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Ask HN: Name a non-cryptocurrency blockchain project in use in the real world?

Over the last decade I've heard lots about the potential of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency. But I've heard a lot less about how much of that supposed potential has actually been realised. Every time I meet someone who has anything to say about anything blockchain-related I ask if they can point to a current, real-world blockchain project that isn't basically a cryptocurrency and has made it past being just a prototype or an idea. Literally nobody I've asked has been able to come up with anything that meets those criteria. Can you?

nwah1 3y ago
If it were useful, after all of the years and effort and hype, you wouldn't even need to ask. There'd be an app on your phone or something that you use every day.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
One potential issue is that word "blockchain" is now tainted by association. I think useful would projects purposely avoid the architecture just to avoid the stigma. Another is that p2p projects are really hard to get rolling in general. Crypto was supposed to incentivize this, and we saw how that went.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  P2P should be easy. Bittorrent has worked for years. But all the projects try to do stuff that is hard to do with P2P when we haven't even covered the easy stuff. It doesn't help that IPFS still uses insanely more idle bandwidth than BT and doesn't work in the same use cases because of that.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Actually this a good counterexample. Many attempts have been made to improve on bittorrent, but we are pretty much stuck with the old protocol, not to speak of really old shady clients users tend to find.
gjvc 3y ago
git
- countermeasure 3y ago
  Even though I use it every day, I'd never thought of a Git repo as a blockchain before. But each commit chains to the one before it though, so I suppose it is. Thanks for this new perspective!
  - gjvc 3y ago
    always glad to be of service
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    the hashes do offer some sort of practical security. you can probably configure github to disallow force pushes which means it is now impossible to push something without the new commit being shown to the reviewer. (and peer to peer you can provably configure so you only accept fast forward on a branch) This means it is harder for an attacker to sneak code into a PR. It is a minor security piece but all layers of security add up!
    - gjvc 3y ago
      https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
houseatrielah 3y ago
You're pandering to the "I hate crypto crowd"; you could have asked this on another forum if you wanted a good-faith answer. From my POV the killer-app of crypto is a USD stablecoin. Argentina's currency is collapsing the 3rd time in like 50 years (40% inflation?). There are other financial instruments beyond the dollar that could be tokenized (US Treasuries?), but most of the world would be happy to more-or-less preserve their purchasing power. They will find some vehicle to approximate the perservation of wealth, whether it's mobile phone minutes (an early digital store of value), physical $20-bills or something else. Non-financial use cases would rely on a blockchain's tamper-resistance: like timestamp hashes for proof that a video happened at a certain time (only useful if this video is alleged to be faked), or something like NameCoin which was a tamper-resistant DNS prototype. Some people are trying to implement digital identity with blockchains, and others are trying to build a social layer in such a way where you own your 'social/friend network' and can view it with any ux you choose. I think basically all of the marketing-hucksters have rotated into AI (IBM is running ads for AI, not blockchains), so the hype is muted compared to 2017 or so.
- countermeasure 3y ago
  HN seems like the ideal place for this question to me. Your assumption that I'm not hoping for good-faith answers is incorrect and unfair.
- gnatman 3y ago
  I have a question about the scenario you're describing in Argentina. If I'm an individual in that country and want to protect my money, a stable offshore asset sounds good. And a digital decentralized asset makes sense because then I don't have to rely on banks in my country which might be unstable. My question is, if every individual takes this strategy, does that further destabilize the economy in my country?
  - houseatrielah 3y ago
    People already do it by hoarding US cash or buying real estate (often US real estate is used as a vehicle to store value). Its just a more efficient mechanism. Does it make the situation worse or better? For the individual to preserve the purchasing power its better, for the government is probably somewhat worse since they can't steal all your wealth with inflation, but on the other hand it seems helpful for a government to have a citizenry that's not totally bankrupt.
jki275 3y ago
Surely you've heard of HyperLedger? https://www.hyperledger.org https://www.hyperledger.org
- countermeasure 3y ago
  I have, but looking at their website doesn't get me closer to an answer to my question. They describe themselves as "Enabling developers, enterprises, and organizations to collaboratively build, share, and enhance blockchain frameworks and tools." So Hyperledger sounds like a framework/platform for building blockchains? So I'm wondering what blockchains have been built with it, and made it past the prototype stage to be in use in the real world?
  - jki275 3y ago
    There's a link to a bunch of companies that use it on their site. I haven't really gotten into the details of what they do with it. If you're really interested, take a look at all the things Tezos is being used for, mostly in France. I don't personally get into this stuff, but there are things happening. Tezos doesn't meet your criteria as it does have a coin, but it's more of a utility coin than others. https://tokenist.com/securitize-and-elevated-returns-to-tokenize-1-billion-of-real-estate-assets-on-tezos/ https://tokenist.com/securitize-and-elevated-returns-to-toke... https://xtz.news/adoption/a-total-asset-value-of-1-billion-euros-is-managed-through-tezos-based-sto-platform-equisafe/ https://xtz.news/adoption/a-total-asset-value-of-1-billion-e... https://xtz.news/adoption/fraktion-a-brand-new-fractional-real-estate-investment-platform-built-on-tezos/ https://xtz.news/adoption/fraktion-a-brand-new-fractional-re... https://decrypt.co/43934/a-city-in-france-uses-tezos-blockchain-to-vote-on-local-project/ https://decrypt.co/43934/a-city-in-france-uses-tezos-blockch...
