus-based approaches (several parties run inference and give a claimed result), and zkML (one party runs inference and proves the result cryptographically).
zkML can be done using general-purpose ZK libraries (since they support arbitrary computations), or there are some specialized tools for proving ML inference, such as https://github.com/ddkang/zkml. It's currently pretty expensive to prove huge models like LLMs, but there's a lot of work being done to make it more practical.
a better question is to look at how people use it, the frictions they encounter, and who works on solving those frictions
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto and the allure of embedded tokens. I’m going to stick to the realty and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income finance.
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
Aware - and kudos to them for using Ethereum - It's a word play to confuse the market. Notice they don't say on Public Net. The installation is permissioned. I was involved with the first Yankee CD trade in 2018 with JPM. No investor can buy this without the KYC/AML checks, means if there's a wallet it's just a brokerage account - the underlying security is at a custodian not on-chain and the TA is still involved in registering the ownership of the share.
Great, yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12 years on public blockchains.
Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless for crypto native issuers and traders.
One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
>yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Perhaps for clearing - ownership wise I think it stays permissioned - no investor wants to loose the wallet and not be able to recover their asset.
>One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
100% - that's the plan but it's a massive regulatory capture to fight. Akin to launching a rocket and you need DoD and hundred other permissions.
One thing to keep in mind - Sec Act of 1933 and 1934 are here to stay - they may get new regs under them but ownership needs to be transferable outside just the normal case of trading i.e. trust, death, divorce, birth blah blah...
smart contracts on public blockchains can handle all those custodial aspects
the smart contracts can be permissioned and have multiple signers and beneficiaries and payable on death conditions, the oracles and admins can be multi signer accounts too
I’m just trying to figure out what false dilemmas you are operating under, the examples already exist
You’re the advocate, in your world, but seemingly stuck in their myriad of concerns that are based on incomplete information
reminds me of how the substitute meat is repulsive to omnivores and vegans alike. hyperledger vibes
the challenge with hyperledger is that there you can run unlimited arbitrary executions of any computational time, but have to run all other nodes’ arbitrary executions of any computational time, so the whole network is DDOSing each other with these stupidly expensive computations all for the sake of saying “blockchain without crypto!”
as if the crypto didn't serve the specific purpose of putting a cost on computational transactions, creating limited block space, so that people wouldn't do expensive computations
it doesn’t solve any problem that blockchain set out to solve, its nice that you found a way to have a shared google spreadsheet with macros without having to debate over whose account made the doc or organization, but its not a technological improvement that presents a novel alternative to a fungible data writing credit that crypto is, the only improvement is catering to a gullible enterprise audience who simply asked for a no-coin version of blockchain so they could say they have a blockchain strategy, grifting to enterprise clients is fine until those users act like they solved a deficiency of speculation as if thats a problem at all
public blockchains and smart contracts have a solution for the problems you mentioned so far, those are the myriad of concerns I’m referring to. Public blockchains also provide benefits to transparency and security that make the SROs and securities regulator redundant in their current form. There is another more productive way they can improve the things deployed on blockchains and give confidence to investors, but that’s only going to come from the blockchain space’s own regulatory capture, ironically thanks to speculation creating new consolidation of power and interest.
> the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network,
Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.
Basically, you're lacking a platform that brings all those things together.
What blockchains may give you is a slow append-only log, which is a very minor part of that platform. And making everyone move to that platform is a much bigger challenge :)
>just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
People love shitting on NFTs, but there's still a really good art scene based on NFTs and smart contracts. And once you have digital objects that you actually care about, all the web3 infrastructure is surprisingly useful.
> It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
> If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects
HN is very adverse to the blockchain space. This is not the best place to look for people using the technology since 9/10 times you would get downvoted to oblivion
I asked this in an Ask HN today, but got no answer so far:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852389
It looks like not a single HN reader is using blockchain technology for anything.
If nobody is using blockchain technology outside of blockchain projects, what are the reasons we expect that some day we will? What could be a near term use case?