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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

#111

Post by shawnz »

mumblemumble wrote: post #108
shawnz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That one's always struck me. At least if you squint, that would imply that blockchain's fraud-prevention strategy hinges on nobody ever using the blockchain to handle anything too valuable or important.

Yes, there is a limit to the security that a cryptocurrency can provide (like with anything else). The level of security provided is based on the market price: The higher the price, the higher the rewards, which increases the profitability of mining, thus leading to more miners, which then increases the amount of competition you'll have if you want to post wrong information. Since there is a fixed rate of new data which can be added, that's what defines the cost of inserting data to the blockchain.

An attacker with a lot of resources (>50% of current mining power consumption) could use their resources to post wrong information, but it would need to be profitable enough to make up for the immense costs. It's unlikely there would be such a situation where an attacker could recover the costs for such an attack. At best they would be spending a lot of money to cause a temporary network disruption as the "fair players" move to a forked coin or similar.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#112

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

tnzm wrote: post #84
markwkw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

You can do this with paper. Signed paper documents. You have invented the "treaty". It has been a thing for centuries.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#113

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

picardo wrote: post #82
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's why it's slow and expensive to trade across borders, ... document fraud

Would you say that blockchains make this faster, cheaper and less prone to fraud?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#114

Post by xemdetia »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #66
nomoreplease wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Uhh ... that means they did a pilot with it back when BaaS started out. 50 bucks says none of them actively use Azure Blockchain for anything meaningful in their organization. And Consensys is MSFT's preferred BaaS ISV these days. Source: work at MSFT Partner, occasionally co-discuss BaaS with clients.

I've become extremely jaded to the logo gallery for these obvious secondary/tertiary B2B SaaS products in an organization. The logo for a pilot or some other freebie is kind of overdone now. Often this pilot ends up hitting the real org then crashing and burning because these secondary/tertiary pet projects are often never given the chance to be mature enough for their actual customer base before trying to solicit customers. These services finally hit a security person or something else and just gets the axe because they are just not even close to ready. If I'm playing technical customer I'm reaching out to you because I need what you have rather than you soliciting me. Most businesses are not so complex that it's obvious if a B2B SaaS is an essential service or some weird add-on trendy thing they are trying on for size so it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#115

Post by axiosgunnar »

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…

Millions? Billions.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#116

Post by slver »

tnzm wrote: post #91
slver wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over property disputes.

All right.

By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#117

Post by namdnay »

tnzm wrote: post #84
markwkw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does renege on the deal really mean though? usually in those situations both sides will claim that the other is reneging on the deal

Engineering solutions based on binary ideas of true and false just don't apply to diplomacy or politics

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#119

Post by thebean11 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #108
shawnz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That one's always struck me. At least if you squint, that would imply that blockchain's fraud-prevention strategy hinges on nobody ever using the blockchain to handle anything too valuable or important.

You can use it to handle anything whose value to an attacker is less than the cost of attacking the network as a whole right? May not be following though.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#120

Post by acdha »

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.

We don't even have a centralized authority for x509 in browsers, and that's the closest you come to being correct — there are still many CAs and multiple groups coordinating which of those are trusted, and private CAs are common even up to millions of users.

GPG has been around since the 1990s with the web of trust being entirely decentralized and while I'd be the first to say there is room for improvement there's no way that's anything other than decentralized.

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