agreed! I don't think there's any particular application outside cryptocurrency that I would strongly defend as "needing" a blockchain - then again, I'm not the most imaginative person, so I think others will eventually come up with some genuinely unique and valuable uses!
I give you one shining example. Secure and untampered voting.
Let's say you record voting based on SMS for American Idol show in MySQL database. Singer A got 1000 votes, singer B got 700 votes. But singer B is more viral and popular in social media. You think if singer B goes to the next level, it will increase the rating of the show much more compared to singer A does. So you decide to bump up the singer B's voting number to 1100.
Not a good case for shared write access. Just shared read access. DB's come with their own logs. If one wanted to provide verification one only needs to provide logs that other people can read and maintain diffs/copies of
You can’t prove that logs haven’t been tampered with, though. The running system is a black box that could be doing anything to that file before making it available.
This is quite simple. You simply have the running system constantly have the file or data be readable to the public. Now anyone can prove that the logs haven't been tampered with. Even better, you can just use a merkle tree data storage solution like Git to make that verification easy and fast. See Certificate Authority for a fully fleshed out solution in this nature. (I guess you could claim that merkle trees are blockchains, but in that case I would argue that the word "blockchain" is pretty meaningless. Just call them merkle trees.)
But it's turtles all the way down. How does the public know that they're getting the data and not a surrepetitiously modified version? At some point you're relying on the system to be truthful about its contents.
It also effectively hands your vote over in cleartext to the nation state. There's a damn good reason why Russia is looking into blockchain voting, and it's not for the purpose of protecting fair and free elections.
Paper ballots work fine and have amazingly low error rates, leave it be.
Maybe for pointless votes like American Idol or Formula E fanboost that's fine, although it seems like massive overkill to me. You're still going to need to justify the energy bill/incentivize miners, and these systems have a central authority that could run a regular voting system anyways.
The issue I have with electronic voting of any kind is that it's a huge and valuable target, it's pretty much guaranteed that multiple hostile nation states will want to poke holes into these systems. Introducing crypto doesn't do squat to prevent all sorts of nasty problems, including information leaks and stolen private keys. Given what we know about how most people handle basic passwords, I think paper is probably the most secure form of voting we've ever seen.
For us, American Idol is pointless. But for the singer who got robbed the championship, it's not. Yes, I admit the energy bill is part of the blockchain scalability issue. But blockchain is still in infancy. There is a room for improvement regarding the energy bill.
The political voting is a complex beast so I am not going to comment on it yet. My main focus is for the voting process like American Idol, choosing moderators in forum.
If the voting is anonymised, then how do you protect against Sybil attacks?
When you think through this, every voting system has a weak link in terms of verifying who is a valid voter. So you must have a centralized authority here. Thus a blockchain is useless.
This is the hypothetical solution. Let's say there are 1000 voters. You premine 1000 coins then send it to each voter. Voter then can vote with 1 coin. So you can make sure the voting process is valid, and you can hide the sender in the smart contract. Of course, the technicality is not this simple. But you get the idea.
It's not really "needing", but one of the strong use cases is disrupting escrow. If domains, car/house titles, etc. existed as blockchain objects then they could be sold securely with no escrow.
Physical deeds are forged all the time, and sorting it out requires a quiet title lawsuit. A stolen electronic deed would be handled similarly. You would ask a court to declare the stolen title invalid and issue a new one.
Just to make sure it's clear, I'm not saying that courts should have any special power to manipulate the blockchain, just that they could declare a stolen title invalid, and issue a new one in the form of a new colored coin on the blockchain.
I'm not claiming any benefit related to government control, just that escrow would be unnecessary.
A centralized source will be held accountable to the legal demands, thus as trustworthy as the blockchain yet significantly more beneficial for all users in terms of speed, storage and utility.
