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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

#71

Post by kevinmchugh »

im3w1l wrote: post #52
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.

Wal-Mart and Louis Vuitton both announced they were adopting blockchain. Walmart's was for supply chain tracking of lettuce. LV's was for authenticating genuineness and preventing sales of counterfeits. Both were to be run entirely by the company. Centralized. No distributed anything.

There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a stock price pop.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#72

Post by slver »

tinus_hn wrote: post #69
_pdp_ wrote: post #3

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone. You can put information on the blockchain and others can be sure it can’t be removed. There are use cases.

Thing is, "without trusting anyone" isn't that relevant most times. The entire system of property rights is based on trusted notaries. Works as well as anything.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#74

Post by carterschonwald »

picardo wrote: post #23
_pdp_ wrote: post #3

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

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.

Yup. All of this is really about having a db for known counter party multi org db for financial institutions without having to basically fund new clearing corporations for each new market. Source: I was at Jpm on some of the relevant teams for a few years.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#75

Post by simias »

enumjorge wrote: post #64
simias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age groups.

Please don't be obtuse, I obviously wasn't implying that 100% of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are in a specific age range, I'm just saying that culturally they probably have more of a following in a younger crowd.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#76

Post by TechBro8615 »

eplanit wrote: post #73

Blockchain is the computer industry's string theory. Bold on the promises and hype, but meek on the returns.

That very much depends which returns you’re talking about. It’s been pretty good on those of the financial variety.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#77

Post by humanlion87 »

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.

I am sure they thought about the "PR" consequences of shutting this service down. My guess is the number of users are comparatively so low that it doesn't really matter. I doubt any of their major enterprise customers were using it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#78

Post by simias »

grey-area wrote: post #43
simias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Weaponized FOMO in realtime at a worldwide scale. It's a tough societal problem to solve.

With good old pyramid schemes it took a lot more work to it off the ground. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit, Discord and the big social networks with your fancy new "revolutionary" cryptothingy and you're making millions.

I've been following the DogeCoin pump on reddit over the past couple of months, it's absolutely transparent that it's a pure pump with no fundamentals but people buy into it because they think they're early enough not to be left holding the bags. IMO the Gamestop thing is mostly exactly the same, but obviously the situation is more complex there.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#79

Post by mumblemumble »

tinus_hn wrote: post #69
_pdp_ wrote: post #3

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone. You can put information on the blockchain and others can be sure it can’t be removed. There are use cases.

> Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone.

Yes, but the only things you can prove without trust are events that happen 100% inside the blockchain. Which, AFAICT the only use for a system that works that way that I've seen is cryptocurrency. The other one people were really hot on was supply chain, but, from what I understand, when you have supply chain trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee someone edited a database record", they look more like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-bu...

Which, ironically, that's not a great use case for cryptocurrency either. Traditional escrow services are a better fit. If the trader had bought that tanker full of rocks with BTC, there would have been no way to reverse the transaction after it had been determined to be fraudulent.

So, yeah, blockchain is mathematically provable to have certain properties. But, like with any proof, those properties only hold for as long as the proof's assumptions hold. And it's really, really difficult for us laypeople to recognize when the assumptions do or do not hold when they're defined in terms of technical jargon that uses a familiar term like "trust" but assigns it a subtly but critically different definition from the everyday meaning.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#80

Post by tnzm »

enumjorge wrote: post #64
simias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age groups.

They invest on behalf of the house.
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