Hype or not? Results of Forbes’ 2018 “30+ Real Examples Of Blockchain Technology In Practice”
In May 2018, Forbes posted an article claiming to list 35 real examples where blockchain tech was actually practically used [archive.org link]. Now, nearly 3 years later, I’ve gone through the list to see how well these examples could stand the test of time.
I’ve labeled each example as a “failure” or “success” based on the following criteria:
- If the link in the Forbes article is a 404 or the domain is down, I consider the project a failure without further investigation.
- If the project is talking about “upcoming” or generally “future-form”, it is not a real example in practice; nor was it 3 years ago.
- If the project is lacking substantial content regarding the blockchain portion of what it’s offering.
- If the project is offering a solution that could be done with less (e.g. using bitcoin, rather than an ERC20-token, or done without a blockchain at all).
- If the project is severely lacking users.
- If the project is a private blockchain (use a traditional DB, plz).
Current state: 1 success, 34 failures.
In some cases, I have provided thoughts or a summary on how to re-implement the given example using stripped down technology, such as using only Bitcoin, or without a blockchain at all.
I intend to update this list, within reason, with corrections, as long as the claims are coherent, minimal in marketing spiel, to the point, straightforward, and most importantly actually address the points I’m raising (except for Ripple, which is a scam).
KickCity
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum (ERC20)
- Characteristics: ICO
- Status: failure (mainly rule 4, but also indirectly rule 1)
Matching event organizers with influencers (?). Stopped investigation when the “Discover events” button was not working.
Probably similar to the Guts example below. See details regarding reimplementing using a Bitcoin-only solution.
B2Expand
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum-based
- Characteristics: Game (token)
- Status: failure (rules 4 and 5)
A quick look on Steam reveals a mostly failed game with mixed reviews by 100 or so users. (This may be a little harsh, but the bar has to be higher than this to be considered successful. Either way, see below paragraph.)
It goes without saying that a system like this can be, and has been for decades, done without a blockchain.
MediaChain (Spotify)
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum (I think?)
- Characteristics: ??
- Status: failure (at minimum rule 3)
This product is a mess, and I mean that in the “your room is a mess” kind of way. It’s talking about being a decentralized peer to peer system, but it’s also talking about maybe tentatively deploying it on Ethereum, too, to make it even more secure, which makes no sense. The github repo has seen no progress in 4 years (so this was already 1 year stale when Forbes gushed about it).
Guts
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum (ERC20?)
- Characteristics: Ticket system / event finder
- Status: failure (rule 4)
So you buy something called a GET token. Then you use that to get a ticket to an event. Then when you go to the event, the event organizer can verify that you’re who you are.
(They are also making baseless claims that you can’t sell the ticket for a price higher than you bought it. This disregards the very obvious fact that you can sell something over the table for any price you want and circumvent their “smart” contract rules.)
Then the event organizer supposedly sells the GET tokens and gets the cash he deserves for holding the event.
On doing this with less
You can implement this system using Bitcoin only and circumvent the token stuff completely, for example:
- Set up e.g. BtcPay for ticket sales.
- Create a simple application with signing capabilities, which works as a bridge between the BtcPay server and user — the user gets an invoice for a ticket they are buying, and the application generates a key pair and passes the pubkey as metadata to the BtcPay server.
- When the user pays (using some wallet of their choice), the pubkey and the ticket are tied together.
- When the user is attending the event, they use the application to verify that they own the given ticket: challenger (event holder) sends a random message, the application signs the message using the previously generated private key, which the challenger can verify on the spot.
- At this point the user can’t actually resell their ticket, period, unless they break open the above application and pull out (and share) the private key with the buyer. The buyer will never be able to ensure that the seller didn’t share the private key with other people, though, or intended to just go check in before the buyer was able to, so this kind of interaction is essentially moot.
- To make reselling tickets possible, the system could be extended with some “exchange this pubkey for that pubkey” system, but this would suffer from the same OTC issues noted above. Still, that would be the way to do reselling.
