Hypefilter: What non-crypto blockchain products/services are successful?
December 7, 2021 9:18 PM Subscribe
Trying to get a feel for the current prospects and future promise of blockchain technology. What companies are doing well with a blockchain-based product line/service? What are those products/services?
Cryptocurrencies get all the media coverage, but I'd like to find out what's happening in the real world far from the noise.
Cryptocurrencies get all the media coverage, but I'd like to find out what's happening in the real world far from the noise.
The AWS Blockchain site has a pull quote from Nestle about using blockchains for supply chain transparency. So I guess they're using it?
this is not an endorsement of AWS or Nestle
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:09 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
this is not an endorsement of AWS or Nestle
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:09 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you take a literal view of the term "blockchain", Github has been doing this since 2008.
Other than that, everything I know of is either connected to cryptocurrency in some way, or is pure scam/hype. Most are both.
posted by wesleyac at 11:24 PM on December 7, 2021 [17 favorites]
Other than that, everything I know of is either connected to cryptocurrency in some way, or is pure scam/hype. Most are both.
posted by wesleyac at 11:24 PM on December 7, 2021 [17 favorites]
You may also be interested in the articles 10 years of... whatever this has been and 100 years of whatever this will be. They don't talk about specific companies, but they do talk about both the practical obstacles to applying this stuff, and what one might expect to come out of the momentum behind it, which sounds like it might interest you.
posted by wesleyac at 11:33 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by wesleyac at 11:33 PM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]
Ripple, maybe, for global remittances, but this is because US banks and institutional payment processors are living in the past, which in turn is why there are so many US para-banking companies that basically replicate what ordinary banks do outside the US.
posted by holgate at 11:46 PM on December 7, 2021
posted by holgate at 11:46 PM on December 7, 2021
Certificate Transparency is probably the most successful "blockchain" system that hardly anyone pays attention to.
Essentially, it's a system for detecting certificate authorities that incorrectly issue HTTPS certificates to unauthorized applicants. Browsers will only accept certificates that have been verifiably, irrevocably submitted to multiple independent audit logs. So even if a rogue or incompetent CA hands over a certificate to an attacker, the certificate is useless unless it's logged. And if it does get logged, it can be quickly noticed, revoked, and the CA held accountable.
Since 2018, Chrome has required CT verification for every certificate on the public web, which means every secure website is already using it whether they know it or not. And it doesn't rely on proof-of-work, which means it doesn't suffer from the ridiculous anti-scalability and energy consumption of most cryptocurrencies.
posted by teraflop at 12:05 AM on December 8, 2021 [13 favorites]
Essentially, it's a system for detecting certificate authorities that incorrectly issue HTTPS certificates to unauthorized applicants. Browsers will only accept certificates that have been verifiably, irrevocably submitted to multiple independent audit logs. So even if a rogue or incompetent CA hands over a certificate to an attacker, the certificate is useless unless it's logged. And if it does get logged, it can be quickly noticed, revoked, and the CA held accountable.
Since 2018, Chrome has required CT verification for every certificate on the public web, which means every secure website is already using it whether they know it or not. And it doesn't rely on proof-of-work, which means it doesn't suffer from the ridiculous anti-scalability and energy consumption of most cryptocurrencies.
posted by teraflop at 12:05 AM on December 8, 2021 [13 favorites]
I know of a rice trading platform that uses blockchain technology to record transactions.
Outside the NFT/crypto hype-bubble - blockchain lends itself to applications where a high volume of transactions must be recorded in a reliable, persistent form. You can do that very well in a traditional database, but blockchain makes it easier to distribute the work across many compute nodes (for resilience, geographic availability, higher throughput etc) and still be able to reconstruct a single ordered list of transactions, without any central authority through which everything needs to pass. "Distributed ledger" is a good search term for this type of use case.
posted by rd45 at 1:12 AM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
Outside the NFT/crypto hype-bubble - blockchain lends itself to applications where a high volume of transactions must be recorded in a reliable, persistent form. You can do that very well in a traditional database, but blockchain makes it easier to distribute the work across many compute nodes (for resilience, geographic availability, higher throughput etc) and still be able to reconstruct a single ordered list of transactions, without any central authority through which everything needs to pass. "Distributed ledger" is a good search term for this type of use case.
posted by rd45 at 1:12 AM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
> If you take a literal view of the term "blockchain", Github has been doing this since 2008.
Curious! Do you mean this in the sense of github being a popular way to host git repositories, and git being based on a merkle-tree ish data structure (not a chain of blocks but a dag of commits) If so, then arguably git is the thing to focus on, not github.
git doesn't seem to have many of the properties that people assume when speaking about blockchains -- it doesn't offer a decentralised protocol to pick the best commit, it doesn't include some kind of peer to peer discovery protocol. many organisations use git in highly centralised workflows when deciding which commit to trust.
> Certificate Transparency is probably the most successful "blockchain" system that hardly anyone pays attention to.
