Ask Lemmy

This looks interesting https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay

Disclaimer I have not tried it , just discovered it now

The "Blockchain" technology is gonna become crucial in the future of AI and Deepfakes.

Since videos, and especially still images can be faked. They would be treated just like witness testimonies, evidence that can be falsified.

What I think will happen is that people would have to use live internet connection to verify a video.

So what happens is that whenever a video is recorded, there will be a "blockchain verify" feature in the camera settings, when enabled either the video feed or the hash of the packets of video data is sent to a blockchain network where it gets timestamped and stored permanently on the blockchain.

The network would consist of various nodes that ideally aren't government run. Think like the ACLU, EFF, or Journalists, or people who independently want to join the network. Each would run their own node independently.

So any time theres suspicion that a video may be faked, the courts can just ask the network to send their own copy of the blockchain, if theres a consensus, then the video can be proven to have been created at the time that is timestamped. So there's no way of creating a fake video evidence after an incident since you wont have the timestamp on the blockchain.

You can check out the use cases on hyperledgers blog. E.g. https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/blog/energy-mines-digital-trust-the-future-of-global-supply-chains

Let’s first state what the blockchain states it is:

• immutable
• public
• decentralized

Let’s say that you’re a user who wants to use the blockchain to manage something outside of the digital world with it. You create your product, and begin advertising it. No matter what this product is, it cannot affect the physical world. This means that immutability is a problem. The real world has mistakes. If a person sells their car, they need to hand over cash in the real world. How does that knowledge make it onto the chain? Same for a house, etc. Any object that has a transaction in the real world has to have an authority that manages whether that object has actually changed hands. So for the simplest use case, the chain has already failed.

Let’s talk about the next one: public. Nobody wants their transactions public. You don’t want votes to be public. The blockchain is not anonymous, no matter what anyone claims, because every record is tracked you can eventually deanonymize anyone if you wanted to. So this one is just a bald-faced lie and something not to be desired in any situation. The point here was to make it so that you can be decentralized and the public can be the ones to police others users of the chain, so let’s talk about how it’s fundamentally impossible for a chain to actually result in a decentralized world.

The blockchain is not actually decentralized. If you want to handle money in most countries on earth, you have regulatory bodies that govern everything about your operations. That means if you want to write an app like Shopify that someone can use to pay with bitcoin on a website, even if you are not selling something physical, you are still governed by a central body. Not only this, but once you want to sell something physical, you have to extract your money through a physical bank in the real world, which is also governed by the same regulatory bodies. This was immediately known as a problem in the early days of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it is still a problem today. This problem is not solvable as long as governments exist.

Funnily enough, each one of these elements does have use by itself! For example, distributed databases have been around for decades, and are the basis for much of the tech you use today. There are even immutable databases that are in use in many industries to keep an immutable record of what happened. AWS is sunsetting it now, but their QLDB was exactly that. CQRS with Event Sourcing is another implementation of the same idea. Finally, any government service or company could make records public if they want to. In fact many already do, for example home ownership records. If you own a house, that information is not private.

Putting something on the blockchain is no more than a move to make sure whomever owns that crypto gets more money out than they put in. If an actual use case existed for this tech, it would have been used decades ago when it was first invented (the blockchain was actually invented in the 80s by cryptographer David Chaum, decades before Satoshi invented Bitcoin and it was even discussed in Satoshi's whitepaper).

I can talk for hours about how each element of the blockchain is just either a grift to extract money from others OR a cynical, incorrect outtake on how the real world functions. If you want that, let me know.

The most attractive part about blockchain is the decentralized ledger showing each transaction made.

I feel like greater minds than mine could come up with a way to use that to fight government corruption. Every transaction is a matter of public record.

I doubt it's really a practical solution though. Each transaction makes each subsequent transaction more computationally expensive. Plus all these vendors and contractors and everything are accustomed to fiat currency. Likely, they'd just immediately exchange it for cash.

This of course doesn't tackle the issue of under-the-table corruption where you invite a senator out for lunch and kickbacks. I'm also sure that the government would want to maintain their own ledger, or that conniving people will find a way to cook the books anyway.

Private transactions, despite what people here are saying. Let me explain:

1. Privacy is not equal to anonymity. The latter is much harder to achieve.

2. There is Monero, a crypto made specifically for anonymity. It's not very convenient to use, but it is preserving anonymity with multiple measures.

