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is there any legitimate use of blockchains?
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Any application where you want to record something publicly without the possibility to alter it and in absence of a central authority.
A database requires a central authority so it doesn’t cover the same use cases.
this was a no nonsense answer, unlike the others discussing Cryptocurrency ;~;
i’ll add a concrete example to this… i’ve described a startup i built in another comment but TLDR:
compliance obligations when protecting kids from sexual predators are difficult to prove: sexual abuse usually comes out 30 years later, so standard record keeping is pretty fraught… companies (like the company monitoring compliance - our startup for example) might not exists any more, paper gets lost, database formats become difficult or impossible to read
writing signed proof of compliance to the blockchain is a way of ensuring that an organisation was doing what they could at the time… how this is achieved is tricky for anyone but the source of record, but with blockchain it’s possible (described in the post)
That was.. Very well said
Good summary, a few additions from my side:
Also worth noting that the computations don't have to be expensive either, it's only there in cryptocurrencies to artificially limit the number of blocks generated on a public system and tie it into the reward system.
So for a bank, that could be a plain single iteration of a sha256 hash, and once share everyone agrees those were the transactions and you can't go back and change one without having to change the whole chain.
Make it sha1 and you basically have git.
A blockchain is more or less just an append-only database. Or even an append-only replication log with built-in checksums.
I would argue against blockchains being a database... its more of a 'signed sequential log' than a database.
Well, Wikipedia describes it sufficiently vague: "a database is an organized collection of data". But is a linked list on its own a database? I'd say the blockchain itself is the data structure but any software using it is most likely a database.
The lack of a trusted central authority is key. If you have at least one authority you can trust just barely enough, the whole idea of a blockchain collapses. There needs to be an urgent trust crisis for this to work.
Also, if you have no trusted parties, you have a huge "First Owner" problem.
If we were to set up a blockchain to track the ownership of fluffy hats, what's to stop me from seeing your fluffy hat, and quickly registering it as mine?
That is a good point. If there’s a dispute about the first owner, there’s no clean way to solve it. However, the current owner is clear, so we could just start tracking the history from the current time onwards, and ignore the history that’s shrouded in mystery and controversy.
That's not the first-owner problem. I'll try to explain in more detail. The problem arises when you're using the blockchain as a "reciept". You can only ever trace the ownership of the reciept, not the item it represents, without a trusted party.
Say we made a blockchain that determines the ownership of all fluffy hats in the world. It starts at june 1st 2026. Lets just assume there's a trivial way to perfectly describe fluffy hats that we can put in a token. Or hell, pretend it's super complex, that changes nothing.
You bought a fluffy hat in 2002, and made one for yourself in 2008. You own both, wearing one to bed when you go to sleep on may 31st, 2026.
At 1 second past midnight, june 1st 2026, I make two tokens, one for each of your hats.
I am now officially the first owner of those hats. You are suddenly a thief holding my property, even though it never left your head.
That's the first owner problem. Without a trusted source, there is no way to ensure the first owner in a blockchain is actually the owner under the current legal definition (as in, you made the hat from homespun wool, it's on your head right now). It gets even worse though, because I can even make tokens for nonexistent fluffy hats that haven't been made. As soon as someone makes it, i'm already the owner.
The ONLY application for a blockchain with a trustless system is if the entire property is directly on the blockchain, and that doesn't work.
Oh… Well that’s pretty bad. It’s like Wild West at that point. Anyone can make these fraudulent tokens. Someone would need to prove that there exists a connection between the token and the real world item it represents.
I guess therein lies the problem. These tokens shouldn’t represent physical objects. If you really want them to, you need a certification authority. If you can find one, it means that you actually can trust someone, so you don’t even need to use a blockchain for tracking these things. Why not just use a trusted authority to handle a traditional database.
So what does that leave us with? What can you do with a blockchain that doesn’t require the tokens to be connected to real world objects?
It’s also a problem of ownership. For exchanges between banks, a blockchain is better because no bank would be the owner of the database.
Plus it’s safer because altering a database is usually trivial while altering a blockchain is virtually impossible.
If you have multiple banks, you can have multiple copies of the same database. If any one bank modifies their copy, it is obvious who modified it and what was changed. No blockchain needed.
How do you sync those copies? Whatever sync process you use could be abused to propagate wrong transactions into other banks unless you figure out a solution to the bizantine generals problems, other than a Blockchain I mean.
Something similar to the way files (and bank transaction records) are modified on a drive. A first message indicating that a specific transaction is starting, a second message with the transaction, and a third message indicating the transaction is complete.
If any message is not acknowledged, it can be resent (with an ID so it's recognized as a duplicate), and if all else fails, flag a human.
The system doesn't need to be 100% accurate, just good enough that only a few humans are needed to fix the problems.
The Byzantine Generals problem is only a problem if you need 100% certainty from both sides. If you're willing to put up with 99.99% certainty, then network engineers have solved this problem many years ago.
Everything is possible, but it would be a much more complex solution than running a blockchain that is designed for that use case.
Could this be a true voting record? Votes would be transparent, but as you say, unalterable.
If the political vote is public, voters are exposed to blackmail or they may sell their vote. It’s a bad idea unfortunately.
There is a project called MACI that prevents the blackmail part
https://xkcd.com/2030/
I appreciate that when you find a relevant xkcd, the explainxkcd page also has relevant information to the discussion:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2030%3A_Voting_Software
Whereas voting with a piece of paper can be tracked and validated by a severely myopic 6 year old. And you can recount it. You can't "recount" a blockchain if that's your only source.
And if you do both, then why bother with the blockhain?
What are you trying to say here?
If each vote is a block in the chain them it is definitely recountable.
If I get a reciept of my vote's hash in the chain, I can confirm it's being included.
The real issue with using a blockchain is it would anonymize the process.
That's not what it means. With this system, you can't independently verify what happened. You can only also look at the blockchain and see that some hash has registered some vote.
But you don't know if that is actually true. You can't see if pushing the red button makes the red vote come out. You can manually count if you want, but the original billet doesn't exist, only a processed form of it on the blockchain.
Only THAT it's included. Otherwise you have something linking you to your vote, which is bad