
Ask HN: What are blockchains being used for in 2020 - snug
I&#x27;ve been getting further and further into researching blockchains, and how the entire ecosystem works, and works together as an ecosystem. However it all just seems to be about trading cryptocurrencies either from fiat or other cryptocurrencies, and there are some small things out there like gambling and basic games, but I still don&#x27;t see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.<p>Getting away from the building blocks, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, smartcontracts etc. What are things like Chainlink, Cosmos, etc. really enabling us to do today? I found Orchid on coinbase, but there seems to have been little movement past its initial hype. It would be great to have a blockchain that can do anon VPN service, but doesn&#x27;t seem there today.
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AlexITC
About what's being built, look into the
[https://identity.foundation](https://identity.foundation), there you will
find about decentralized identities, where you have a wide amount of use
cases, like verifiable credentials, and authentication.

Particularly, I'm involved in a similar project involving decentralized
identities and verifiable credentials, and we just released an app to showcase
how everything works: [https://atalaprism.io/](https://atalaprism.io/)

Another use case where I know someone working on it relates to auctions for
cars being sold by insurance companies, the problem is that external people is
bribing employees from the insurance companies to win the auctions, the goal
is to remove this possibility by using smart contracts.

On the previous case, it's a common problem on public auctions conducted by
the government and I would love if they use a system where auctions could be
audited by anyone, so that participants trust that no one is cheating.

~~~
alexmingoia
What about those cases uses a blockchain?

Any public/private key pair is a decentralized identity.

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AlexITC
In the case of identities/credentials, the blockchain is mostly used as the
decentralized timestamp service, used to know the relative orders of events,
like when a credential was issued, which key signed the credential, whether
the key was revoked by that time, etc.

Any public key could be seen as a decentralized identity but you don't have a
way to certify if the key was ever rotated, where you usually go to
centralized servers, a hacker may compromise a centralized service to change
certain information about the public keys but it's unlikely it will compromise
Bitcoin, these decentralized identities I mention are on practical terms,
mutable, which is where the decentralized timestamp shines.

On the auctions, a trust-less smart contract is what shines, as you can get
the participants to bid there, and in case of disputes, everyone is able to
audit the smart contract to make sure the outcome wasn't manipulated.

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alexmingoia
The purpose of Bitcoin is to have a fixed-supply digital asset that can be
used as money, and which has no central authority to inflate the supply or
censor transactions.

Bitcoin is not a building block to a blockchain. The purpose of a blockchain
data-structure is to ensure the monotonicity/order of transactions in a
distributed decentralized context such as the bitcoin protocol. A blockchain
is just a list of transactions where each one references the previous one.

Orchid is a VPN network where participants are paid to route traffic with an
Ethereum token. I don’t see any advantage to this over just paying a VPN
provider directly. It does make VPN chaining easier, but you can still do VPN
chaining without Orchid.

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thinkingemote
>but I still don't see any useful stuff for normal day to day stuff.

I don't think there are any, but what you will find is a lot of enthusiasm for
the potential of it. Such hype also help sells various crypto currencies or
raise funding for startups, but might not be the same thing.

It's hard to separate the enthusiasm for the pure technology and persuasive
opportunism to make a quick buck. It has been around a decade now so the core
tech should be less on the edge.

I would suggest that the lack of actual normal day to day stuff indicates
something important.

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giantg2
Document or transaction records. For example, stock trading or bank transfer
records in clearing houses. I think someone is working on blockchain to have a
transparent and immutable record of public documents, like laws and
regulations.

~~~
snug
> For example, stock trading or bank transfer records in clearing houses.

Yeah, IM looking for other examples, this has been kinda going on from the
very beginning.

> I think someone is working on blockchain to have a transparent and immutable
> record of public documents, like laws and regulations.

This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for, but where are the real world
examples?

I brought up Orchid, which seems interesting, any maybe promising at first,
but the hype has died down. It's also not user friendly, as in I need both ETH
for the smartcontract to work and OXT (Orchid Cryptocurrency) for the
bandwidth I want to use.

I do think that blockchains can be useful, and will be useful, but it still
seems like it's a solution looking for a problem, and maybe it's creating more
problems first (i.e. need for smartcontracts, oracles, etc.)

~~~
davidajackson
A lot of it is the due to high expenses at this stage (SISP debate aside), see
[https://ethgasstation.info/](https://ethgasstation.info/) for example. Gas
price is so high that adding any complex logic on chain is often really costly
--there are few real world applications that merit this, and certainly for
micro txs it's not ready. That will probably change but I think it will take
5-10 years before tech improvements + adoption start to really move the
needle.