    - countermeasure 3y ago
      Thanks for the links to examples. These voting and real estate securitisation projects look to be quite small-scale, but they also seem to be real-world and not prototypes, so they are what I asked for :)
aranchelk 3y ago
NFTs. It's not a terribly interesting answer, but you've asked your question in an uninterested way. Since there are a lot of good and bad, intrinsic and extrinsic reasons tech does and does not get adopted, I think a better question might be: "Without any BS or deceptive rationalization, what's something that blockchain really would be better at?"
- countermeasure 3y ago
  Okay, NFTs, fair enough :) They often run off the Ethereum ledger, am I right?
  - aranchelk 3y ago
    AFAIK that's entirely true, but as asked it's a non-cryptocurrency project.
Daeraxa 3y ago
LBRY? It does have a currency element for tipping purposes but it isn't its raison d'être
- countermeasure 3y ago
  I hadn't heard of LBRY before. A quick look at it has me thinking that it's a content distribution platform, and the blockchain element is that it has its own token that can be used to pay content creators. Does that sound right?
colesantiago 3y ago
No you cannot and nobody can. Crypto has no legitimate use case other than speculation and enablement of ransomware and encouragement of financial and economic nihilism. It's too slow, not stable, not backed by anything ever, not used in the real world and certainly not useful to anyone other than scammers. Stay away.
tuga 3y ago
ipfs
- countermeasure 3y ago
  I can see that IPFS is decentralised/P2P, but I don't see how a blockchain is part of it. Am I missing something?
quickthrower2 3y ago
SSL certs :-)
- countermeasure 3y ago
  Okay, that's cute :)
keiferski 3y ago
As someone else said, HN is not a good place to ask this question. There is a constant irrational hostility to anything crypto-related here. It's been awhile since I've followed blockchain tech closely, but with the increasing power of AI tools and the potential for deepfakes, I can see a use case for blockchain in verifying that a photograph is real and not AI-generated. I also think blockchain is an ideal technology for a world that no longer trusts central authorities. That world seems...increasingly likely to me, so in some sense blockchain's real use case may not have arrived yet. This is not unique or rare; many times in history, a technology's "real use" is not apparent until decades or centuries after its invention. People declaring something dead or useless a decade after its invention are frankly ignorant of how the world actually works.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s So your suggestion for how blockchain is useful is something that doesn’t even make sense? How does “blockchain” solve deepfakes/AI-generated images? This is why HN is hostile to this. Blockchain is a cool idea, no doubt, but the applications of it are almost solely crypto (aka scams) or ideas that make no sense and require burning a ton of power for dubious results. How does a blockchain verify a picture is not AI-generated? You’re going to put a picture hash in a chain? Ok, what stops me from putting an AI generated hash in a chain? So many of these ideas around blockchain love the idea of “trustless” but fall flat on their face when you have to trust what’s being put into it in the first place. Yes, we all can share a glorified excel document of hashes but who decides what goes into that sheet? And what stops someone with more computing power from deciding even if it’s wrong?
  - loveparade 3y ago
    > I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized" or "I thought blockchain solved this" - Everyone likes to have an opinion on crypto even when they're completely uninformed. Of course it doesn't help that 99% of crypto projects are scams, but that doesn't make the underlying protocol a scam. AI doesn't really have that problem. You don't need to understand anything about how models work to use an LLM. AI also doesn't have payments built-in at the protocol layer, so it's much harder to scam people with AI. But crypto is fundamentally different. It doesn't have easy-to-understand apps that make you more productive like an LLM does. It's highly political and ideological and operates on a layer (banking) that most people have never had exposure to and don't think about in their daily lives. > burning a ton of power for dubious results You realize that pretty much all crypto projects are built on top of Ethereum or Ethereum L2s which barely burn any electricity, right? There are (nearly) no projects built on Bitcoin because well, you can't really build anything on Bitcoin.
dhruvkar 3y ago
Cardano is the closest I've seen to building real world applications. They are slow to move, but super methodical. https://atalaprism.io/ https://atalaprism.io/ This, I believe, is being used to verify identities of students in Ethiopian universities.
- countermeasure 3y ago
  I've found a few articles and some discussion about this on social media from 2021, but not much since then. Any idea whether that project in Ethiopia is still alive?
csomar 3y ago
If you have a non-cryptocurrency blockchain use, you don't use a public blockchain (expensive). You create your own blockchain. There are several platforms that allow that. For example: https://www.kaleido.io https://www.kaleido.io Maybe reach out to them or look more if they have any notable users willing to share their use case?
lividly3529 3y ago
Microsoft is using blockchain technologies to manufacturer Xboxes more efficiently and reduce overhead.
- countermeasure 3y ago
  How?
jmorenoamor 3y ago
I've been part of a project to use blockchain and smart contracts for the ticket lifecycle of a sports club events. Buy, transfer, validate at the gate. All in a private blockchain instance without a "token economy" involved. Pretty cool thing tonbe honest.
- countermeasure 3y ago
  It sounds like "private blockchain" means very few copies of the blockchain, or even just one? If it does, why was it decided to use a blockchain rather than a traditional database?
mkranjec 3y ago
Blockchain document transfer