3. Even Bitcoin, which is not built for that purpose, is private enough. It depends on how you use it.

4. Deanonimization in general happens when you link your transaction with personal identifying information, but you can reduce your exposure by following certain opsec rules. I see this situation is better than traditional banking where your transactions are always not anonymous, and privacy is only protected by the bank itself. Data leaks happen, governments can get to your transaction info via legal means, but with crypto you have more options to protect yourself.

I'd say in theory it could be used something like public records of proof for ownership of immaterial or intellectual property and the transfer thereof. Say the rights to music, writing, digital art and whatnot. Like the essence of NFT without the hyped up crypto bro speculation and pump'n'dump.

The difficulty would be to get it recognized as legally valid and the bigger difficulty that as there is no central authority there is also nobody being able to rectify fraud or user mistakes. If you implement central authority it's basically just any old list of transactions with some extra crud so then the question would be why even bother.

I'm going to say "no", at least in the practical sense.

Before "AI" was the current hype, there was an equally annoying "Blockchain all the things" hype (and associated cryptobros partially fueling it). Aside from the various crypto scams, I'm not entirely sure if/where it found its niche. The fact that everything today isn't running on blockchain like the hype of yesteryear predicted is pretty solid evidence that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.

It's not even good as a bank. On the other thread you mentioned I commented that blockchain is an immutable ledger visible to everyone. That is a nightmare for privacy reasons.

Audit logs is genuinely the only application I see it may be good for, but we have other systems that have a smaller environmental and technical impact making them a better fit than blockchain.

A blockchain is just a list of records. You put data in it, and you have some script that ensures the data is internally valid. For example, with cryptocurrencies you can’t allow a transaction that causes a balance to be less than 0. A blockchain containing such transaction is invalid.

This is nothing particular. You can do this with most data records.

What’s unique about blockchain is that if you have two blockchains, both are internally valid but have records that disagree with each other, then you have a way to decide entirely by yourself which one you should prefer. For example, with Bitcoin you choose the blockchain with most “work”. No need to ask some third party about which one you should prefer.

And that’s where it falls apart. These situations are rare. There might be a few niche cases. I haven’t heard of any use case that’s particularly convincing to me.

Its only real use is as dark money. Which isn't always a bad thing - there are a lot of activists in oppressive countries who rely on bitcoin donations, Anarchist Black Cross comes to mind.

But, as you said, it's not really as "dark" as people think.

I seem to recall someone developing a "game" that was based on the blockchain but used to crowdsource protein folding models or something like that? I could be mixing two memories though. I could see how the concept could possibly be implemented for something like that, but I wonder if it couldn't be handled more energy-efficiently by like a single quantum computer doing calculus.

The general category of potential use case is when you want some information to be public, undeletable, and outside of corporate or government control.

While I can’t think of a compelling use case at the moment (other than whistleblowers, maybe), given the direction our corporations and government are going it seems like the sort of thing that might become increasingly useful in the near future.

Just fraud. Nothing else.

It's a good way to pay for illicit drugs, weapons, anything really, that you ordered using TOR, or your favorite unattributable communications technique. If you believe there are laws that should not be, that's good. If you are in favor of those laws, not so much.

I know several privacy focused apps use it for syncing data between multiple clients. For example Google Chrome syncs user data to your Google account, but Brave browser syncs user data using block chain.

I don't know if it's actually the best way to do that, but it's an option.

Blockchain is perfectly fine. Its specifically certain crypto thats the issue as they use up to much energy for what they do. So for example bitcoin uses the energy intensive proof of work but then also artifically inflates its value such that it will always take more energy to make one as time goes by. So the amount of bit coins you could mine per barrel of oil was way less in 2010 in comparison to now and not just as a function of inflation. Regardless of that the proof of work is to energy intensive. Grid coing uses proof of stake and the computation is used to do useful work. So like im fine with that. blockchain is ultimately a distributed ledger which is fine but bitcoin was a poc of a possible use and unfortunately the creator did not realize the issues it would have energy wise if it was actually used as a form of currency. Bitcoin makes the k-cup guy look like the patron saint of environmental responsibility.

Fraud!

GREAT PFP🔥🔥