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Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#41

Post by simias »

davewritescode wrote: post #39
lars wrote: post #32

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand. Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That…

There's also the fact that small blockchain networks become less useful the smaller they become because while it's impossible to change history, 51% attacks can make a blockchain not function in optimal ways. When you have a massive network of nodes and the incentives not devalue the thing you're trying to earn it works.

Meanwhile larger networks become increasingly inefficient because without trust all transactions have to be checked and rechecked and rechecked and rechecked. But fear not, $magical_solution is around the corner and will resolve all of this! It's been coming for 5 years now, so you know it's due any minute now.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#42

Post by smt88 »

anonymousDan wrote: post #30
74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exacactly - you just need something equivalent to a certificate authority which signs states of the database and guarantees the correctness of the stored data.

That requires trusting one authority. You can do better - there are distributed algorithms that can prevent malicious behaviour from compromising the system so long as less than a third of the participants are malicious.

A blockchain requires trusting the authority that set it up and/or any authority that can 51% attack it.

If you are in a situation where you can't find any trustworthy authority (including yourself), you are probably part of a scam or a crime.

Byzantine fault tolerance is an interesting concept that solves a problem that almost never happens in modern software.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#43

Post by grey-area »

simias wrote: post #40
lars wrote: post #32

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand. Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That…

Some of it is that, some of it is just simple greed. Many people think they're too good to fall for pyramid schemes and MLM, yet they'll dump money into cryptocurrencies or some meme stock because they think it'll make them millionaires. I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online, yet I don't think cryptocurrencies are going anywhere any time soon. It's effectively become a cas…

Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes. They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology, a new paradigm etc, etc.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#44

Post by daniellarusso »

74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #31
daniellarusso wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blockchain does not require anything beyond ensuring the prior entries checksums make sense. Making past entries immutable is the purpose. Proof of work and distributed mining don’t need a blockchain. Have you heard of hashcash? It is proof-of-work concept to prevent email spam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

what prevents the entity controlling the blockchain from recursively changing data and adjusting the checksums?

Paraphrasing Achebe here: “that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.“

This is also an issue with a 51% attack.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#45

Post by speeder »

koheripbal wrote: post #34
picardo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permissioned blockchains can be useful in trade finance and international trade. Financial transactions across borders can be delayed to allow for clearance and settlement between several institutions, which requires multiple banking systems to verify the integrity of transaction and collect a lot of paper trail. There are several competing projects solving for that problem right now.

I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.

The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other.

For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal...

US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russia and China.

EDIT: common people, that was just an example, it doesn't mean future transactions between US and Iran would be done that way. It was just an easy to understand example.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#46

Post by unnouinceput »

acdha wrote: post #35
anonymousDan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of an industry e.g. like banking, where the different participants know who each other are but don't fully trust each other. Presuming each participant controls one replica in the system, then using BFT algorithms you can ensure that so long as less than a third of the participants are malicious it is not possible to perform such an attack.

Don’t signatures get you the same benefit? I don’t need to trust you simply to sign something saying “user X showed me hash Y at time Z”.

Signatures still requires a centralized entity to manage the trust. A public distributed ledger, be it a blockchain or something else do not.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#47

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

speeder wrote: post #45
koheripbal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.

The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russi…

> The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other.

So what's the purpose of _private_ blockchains then? Grandparent comment was about "Permissioned blockchains can be useful..." not blockchain in general.

How does it remain private in a trustless case?

Alternatively, who keeps the blockchain private? Who manages access? If there is an impartial 3rd party, an "authority" or a "broker", a "governor" that all other parties can trust to do that, even if they don't trust each other ... can't that authority just use a database, with some checksums and signed rows if need be? What can't you get from a private github repo?

Is the "private blockchain" centralised or decentralised?

I feel that every time I see this discussion, the argument is shifted to a straw man whenever the wrong question is asked.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#48

Post by marcinzm »

This doesn't seem like a good PR move for Azure in terms of enterprise sales. One of the big selling points of AWS is that they support everything pretty much forever. Azure has now made it clear that they can and will shutdown services with relatively short notice.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#49

Post by bydlocoder »

speeder wrote: post #45
koheripbal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.

The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russi…

That's like the worst example ever. With international peace talks there usually is a trusted third party, like US was a part of various Israeli-Palestinian talks.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#50

Post by meepmorp »

speeder wrote: post #45
koheripbal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than just a centralized database. I'm very skeptical of these use cases.

The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russi…

OTOH:

https://apnews.com/article/fd4113419276444eba1d2a46d5c29752

In 2016, the US paid Iran $1.7B in pallets of EUR and CHF. The article's not explicit, but the settlement network probably uses a C-130.

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