The Benefits and Potential Uses Cases for Decentralizing To-Do List Applications

Written by Amanila | Published 2018/08/18
Tech Story Tags: blockchain | cryptocurrency | smart-contracts | decentralized | software-development

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

We have used applications like “Google Keep” or “Evernote” for taking down notes and make to-do lists. In my observation, this simple application has 3 use cases when we deploy its decentralized version on a blockchain platform. I will now explain the application design and its 3 use cases. These uses of the to-do list application are more secured, private, and tamper proof.

Application Design:

Like any to-do list application, we have user accounts for users to create notes in it. The application needs to be written using solidity or by any other contract oriented Turing complete language. Once the application is developed, it needs to be deployed on a blockchain.

Let me summarize the parameters:

  1. User Account.
  2. List of notes written by a user.
  3. Address of the user. This is the public address of the user who writes the notes. On a blockchain, we will refer the user by this parameter.
  4. Timestamp, which is the time at which we are deploying a contract. This is very essential for a blockchain ecosystem.

Let us now move on to the three use cases of this application.

Use Case 1: Decentralized Twitter

To-do list application can be the foundation of a micro-blogging platform like Twitter.

To help you understand this let me derive an analogous relationship between our to-do list application and this platform:

  1. A user account in the to-do list would be a user profile on this platform.
  2. List of notes would be the Tweets by a User.
  3. The address will be the address used by the user to access their accounts.
  4. The timestamp is the time when a tweet is tweeted by the user.

By this we can have a decentralized micro-blogging platform like Twitter.

Use Case 2: Billing System

A decentralized billing system can be implemented as follows:

  1. A user account in the to-do list would be a separate account created for each customer.
  2. List of notes would be the bills pertaining to a particular customer.
  3. The address can be used by the customer to view their previous purchases.
  4. A timestamp is the time when a bill is generated for the customer.

Advantage: Since the bills are on a blockchain it will facilitate tamper-proof audit trails for the administration.

Use Case 3: Process Management System

Every company saves their processes on a document. Now the problem with this approach is that sometimes the processes might be lost or hacked or accidentally deleted. Hence, there is a need for a decentralized process management system.

It can be implemented as follows:

  1. A user account in the to-do list would be a separate process.
  2. List of notes would be the procedures or instructions of each step in a process.
  3. An address can be used to read/write a specific process. For security reasons, only trusted persons must have access to the data.
  4. A timestamp is the time when a process is modified.

Once this system is on a private blockchain, it can’t be deleted or hacked.

These are the three use cases of a decentralized to-do list application.

The following words were my motivation to study this domain:

“Eventhough the chance for Blockchain or Cryptocurrency to succeed is much less than a 100%, Even if it is 10%. A 10% chance of making something that unleashes a massive paradigm shift on the entire world is still something that is totally worth dedicating your whole life to.” ~ Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum)

Thank you for reading my article.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email. You can also contact me via Linkedin. You can also follow me on Twitter.

In order to get started with Blockchain read my article published on Hackernoon


Published by HackerNoon on 2018/08/18