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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

#91

Post by tnzm »

slver wrote: post #72
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.

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.

> Works as well as anything.

Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going.

And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on monopoly.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#92

Post by mumblemumble »

tnzm wrote: post #89
mumblemumble wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Fair, though that would be a much more compelling observation if anyone had ever succeeded in implementing a full-fledged insurance policy in the form of a smart contract.

I'm curious, for example, how you'd get an errors and omissions clause working in Etherium. Like, how would Ether arbitrate a claim against that policy? Assume, for the sake of argument, that hard AI has not been invented yet.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#93

Post by rajin444 »

rodiger wrote: post #83
Clewza313 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inste…

The only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust - trust being the key part. If you don't need decentralized trust you don't need blockchain. And outside of a global currency, there isn't much that needs that.

DeFi is just unregulated speculation / ponzi schemes. People came up with new systems (supposedly faster than bitcoin) to send currency back and forth. People are flocking to it hoping to get rich quick, but it doesn't actually deliver anything novel outside of not being regulated.

Internet Computer would be cool if it was actually decentralized. But it's not:

> The Internet Computer hosts its own governance system, called the "Network Nervous System" (NNS). In order for a data center to provide compute capacity to the Internet Computer network, it must acquire a DcID (Data Center ID) by making an application to the governance system

And unfortunately making a decentralized version of what Internet Computer wants to do is _very_ hard (maybe impossible).

So many of the newer "blockchain" tech is considered useless is because, like Internet Computer, they cheat and introduce centralization because of the technical limitations of being decentralized. BNB/BSC is a huge example of this (one of the major new "defi" networks).

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#94

Post by Godel_unicode »

ipaddr wrote: post #85
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 y…

> classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#95

Post by viraptor »

ipaddr wrote: post #85
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 y…

In a classroom you only need a proof of something happening. A separate answer-checking (or even just timestamping) service is a few times easier to create and operate.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#96

Post by weasel_words »

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…

No one, other than the city of NY, will have the full node.

So in this use-case there is no distributed network in the first place. And never will be.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#97

Post by newdude116 »

ipaddr wrote: post #85
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 y…

I don't see many applications for blockchain. The only application is where you don't want to have a trusted central party, be it a company or a government.

I see many start-ups advertising and betting on a blockchain technology by something that could be easier solved with a regular, central database. Are they just bullshitting?

Digital vaccination passports it an example. Why do you need the blockchain? A central government signature/database solves this problem.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#98

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

That. It's yet to be seen how a blockchain that required specialized hardware reacts to a shrinking user base.

If there exists more hardware than what's active mining, and it can not be used for anything else, will there be enough incentives not to use it in a harmful way?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#99

Post by shawnz »

matthewaveryusa wrote: post #70
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…

>contributing compute power is economically incentivized I think this is the aspect in blockchain that has really been stretched. Most problems are within closed networks and solved with digital signatures -- is the act of signing a record proof of work? If you squint hard enough and razzle-dazzle it enough I could see how you could call it that -- or simply call it a database with a signature column :)

> is the act of signing a record proof of work?

The idea behind proof-of-work is to add a cost to inserts, so that inserting wrong information is too costly to be profitable. Whereas inserting correct information makes you eligible for rewards that negate the cost of having inserted it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#100

Post by rchaud »

ipaddr wrote: post #85
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 y…

Can you provide an example of Web 2.0 snake oil? I remember the shift from 1.0 to a more JS/AJAX based web. It was still the web, something hundreds of millions used.

>No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

What?

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