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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

#51

Post by diamondhandle »

ForHackernews wrote: post #24
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.

For more than a decade, this company has been publishing their hashes in the NYTimes classified ads: http://www.surety.com/digital-copyright-protection/prove-own... (some cryptokiddies have tried to claim it as "the world's first blockchain" https://btcmanager.com/finding-the-oldest-blockchain-in-the-... apparently not understanding how much it undermines the case for wasteful proof-of-work blockchains if a classifie…

Okay, and what happens when I run a phony ad next to this one in the New York Times? What happens when I bribe the guy at the Times to accidentally use my hash rather than theirs?

It’s a cute gimmick, I’ll give them that.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#52

Post by im3w1l »

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 is a difference between the knowledge of individuals and knowledge of institutions. Many people who seriously looked into these things said it was bogus. But the institutions didn't know it was bogus. They didn't know whether to believe the nay-sayers or not. So "our" (for some weird abstract sense of "our") knowledge increased by doing these doomed experiments.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#53

Post by markwkw »

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…

Could you explain this example a bit more? US and Iran meet and discuss some deal? And then the want to pay each other some amount as proof of reaching the deal? Could they do it in public and invite various journalists to witness the post-signing conference where both parties say they have reached the deal? (It seems to be a standard procedure)

Or is the set of blockchain payments an guarantee of adherence to the deal? How would that help? Are the coins supposed to be returned in case of lack of adherence? If that is the case, how would I trust the other party to return the bitcoin?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#54

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

It’s a technology that’s as easy to shit on as it is to hype!

I don’t know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a useful tool for a lot of different use cases.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#55

Post by BrentOzar »

marcinzm wrote: post #48

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.

> Azure has now made it clear that they can and will shutdown services with relatively short notice.

This isn't a new thing - there's an entire Twitter feed dedicated to things Azure discontinues: https://twitter.com/azureendoflife

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#56

Post by moksly »

marcinzm wrote: post #48

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.

Enterprise doesn’t worry too much about changes or shutdowns. We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or without plans for how we move forward.

I’d be pretty happy if our legacy Mainframe systems got shut down, with a decent plan for how our suppliers would move forward to other technologies. As it stands there are only two national companies left who can handle mainframes in my country, so there isn’t much of a bidding war when we put systems into procurement processes, and it makes things really expensive over time.

I hope most enterprises entered the cloud with a mindset not to get locked in. I know we did, and in that setup, Microsoft can move forward as they see fit as long as they give us time to move on.

Not that I think any enterprise organisations were really using Azure Blockchain, I still haven’t seen a single reason to use Blockchain. Even if you live in a corrupt country, where decentralised trust might make sense, you still need an authority to back it up. This is why Bitcoin works for crime, they enforce it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#58

Post by SahAssar »

unnouinceput wrote: post #46
acdha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't a private blockchain need that anyway to manage access to add to the chain?

Or how does a private blockchain manage who has write access to it (since it's supposed to be private)?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#59

Post by nomoreplease »

moksly wrote: post #56
marcinzm wrote: post #48

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.

Enterprise doesn’t worry too much about changes or shutdowns. We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or without plans for how we move forward. I’d be pretty happy if our legacy Mainframe systems got shut down, with a decent plan for how our suppliers would move forward to other technologies. As it stands there are only two national companies left who can handle mainframes in my country, so there i…

> Microsoft's product page for Azure BaaS lists GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers.

The article says that these enterprises are using it

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#60

Post by picardo »

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.

Banking systems are complex. You can't build a single centralized system that works for everyone, let alone get everyone to trust each other on the system. The solution needs to be decentralized, trustworthy and provide built-in checks for integrity.
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