Blockchain : How do you find blockchain useful in practical use-cases?
Hey, I am a CS undergrad learning about blockchain, and have developed some side-projects using Ethereum, mostly because it sounded cool. However, I had few perceptions and subsequent questions regarding the applicability of blockchain in practical world, and would love to have your views and knowledge on the same.
* **Distribution of records**
* Blockchain relies on the very concept of decentralization and distribution of not just records, but trust.
* Distribution requires lots of peers to keep the data distributed across nodes, which is usually not possible, one of the reasons behind private blockchain.
* So, instead of private blockchain distributed across 500 nodes which I own, why don’t I have a MongoDB database sharded?
* **Decentralization**
* Same as above
* **Business benefits**
* From a philosophical point of view, independence and sharing of power is useful for society and really cool. However, to a consumer what is the advantage given that Blockchain based networks consume more energy/hardware/bandwidth/time for each record/transaction, compared to traditional databases?
* In business, I read that a consumer won’t move to a new product unless provided a bragging right, backed by economic advantage.
* **Enforcement of contracts**
* The advent of Ethereum and concept of smart contracts paved way for blockchain for more use-cases.
* Consider, land records are stored on a blockchain, or one company stored artwork ownership on blockchain.
* However, the tech guarantees ownership, but doesn’t prevent anyone from stealing the property. One would still have to go to the police or court to resolve disputes and enforce the contract.
* Thus, what big advantage do blockchain provides to present day contract? Also consider present-day legal contracts which are out there in the public domain, and everybody in the society knows about it.
* **Privacy of records**
* One popular and hyped application of blockchain is to store health records.
* The need stated for such system is usually the case of mutability of records and ownership of one’s health data.
* Is mutability of health records a big enough concern to be solved? I have had a very short experience in life so far, but never worried about immutability of one’s health record.
* Also, how is one’s health data so precious? Obviously, insurance and research companies can collect those data to provide appropriate products, but how does that affect an individual in daily life?
* **Undermining of society as a great institutional structure**
* People usually speak about trust which should not be in one, but peers, validated by not self, but mathematics or cryptography. The reason is that they want to distribute trust on a network, not one person.
* However, the human nature of seeking validation and acceptance from people around is the very foundation of present day societal structure. This is why certain things are out there in the public – your name for identification, marriage as a social contract between individual, relations as a social responsibility + obligation to serve ones duty for others.
* How does blockchain provides something better which this self-evolving society (thousands of years of age and maturity) couldn’t?
I would love to have your opinions on all three fronts – technology, business, and societal.
What is the Blockchain?
A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol. A full copy of a currency’s block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can find out how much value belonged to each address at any point in history.
Author: imapandorabox
Score: 8
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