Also curious! It seems like there are a number of public CT logs and CT log clients (embedded in chrome browser and apple software). Apple and Google each maintain their own curated shortlists of public CT logs that they configure their respective client software to trust. Each CT log is a merkle tree, but it seems like each log is centrally owned and operated by a single party. So in terms of the organisational structure, it seems like a very small clique of corporations that release client software each making their own independent and centralised decisions about which peers to trust, not governed by a single algorithm or protocol.
Similarly, Certificate Transparency appears to lack a bunch of the properties that people assume when they speak about blockchain.
posted by are-coral-made at 1:31 AM on December 8, 2021 [4 favorites]
Curious! Do you mean this in the sense of github being a popular way to host git repositories, and git being based on a merkle-tree ish data structure (not a chain of blocks but a dag of commits) If so, then arguably git is the thing to focus on, not github.
git doesn't seem to have many of the properties that people assume when speaking about blockchains -- it doesn't offer a decentralised protocol to pick the best commit, it doesn't include some kind of peer to peer discovery protocol. many organisations use git in highly centralised workflows when deciding which commit to trust.
> Certificate Transparency is probably the most successful "blockchain" system that hardly anyone pays attention to.
Also curious! It seems like there are a number of public CT logs and CT log clients (embedded in chrome browser and apple software). Apple and Google each maintain their own curated shortlists of public CT logs that they configure their respective client software to trust. Each CT log is a merkle tree, but it seems like each log is centrally owned and operated by a single party. So in terms of the organisational structure, it seems like a very small clique of corporations that release client software each making their own independent and centralised decisions about which peers to trust, not governed by a single algorithm or protocol.
Similarly, Certificate Transparency appears to lack a bunch of the properties that people assume when they speak about blockchain.
posted by are-coral-made at 1:31 AM on December 8, 2021 [4 favorites]
I think Bittorrent lends its first syllable to Bitcoin for data transfer of blocks in the ledger, and Inter-Planetary File System gets used in more recent chains. That concept in bittorrent is "content-addressible storage" where the data has a key to find it that's derived from the data itself -- change the data, the key changes -- which helps with integrity and reliability when sharing with people you don't necessarily trust. Let's note IPFS because it is another project not mentioned yet -- arguably its biggest success is ledgers and NFT's -- but it's designed to be robust to signal corruption and handle speed-of-light delays across the scale of the solar system and up.
git doesn't need an ongoing stream updating your clone with someone else's program code, and CT is involved in interactions derived from one-shot HTTP requests whereby it would be inefficient for you to carry every organisation's public keys on every device for secure connections you may never make.
>git doesn't seem to have many of the properties that people assume when speaking about blockchains -- it doesn't offer a decentralised protocol to pick the best commit, it doesn't include some kind of peer to peer discovery protocol.
It's a merkle tree that uses hashing to address stored content, that's enough for me. The notion of an authoritative history depends on the project using git to store textual data (helpers exist to map differences in binary data so you can track changes over time -- git is better at source code than JPEG's, for example) ...but the specific point Linus Torvalds wanted was to have anyone share their code history and to use reliable tools which reconstruct state across branches of history as you move data around.
Discoverability was you making an announcement in an email mailing list. git replaced transmission in rfc822 email with a sync'ing protocol tunneled through ssh. Where you used to send differences to mutate their copy into your improved copy, not tar-type archives, git has efficient ways to transmit packed sets of differences.
posted by k3ninho at 2:46 AM on December 8, 2021
git doesn't need an ongoing stream updating your clone with someone else's program code, and CT is involved in interactions derived from one-shot HTTP requests whereby it would be inefficient for you to carry every organisation's public keys on every device for secure connections you may never make.
>git doesn't seem to have many of the properties that people assume when speaking about blockchains -- it doesn't offer a decentralised protocol to pick the best commit, it doesn't include some kind of peer to peer discovery protocol.
It's a merkle tree that uses hashing to address stored content, that's enough for me. The notion of an authoritative history depends on the project using git to store textual data (helpers exist to map differences in binary data so you can track changes over time -- git is better at source code than JPEG's, for example) ...but the specific point Linus Torvalds wanted was to have anyone share their code history and to use reliable tools which reconstruct state across branches of history as you move data around.
Discoverability was you making an announcement in an email mailing list. git replaced transmission in rfc822 email with a sync'ing protocol tunneled through ssh. Where you used to send differences to mutate their copy into your improved copy, not tar-type archives, git has efficient ways to transmit packed sets of differences.
posted by k3ninho at 2:46 AM on December 8, 2021
> Curious! Do you mean this in the sense of github being a popular way to host git repositories, and git being based on a merkle-tree ish data structure (not a chain of blocks but a dag of commits) If so, then arguably git is the thing to focus on, not github.
Yes, I mean in that it hosts merkel trees, which are quite literally chains of blocks (most things that people call "blockchains" are really DAGs anyways, and whether something is a "block" or a "blob" is not a meaningful distinction IMO). OP asked about companies and products, which I wouldn't count git as, hence mentioning Github — they weren't the people who actually built that part of it, they're just the ones making money off it :)
> appears to lack a bunch of the properties that people assume when they speak about blockchain.
I think this is a pretty fundamental problem — the term "blockchain" doesn't really mean very much. When I wrote Github above, it was a sort of tongue-in-cheek way of getting at this — the thing that makes something a "blockchain" is really more branding than anything else.