- You also want to set up some infra for the event finding feature itself, so people can discover stuff.
Matchpool
- Status: failure
Site is down.
Warranteer
- Status: failure
Site is down.
Blockpoint
- Status: failure
Domain name is up for sale (i.e. was abandoned).
Loyyal
- Blockchain Technology: some private blockchain
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failure
Private blockchains are pointless marketing-garble.
Bitcar
- Status: failure
Page not found.
IBM Blockchain
- Blockchain Technology: private
- Characteristics: -
- Status: failure
Private blockchains are pointless marketing-garble.
Food industry (Walmart, etc)
- Blockchain Technology: above
- Characteristics: supply chain tracing
- Status: failure
This product does not require a blockchain, and/or a blockchain does not solve some of the problems they are indicating it solves.
While it has users and is expanding, this appears to be purely hype-based.
See below on supply chain tracing.
Provenance
- Blockchain Technology: private (I think)
- Characteristics: supply chain tracing
- Status: failure
This product does not require a blockchain, and/or a blockchain does not solve some of the problems they are indicating it solves.
See below on supply chain tracing.
Blockverify
- Status: failure
Site is down.
OriginTrail
- Blockchain Technology: ethereum and .. something?
- Characteristics: supply chain tracing
- Status: failure
This product does not require a blockchain, and/or a blockchain does not solve some of the problems they are indicating it solves.
While it has users and is expanding, this appears to be purely hype-based.
On supply chain tracing
This is first and foremost a big hardware problem, rather than software. You need to be able to verify the physical location of the participants and the goods, and the time when this verification happened, and the qualities/attributes of the goods. Signing something with a private key is not solving any of these things. I can sign from anywhere, for one, and just because I signed something doesn’t automatically or magically make that something the truth. Nor is there any way for me, without e.g. using Peter Todd’s open timestamp system, to verify that this was signed at a specific time, and even that only proves it one way — “no later than this” — it does not prove any boundaries about how early the signature was created.
Once you solve those hardware problems (physical location, time, verifying the content without e.g. showing the content of a different crate, etc), the cryptographic part is most likely trivial, and it most likely will not in any way require a blockchain.
De Beers
- Status: failure
Page not found.
Accenture
- Blockchain Technology: ?
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failure
Blockchain, the word, appears, but blockchain, the concept, appears not to. Looks like a pure marketing tactic to garner interest, but I could be wrong. It is claiming to attach insurance to blockchains, but there’s no details whatsoever on exactly how, or why, or what the benefits of doing so are.
RiskBlock
- Blockchain Technology: none
- Characteristics: —
- Status: failure
This one isn’t even talking about using blockchains. Perhaps they scrubbed it after realizing it was a bad idea. It’s just a regular old insurance company.
MedicalChain
- Blockchain Technology: Hyperledger Fabric
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failure
Latest news were December 2019.
They idea seems to be that users upload their sensitive medical data to “MedicalChain’s Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, which allows them to access their history with new docs or while traveling.”
A trial was supposedly starting end of 2019 in the UK. Only thing I could find on this was a March 2018 Telegraph article saying a trial was going to be done. Expect a 2021 article saying a trial will be undertaken, I guess?
Firstly, this is a god awful idea in general. Secondly, I don’t see why a blockchain is needed for this, or where it will help.
On sharing sensitive data selectively
The way I would expect this to work is, firstly, that a user would keep all their data encrypted using a key that only they, the user, was in possession of. Their doctors and clinics would still keep medical records in the same way they do now, but the user would have the option of receiving digitalized copies of these, by providing a public key or the like. The digitalized copy would be encrypted for decryption using the given public key, and uploaded to a centralized database shared by users and clinics and hospitals.
This way, no one except the user would be able to access this sensitive information, even if they managed to hijack and steal all the data.
When the user wants to reveal/share their data with e.g. a new doctor, they would receive a public key from the doctor, for the dedicated purpose of downloading and re-encrypting their data, except now with the doctor’s key.
