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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

#121

Post by meowkit »

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.

Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

Regardless I looked into the internals/source code for it (I work there) - and it seems to be cold storage for the workbench and not blockchain support as a whole.

Right now it makes more sense to use ConsenSys or manage your own nodes on Azure not pay for a tool.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#122

Post by mrits »

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 is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#123

Post by TomSwirly »

mrits wrote: post #122
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 is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#125

Post by srmarm »

rchaud wrote: post #100
ipaddr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I thought web 2.0 was more about communication flow, i.e rather than a bunch of people publishing a website for others to consume we have more of a two way communication (i.e social media). There was a bunch of tech that enabled it and came along at the same time and a very clear style that accompanied it though.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#126

Post by marcinzm »

meowkit wrote: post #121
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.

Uh is shutting down in September short notice? Regardless I looked into the internals/source code for it (I work there) - and it seems to be cold storage for the workbench and not blockchain support as a whole. Right now it makes more sense to use ConsenSys or manage your own nodes on Azure not pay for a tool. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...

>Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

For a large company where it might take them 2+ months to just get approval for a new project or a significant project change, yes. I once spent 6 months in meetings to get a single column added to a database for a project we were doing and that was a semi-tech company.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#127

Post by cryptica »

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…

>> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem

It's not a rare problem. Fiat currencies don't work for the majority of people. The problem is ubiquitous. We need to separate money from state and blockchain provides a mechanism to do that.

Just because fiat works for a handful of rich people, doesn't mean that it works for everyone. Everyone can see that the current system is unfair.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#128

Post by anonymousDan »

74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #87
smt88 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know why the comment above was downvoted. The parent clearly doesn't know what they are talking about (e.g. in a deterministic setting at most one third can be malicious).

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#129

Post by alkonaut »

_pdp_ wrote: post #3

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

Every company on the planet seems to be asking that. It’s like “AI”, one of those technologies that you can’t risk everyone else using while you don’t.

So for some reason having a solution and look for the problem is suddenly acceptable. Few seem to find the problem though.

If you read through typical descriptions of how blockchains can be applied in industry, you’ll notice that they are extremely vague. That should tell you something.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#130

Post by mumblemumble »

shawnz wrote: post #111
mumblemumble wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

So, I can see that argument following for something like Bitcoin. Though I think that part of that is because cryptocurrency doesn't actually have any intrinsic value. So an attack on, say, the Bitcoin network would also have the effect of devaluing the very thing you're trying to compromise.

But it does seem to be something you need to contend with when looking for new uses. Most new ideas people are thinking up have to do with something that exists outside the blockchain itself. And that, not Bitcoin, is what Azure Blockchain Service was really about. The merits of cryptocurrency as an application of blockchain are largely irrelevant to this discussion.

My sense is that the general pattern for most other uses is that the number of potential legitimate participants in the blockchain system is likely be inversely proportional to the overall importance of the thing the blockchain is trying to manage. Everyone can get in on something like CryptoKitties, but there are probably very few natural participants in a blockchain network for managing nuclear fuel resources.

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