"Blockchain technology" isn't one thing — it could mean merkel trees (which have been around since 1979 at least), open distributed/federated systems (been around since ~1993 if you count the WWW, and has definitively been around since 2001 if you count bittorrent), proof-of-work (been around since conceptually since 1993, and was implemented in a somewhat real system in 1997), tokenization (which has been around since the 1600s — cryptocurrencies really just copied existing stock markets in many ways here, just with less regulation), or many other things.
These are all things that have real applications, but if you bundle them all up together, it's unlikely that's because you've examined each part and decided it will solve a real problem — it's because you think that calling something a "blockchain" will make money fall out of the sky (and to be fair, it often will, these days!)
If you say that CT isn't a blockchain, then you sort of have to accept that many of the things that people call "blockchains" aren't actually that. I don't know the details of the Nestle thing linked above, for instance, but if it's anything like similar projects that I've heard of, it's highly likely that it ticks fewer of the "blockchian" boxes than CT does.
I'm not trying to argue here that it makes sense to call CT a blockchain, or that it doesn't make sense to call the Nestle thing a blockchain, just that... whether something is using "blockchain technology" or not is mostly a category that is defined by hype.
CT is really excellent and I'm glad it exists, but I also wouldn't put it in the category of a "product", and there definitely isn't really a "company that's doing well" off of it (I mean, maybe Google, but that's quite indirect)
posted by wesleyac at 2:52 AM on December 8, 2021 [16 favorites]
Yes, I mean in that it hosts merkel trees, which are quite literally chains of blocks (most things that people call "blockchains" are really DAGs anyways, and whether something is a "block" or a "blob" is not a meaningful distinction IMO). OP asked about companies and products, which I wouldn't count git as, hence mentioning Github — they weren't the people who actually built that part of it, they're just the ones making money off it :)
> appears to lack a bunch of the properties that people assume when they speak about blockchain.
I think this is a pretty fundamental problem — the term "blockchain" doesn't really mean very much. When I wrote Github above, it was a sort of tongue-in-cheek way of getting at this — the thing that makes something a "blockchain" is really more branding than anything else.
"Blockchain technology" isn't one thing — it could mean merkel trees (which have been around since 1979 at least), open distributed/federated systems (been around since ~1993 if you count the WWW, and has definitively been around since 2001 if you count bittorrent), proof-of-work (been around since conceptually since 1993, and was implemented in a somewhat real system in 1997), tokenization (which has been around since the 1600s — cryptocurrencies really just copied existing stock markets in many ways here, just with less regulation), or many other things.
These are all things that have real applications, but if you bundle them all up together, it's unlikely that's because you've examined each part and decided it will solve a real problem — it's because you think that calling something a "blockchain" will make money fall out of the sky (and to be fair, it often will, these days!)
If you say that CT isn't a blockchain, then you sort of have to accept that many of the things that people call "blockchains" aren't actually that. I don't know the details of the Nestle thing linked above, for instance, but if it's anything like similar projects that I've heard of, it's highly likely that it ticks fewer of the "blockchian" boxes than CT does.
I'm not trying to argue here that it makes sense to call CT a blockchain, or that it doesn't make sense to call the Nestle thing a blockchain, just that... whether something is using "blockchain technology" or not is mostly a category that is defined by hype.
CT is really excellent and I'm glad it exists, but I also wouldn't put it in the category of a "product", and there definitely isn't really a "company that's doing well" off of it (I mean, maybe Google, but that's quite indirect)
posted by wesleyac at 2:52 AM on December 8, 2021 [16 favorites]
Nori sells carbon removal credits and uses a blockchain to track the exact location and method of the carbon removal so that the carbon can't be counted multiple times - apparently a significant problem with existing marketplaces.
posted by bashing rocks together at 5:05 AM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by bashing rocks together at 5:05 AM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
With the caveat that that 99% of blockchain is pointless except as a way to host transactions that are not possible (for good or ill) with conventional payment, IBM has a bunch of examples. They had one project using a "private blockchain" (?!?) that was going to use various measurements from wine bottles (label position, dimensions, etc.) to authenticate individual wines for sale, which is a major fraud problem.
posted by wnissen at 10:13 AM on December 8, 2021
posted by wnissen at 10:13 AM on December 8, 2021
Well it seems blockchain is being used to "certify" spaghetti (via Boing Boing).
posted by mephisjo at 11:58 AM on December 8, 2021
posted by mephisjo at 11:58 AM on December 8, 2021
Response by poster: There's no such thing as "the blockchain".
posted by storybored at 2:05 PM on December 9, 2021
posted by storybored at 2:05 PM on December 9, 2021
A lot of software developers, myself included, have concluded that 'blockchain' as it's commonly used (i.e., a distributed ledger) is mostly a solution in search of a problem. Stephen Diehl writes about why, and I generally I agree with his conclusions, which are that blockchain technology is a great building block for when you are interested in sidestepping financial regulations but otherwise a centralized DB is typically better.
posted by axiom at 12:59 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by axiom at 12:59 PM on December 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by kschang at 9:48 PM on December 7, 2021