The doctor would then be able to download and look at this data whenever they wished, and the user would be able to revoke (delete) the data online whenever they wanted to, even though this would not—which is indeed also the case for the blockchain solution above — prevent the doctor from keeping the copy they downloaded indefinitely.
Firstly, this is a god awful idea in general. Secondly, I don’t see why a blockchain is needed for this. If you want a system where users can selectively share their data with doctors while keeping said data secure, a blockchain is not what you need.
MedRec
- Status: failure
404.
Nano Vision
- Blockchain Technology: ?
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failure
Was this URL a typo or something? The page linked to was about babies and disinfectants, and had no blockchain related content anywhere as far as I could tell.
Gem
- Blockchain Technology: ?
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failure
The newest entry in the News section is from 2017.
The “Powered by GemOS” link leads to a 404.
SimplyVital Health
- Status: failure (404)
BitProperty
- Status: failure (NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID)
DeedCoin
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum (ERC20, looks like)
- Characteristics: ICO (looks like)
- Status: failed
The lack of information is a major issue here, but from what I can tell, if you use their coin, somehow your commission for buying a house drops. Why? God knows. It just does. Magic. (No…)
Ubiquity
- Status: failed (404)
BitGive
- Blockchain Technology: Bitcoin
- Characteristics: charity funding
- Status: successful
The creators of givetrack.org, they are running a bitcoin based charity funding operation since 2013, which seems to be active today.
While this project is not strictly a blockchain innovation in itself, the innovative point lies in the infrastructure around using a cryptocurrency to approach a real existing problem (the lack of transparency in charity orgs).
AidCoin
- Blockchain Technology: Ethereum (ERC20)
- Characteristics: ICO
- Status: failed
You buy their coin, and in exchange you get to meet .. celebrities. And then you give your coin to charity, I think. I don’t see the benefit in doing this vs using e.g. BitGive above directly. They’re claiming to solve the transparency issue between charities and the actual causes (i.e. charities taking a big chunk of the funds for themselves). Interestingly, (unless I’m mistaken) BitGive already does that to the same degree, as the transactions are public.
Utopi
- Status: failed (site down)
Bitcoin Atom
- Blockchain Technology: Bitcoin fork
- Characteristics: ?
- Status: failed
I have no idea what this even is. It’s claiming to remove fees or something. Honestly incredulous Forbes would list this, but hey. They did list Ripple too, after all.
Securrency
- Status: failed
This is just marketing nonsense.
Ripple
- Status: failed
This is a corporation who issued an absurd amount of tokens which they are selling off to hapless idiots who think it’s “gonna explode.” It’s currently under investigation for unregistered securities offering, much to the surprise of no one.
ABRA
- Status: failed (rule 3)
This seems to be an exchange where you buy and sell cryptocurrencies. I find it odd that Forbes mentions it at all.
Aeternity
- Status: failed
I’ll let you judge based on their “why is Aeternity innovative” paragraph:
æternity blockchain is an Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform engineered by programming pioneers to address some of the most fundamental challenges native to earlier blockchains. By redesigning blockchain technology at the protocol level, the æternity developer community has enabled the core protocol to understand and integrate a rich set of functionalities out of the box.
In other words, it’s just another altcoin. Why Forbes chose this is, again, beyond me.
Smart Valor
- Status: failed (rule 3)
Another exchange.
Circle
- Status: failed (404)
This one is potentially in need of more investigation, but I’ll stick by the rule that the Forbes link must be a valid page.
Conclusion
Out of 35 examples listed in the Forbes article, one project was successful and 34 projects are currently listed as failures (97.1%).
The one successful project was using technology that existed years before the Forbes article was written.
12 of the 34 failed projects (35.3%) were no longer in existence (site down, domain missing, or page not found errors).
As it stands, the ruling is clear: with one exception, the gushed-about innovation is predominantly hype.
I welcome corrections within reason, and will update the status of projects when warranted. However, I will dismiss any feedback which does not, as mentioned at the beginning, provide succinct and straightforward reasoning explaining why the project requires a blockchain to operate.
