This is a very good question. I wrote an answer in another thread on this topic which illustrates a use-case you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15512116
Total shot in the dark, but could there be a use case in Software Licensing? Your customer agrees to host a node in your distributed network, and all clients are able to view a digest of licenses in a format that is not solely owned by the publisher?
Note for anyone wanting to try this out on trial account of GCP:
Your instance will be halted with a scary sounding warning email (even if you are just running a benchmark).
Evidently for their trials, they have bots that scan the VMs and kill machines running cryptocurrency software. Just read a bit of threads on google, reddit about this.
Possibly, you can run it on paid machines - but why would you? They charge you more for a machine/hour than you can make cryptocurrency/hr.
If the free tier isn't funded by conversions, then it's only really valuable as a marketing tool.
This is why hosts are often judicious with the free hosting tier - even with address verification and capchas, 60% of the free tier is phishing hosts using a stolen identity and credit card. About 20% are Ebay snipers running shoe-bots, or crypto-miners, begging for bare metal for the response times or hardware, respectively. Another 18% are technology generalists who might cobble together a 2004-era blog hosting service, to engorge their inner nerd - mostly harmless, might not patch something, but will never convert.
For the first 2 groups - once the credit is up (or gets flagged for spam/phishing), the account gets flipped. The scammer uses new email and maybe a new credit card, and migrates their activities. Darknet forums (and probably some subreddits) have lists of providers and how to work the free tier. I expect software to auto-balance between multiple free-tier accounts on multiple cloud providers exists; I've debated scripting the API calls in Powershell in a few weekends.
Some shoes have limited editions where only a specific number of pairs are manufactured. e.g. Yeezy Boosts by Adidas. They are Kanye West's design and very exclusive. So when they go on sale they run out within seconds. Most of the people who buy them then put the up for auction on other sites like eBay where they can fetch up to 20 times the price.
So people who want them have to get them quick so they need automated scripts that can add to cart, fill in credit info and check out the moment they are released. (The manufacturer usually announces in advance exactly the date and time they will be released).
People pay a lot for these bots. I once wrote a bot for somebody off Craigslist for a certain clothing brand that was selling exclusive jackets and shirts like this. ( I do a lot of automation and scraping for my day to day work so it was not difficult). The guy paid me $600, didn't even try to negotiate downwards. The bot bought 10 items (max allowed in the cart) at like 250 each. I looked the items up on eBay sometime later and they were going for slightly above 1k. So I actually felt I could have asked for much more.
Anyway, long story short, people put a big value on exclusivity and brand so they are willing to go to lengths to secure these limited items.
It's an eBay bidding bot - bid on a popular product faster than humans. For some reason, shoes were extremely popular, and I have only ever seen this type of user target shoes, and not other products such as handbags or hats.
Actually it's mostly on niche stores that sell limited edition items like Yeezy Boosts, Supreme, BAPE. They even do it for clothes now. They have a release date and time and sell out within seconds
How is Etherium's latency? Would it be at all worthwhile to pursue building a shoe-bot (or other HFT/bidding bot) on an Etherium platform? Is there a future where users could pay more Gas to get a low-latency response?
I'm investigating this at my company so I can share a couple of ideas.
Our system is used by a series of companies to manage the performance of their supply chain (keeping this very vague to avoid breaching NDAs).
We generate reports which show the performance. as our system sees it. However, what if a supplier were to bribe us to change the report? I have heard third-hand of this happening before in our industry so that's not as crazy as it sounds.
And what if the client were to change performance criteria mid-way through a contract? The supplier might now be showing poor performance where this is totally unfair.
This is where a blockchain might be helpful. If we publish these reports to the private blockchain shared between us, the customer and the supplier, the customer can verify the blockchain at any time to prove that this has not happen. Finally, the supplier can see if terms are updated and this is permanently stored in the chain.
Effectively, if three parties might not trust each other, then blockchain might be a good option to keep people honest.
Assuming with blockchain you mean blockchain+PoW, I fail to see how it solves your problem. The gist of PoW is that so many people contribute work that it's difficult for any party to do more work than the other parties combined. PoW is essentially useless if three parties are involved.
Wouldn't a simple timestamping of documents work in this case? Either standard RFC 3161 service or publishing document's hashes on Bitcoin (via OP_RETURN transactions).
That is given that the data remains true at the point of data entry into the network. If the data entering the chain is bogus due to bribery, blockchain won't solve the problem.
I think that's addressing a different problem. There are two distinct issues:
1. Is the data correct?
2. Has the data been changed?
For many cases, 1) is not solvable in software.
I'm not sure I really understand why 2. is something best solved with a blockchain with a private group, but given people who have actually looked into this when I haven't think it's relevant means I'm probably missing something either on the requirements, difficulty to implement or features.
Well, in this case it is still a permissionless blockchain. But there are many use cases why we need private permissioned blockchains. For example Hyperledger Fabric is mostly used for different purposes. You can find some use cases here: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/business-use-cases.html
There's also Quorum, the open source enterprise blockchain based on Ethereum. It's got privacy and zksnarks and pluggable consensus and a decompiler and a consortium and everything.
Yes, except you are 100% in control of what goes on on your server and could easily falsify data. The _whole_ point of cryptocurrencies is to avoid that.
A private blockchain spread across for example, several organizations, may be a good vehicle for sharing a database in such a way that all parties know it can't be falsified.
For example, you could use a different consensus algo and enable each organization to have one vote, one mine and this would enable sharing of data that you want to ensure hasn't been modified.
This model could connect possibly thousands of different organizations together with a trustless setup.