nwah1 3y ago

If it were useful, after all of the years and effort and hype, you wouldn't even need to ask. There'd be an app on your phone or something that you use every day.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

One potential issue is that word "blockchain" is now tainted by association. I think useful would projects purposely avoid the architecture just to avoid the stigma. Another is that p2p projects are really hard to get rolling in general. Crypto was supposed to incentivize this, and we saw how that went.

eternityforest 3y ago
P2P should be easy. Bittorrent has worked for years. But all the projects try to do stuff that is hard to do with P2P when we haven't even covered the easy stuff. It doesn't help that IPFS still uses insanely more idle bandwidth than BT and doesn't work in the same use cases because of that.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Actually this a good counterexample. Many attempts have been made to improve on bittorrent, but we are pretty much stuck with the old protocol, not to speak of really old shady clients users tend to find.

gjvc 3y ago

git

countermeasure 3y ago
Even though I use it every day, I'd never thought of a Git repo as a blockchain before. But each commit chains to the one before it though, so I suppose it is. Thanks for this new perspective!
- gjvc 3y ago
  always glad to be of service
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  the hashes do offer some sort of practical security. you can probably configure github to disallow force pushes which means it is now impossible to push something without the new commit being shown to the reviewer. (and peer to peer you can provably configure so you only accept fast forward on a branch) This means it is harder for an attacker to sneak code into a PR. It is a minor security piece but all layers of security add up!
  - gjvc 3y ago
    https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

