Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#81

Post by haukem » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

diamondhandle wrote: post #51

ForHackernews wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They prove that the hash they publish in the NYTimes exists at that time. There are probably some archives which can give you an authorized copy of the NYTimes from a specific date. You can use that to prove that the hash existed at the date the NYTimes was published. This is now the hash over a hash tree, which this companies stores. With this single hash they can also prove that every document in this hash tree existed at that time. They can not add a extra document later, because this would alter the hash they published in the NYTimes.

When you publish your phony ad in the NYTimes, you also prove that this phony ad existed at the date the NYTimes was published.

This company probably buys one edition of the NYTimes with their add and check if the NYTimes published the correct hash, if it is wrong they will run an other add the next day with the correct hash the next day. Now they only prove that the hash existed the next day.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#82

Post by picardo » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #67

picardo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you say that we have a "a single centralized system that works for everyone" in banking now? It seems more like a patchwork of a lot of systems to me.

No, we don't. That's why it's slow and expensive to trade across borders, especially if the counterparties have never done business before. It's an arduous process of proving creditworthiness through letters of credit. You often see document fraud where someone can tamper with a letter of credit, which is hard to detect.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#83

Post by rodiger » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #61

Spooky23 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such as?

There's a weird insistence (especially here on HN) that if blockchain isn't doing something that can't be done in another way then it is useless.

In reality just doing normal, established processes in a distributed way often is the value-add. See decentralized finance[0]. All these tools and primitives exist in traditional finance, but when it's decentralized all market participants can get a cut of the rewards instead of just the big banks.

A more recent AWS-like example is Internet Computer[1]. A more open way to on-board data centers and build distributed apps. Could it be done in a centralized way? Yes, of course. Is it more fair and open if it's decentralized? Also yes.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08778

[1] https://dfinity.org/data-centers

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#84

Post by tnzm » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

markwkw wrote: post #53

speeder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger, which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it. Parties confirmed to be less trustworthy are subsequently afforded fewer compromises during negotiations.

A NFT could also be minted, where people and institutions stake money on the deal and if either party breaks the agreement, the NFT is burned. So stakers are incentivized to do whatever is within their reach to make governments stick to the deal - otherwise they would lose their investments.

The way to bootstrap participatory democracy in a world that only cares about the money is to bake it into the money.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#85

Post by ipaddr » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

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…

This is common with new technology. It was amazing what was sold under web 2.0. It was amazing what was sold before the dotcom craze.

Blockchains are here to stay. Replacing money is probably not a medium term goal but allowing trustless entities to reach an agreement could be interesting. No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

Not trusting your peers is the future.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#86

Post by merth » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #76

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.

that's not technology fueled, that's "get rich quick" fueled. you don't need blockchain to do that, It has been around for 1000 years.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#87

Post by 74d-fe6-2c6 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #42

anonymousDan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

So, you don't understand how blockchains work, okay.

With a distributed BC you don't have to trust an authority. You trust that 51% of participating entities know what they are doing and that they checked the protocol implementation and agree on one.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#88

Post by twayallday » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

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.

AWS does it too. See the S3 path-style deprecation plans which saw a lot of customer pushback. [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#89

Post by tnzm » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #79

tinus_hn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

>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...

>Normally, in such cases of non-delivery a trading house could make a claim against a cargo’s insurance policy. But Mercuria found that just one out of seven contracts used by the Turkish company to insure the cargo was real. The rest had been forged.

Can't forge a smart contract.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#90

Post by HideousKojima » Thu, May 13, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

purple_ferret wrote: post #68

_pdp_ wrote: post #3

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

NY runs its Vaccine passport on an IBM blockchain citing privacy benefits: >special emphasis has been placed on the protection of an individual's privacy. Secure technologies, like blockchain and encryption, are woven throughout Excelsior Pass to help protect the data, making it verifiable and trusted. No private health data is stored or tracked within the apps. Excelsior Pass can be used to voluntarily show a QR cod…

Reading through both that and IBM's site, I'm struggling to see how blockchain enables this in any way? Covid test and vaccine providers have to be trusted for any of that to work, and without the "trustless" element blockchain provides you literally zero advantages (with a huge amount of disadvantages).

EDIT: I guess I could request the whitepaper from IBM and read it, I mean what's yet one more tech giant sending me spam and selling my info to advertisers going to hurt? But I don't see any way for the entire thing to work and avoid people making up fraudulent test results/vax records without trust. I mean even with trust a clinic could feasibly fake that stuff, but without trust pretty much anyone could do it.

EDIT2: Requested the whitepaper from IBM and it's literally just an 11 page marketing PowerPoint. Mentions blockchain a few times but doesn't explain how it solves anything that a normal RDBMS (or even some fancy distributed one with immutable records etc. where all parties are trusted) couldn't do.