houseatrielah 3y ago

You're pandering to the "I hate crypto crowd"; you could have asked this on another forum if you wanted a good-faith answer. From my POV the killer-app of crypto is a USD stablecoin. Argentina's currency is collapsing the 3rd time in like 50 years (40% inflation?). There are other financial instruments beyond the dollar that could be tokenized (US Treasuries?), but most of the world would be happy to more-or-less preserve their purchasing power. They will find some vehicle to approximate the perservation of wealth, whether it's mobile phone minutes (an early digital store of value), physical $20-bills or something else. Non-financial use cases would rely on a blockchain's tamper-resistance: like timestamp hashes for proof that a video happened at a certain time (only useful if this video is alleged to be faked), or something like NameCoin which was a tamper-resistant DNS prototype. Some people are trying to implement digital identity with blockchains, and others are trying to build a social layer in such a way where you own your 'social/friend network' and can view it with any ux you choose. I think basically all of the marketing-hucksters have rotated into AI (IBM is running ads for AI, not blockchains), so the hype is muted compared to 2017 or so.

countermeasure 3y ago
HN seems like the ideal place for this question to me. Your assumption that I'm not hoping for good-faith answers is incorrect and unfair.
gnatman 3y ago
I have a question about the scenario you're describing in Argentina. If I'm an individual in that country and want to protect my money, a stable offshore asset sounds good. And a digital decentralized asset makes sense because then I don't have to rely on banks in my country which might be unstable. My question is, if every individual takes this strategy, does that further destabilize the economy in my country?
- houseatrielah 3y ago
  People already do it by hoarding US cash or buying real estate (often US real estate is used as a vehicle to store value). Its just a more efficient mechanism. Does it make the situation worse or better? For the individual to preserve the purchasing power its better, for the government is probably somewhat worse since they can't steal all your wealth with inflation, but on the other hand it seems helpful for a government to have a citizenry that's not totally bankrupt.

jki275 3y ago

Surely you've heard of HyperLedger? https://www.hyperledger.org https://www.hyperledger.org

countermeasure 3y ago
I have, but looking at their website doesn't get me closer to an answer to my question. They describe themselves as "Enabling developers, enterprises, and organizations to collaboratively build, share, and enhance blockchain frameworks and tools." So Hyperledger sounds like a framework/platform for building blockchains? So I'm wondering what blockchains have been built with it, and made it past the prototype stage to be in use in the real world?
- jki275 3y ago
  There's a link to a bunch of companies that use it on their site. I haven't really gotten into the details of what they do with it. If you're really interested, take a look at all the things Tezos is being used for, mostly in France. I don't personally get into this stuff, but there are things happening. Tezos doesn't meet your criteria as it does have a coin, but it's more of a utility coin than others. https://tokenist.com/securitize-and-elevated-returns-to-tokenize-1-billion-of-real-estate-assets-on-tezos/ https://tokenist.com/securitize-and-elevated-returns-to-toke... https://xtz.news/adoption/a-total-asset-value-of-1-billion-euros-is-managed-through-tezos-based-sto-platform-equisafe/ https://xtz.news/adoption/a-total-asset-value-of-1-billion-e... https://xtz.news/adoption/fraktion-a-brand-new-fractional-real-estate-investment-platform-built-on-tezos/ https://xtz.news/adoption/fraktion-a-brand-new-fractional-re... https://decrypt.co/43934/a-city-in-france-uses-tezos-blockchain-to-vote-on-local-project/ https://decrypt.co/43934/a-city-in-france-uses-tezos-blockch...
  - countermeasure 3y ago
    Thanks for the links to examples. These voting and real estate securitisation projects look to be quite small-scale, but they also seem to be real-world and not prototypes, so they are what I asked for :)

aranchelk 3y ago

NFTs. It's not a terribly interesting answer, but you've asked your question in an uninterested way. Since there are a lot of good and bad, intrinsic and extrinsic reasons tech does and does not get adopted, I think a better question might be: "Without any BS or deceptive rationalization, what's something that blockchain really would be better at?"

countermeasure 3y ago
Okay, NFTs, fair enough :) They often run off the Ethereum ledger, am I right?
- aranchelk 3y ago
  AFAIK that's entirely true, but as asked it's a non-cryptocurrency project.

Daeraxa 3y ago

LBRY? It does have a currency element for tipping purposes but it isn't its raison d'être

countermeasure 3y ago
I hadn't heard of LBRY before. A quick look at it has me thinking that it's a content distribution platform, and the blockchain element is that it has its own token that can be used to pay content creators. Does that sound right?

colesantiago 3y ago

No you cannot and nobody can. Crypto has no legitimate use case other than speculation and enablement of ransomware and encouragement of financial and economic nihilism. It's too slow, not stable, not backed by anything ever, not used in the real world and certainly not useful to anyone other than scammers. Stay away.

tuga 3y ago

ipfs

countermeasure 3y ago
I can see that IPFS is decentralised/P2P, but I don't see how a blockchain is part of it. Am I missing something?

quickthrower2 3y ago

SSL certs :-)

countermeasure 3y ago
Okay, that's cute :)

keiferski 3y ago

As someone else said, HN is not a good place to ask this question. There is a constant irrational hostility to anything crypto-related here. It's been awhile since I've followed blockchain tech closely, but with the increasing power of AI tools and the potential for deepfakes, I can see a use case for blockchain in verifying that a photograph is real and not AI-generated. I also think blockchain is an ideal technology for a world that no longer trusts central authorities. That world seems...increasingly likely to me, so in some sense blockchain's real use case may not have arrived yet. This is not unique or rare; many times in history, a technology's "real use" is not apparent until decades or centuries after its invention. People declaring something dead or useless a decade after its invention are frankly ignorant of how the world actually works.

joshstrange 3y ago
I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s So your suggestion for how blockchain is useful is something that doesn’t even make sense? How does “blockchain” solve deepfakes/AI-generated images? This is why HN is hostile to this. Blockchain is a cool idea, no doubt, but the applications of it are almost solely crypto (aka scams) or ideas that make no sense and require burning a ton of power for dubious results. How does a blockchain verify a picture is not AI-generated? You’re going to put a picture hash in a chain? Ok, what stops me from putting an AI generated hash in a chain? So many of these ideas around blockchain love the idea of “trustless” but fall flat on their face when you have to trust what’s being put into it in the first place. Yes, we all can share a glorified excel document of hashes but who decides what goes into that sheet? And what stops someone with more computing power from deciding even if it’s wrong?
- loveparade 3y ago
  > I can’t imagine why HN thinks crypto related stuff is bullshit /s Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized" or "I thought blockchain solved this" - Everyone likes to have an opinion on crypto even when they're completely uninformed. Of course it doesn't help that 99% of crypto projects are scams, but that doesn't make the underlying protocol a scam. AI doesn't really have that problem. You don't need to understand anything about how models work to use an LLM. AI also doesn't have payments built-in at the protocol layer, so it's much harder to scam people with AI. But crypto is fundamentally different. It doesn't have easy-to-understand apps that make you more productive like an LLM does. It's highly political and ideological and operates on a layer (banking) that most people have never had exposure to and don't think about in their daily lives. > burning a ton of power for dubious results You realize that pretty much all crypto projects are built on top of Ethereum or Ethereum L2s which barely burn any electricity, right? There are (nearly) no projects built on Bitcoin because well, you can't really build anything on Bitcoin.

dhruvkar 3y ago

Cardano is the closest I've seen to building real world applications. They are slow to move, but super methodical. https://atalaprism.io/ https://atalaprism.io/ This, I believe, is being used to verify identities of students in Ethiopian universities.

countermeasure 3y ago
I've found a few articles and some discussion about this on social media from 2021, but not much since then. Any idea whether that project in Ethiopia is still alive?

csomar 3y ago

If you have a non-cryptocurrency blockchain use, you don't use a public blockchain (expensive). You create your own blockchain. There are several platforms that allow that. For example: https://www.kaleido.io https://www.kaleido.io Maybe reach out to them or look more if they have any notable users willing to share their use case?

lividly3529 3y ago

Microsoft is using blockchain technologies to manufacturer Xboxes more efficiently and reduce overhead.

countermeasure 3y ago
How?

jmorenoamor 3y ago

I've been part of a project to use blockchain and smart contracts for the ticket lifecycle of a sports club events. Buy, transfer, validate at the gate. All in a private blockchain instance without a "token economy" involved. Pretty cool thing tonbe honest.

countermeasure 3y ago
It sounds like "private blockchain" means very few copies of the blockchain, or even just one? If it does, why was it decided to use a blockchain rather than a traditional database?

mkranjec 3y ago

Blockchain document transfer