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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

#171

Post by picardo »

bydlocoder wrote: post #150
picardo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I'd rather provide a letter than put all my transactions in public eye.

It's not in the public eye. The blockchain is only accessible to trusted parties, like banks and merchant representatives.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#172

Post by 3pt14159 »

WasimBhai wrote: post #148
hn8788 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's the government's idea in the first place. I work at a contracting company, and one of our government customers said they wanted a service that utilized blockchain technology. They didn't know what a blockchain was, or care what the blockchain powered service was, they just wanted to sound like they were responsible for acquiring cutting edge technology. Luckily that was shortly before NIST put out thei…

Link to the said paper, please?

Probably means this one from 2018:

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf

Brief quote from the conclusions:

> The use of blockchain technology is still in its early stages, but it is built on widely understood and sound cryptographic principles. Currently, there is a lot of hype around the technology, and many proposed uses for it. Moving forward, it is likely that the hype will die down, and blockchain technology will become just another tool that can be used.

Then there is a fairly large paragraph about limitations and choosing the right tool for the job rather than just trying to shoehorn blockchain in for its own sake.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#173

Post by SubiculumCode »

74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #16
ignoramous wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchains are an irrevocable proof of record (immutability with cryptographic proof) unlike traditional databases that need to be audited to capture all updates. Amazon QLDB, though private but not a Blockchain, could be used as one: For ex, creating and maintaining customer wallets (per customer coupons and discounts specific to your service). Public blockchains could be used for accounting transparency, for examp…

But how can a blockchain be actually and meaningfully "public" without proof of work and distributed mining establishing majority based consensus on what _is_. If you just store the equivalent of a blockchain somewhere then I don't see what benefit it provides over a database controlled by a consortium. It's all bullshit.

Proof of work is fading away, Proof of Stake is becoming the default method.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#174

Post by squeaky-clean »

motohagiography wrote: post #153
jandrese wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you think the Blockchain itself is valuable, the "proof of work" is almost entirely wasted in the end. Some trillions of hash computations are thrown away for each one that is used.

Even as a blockchain non-fan, those computations are necessary to produce the desirable thing, and the same could be said for protein folding. There are a lot of great and devastating criticisms of blockchains, but the environmental concern is more of a proxy or even dogwhistle for a general political objection to cryptocurrencies - even reasonable objections in the context of their worldview. Greenwashing those obje…

I think you two are disagreeing on what "the desirable thing" means. You're saying it's creating the bitcoin/blockchain which is the desirable result. But they're saying that "desirable result" here is actually just computing a SHA-256 below a certain threshold. Sure you get the blockchain as a result, but does it really need to be SHA-256? As long as you have a "hash" function with a statistically predictable amount of CPU usage to generate a "successful" result, that function could maybe be something more meaningful. I have no idea if you could quantify protein folding into some sort of statistically predictable successful/unsuccessful CPU process.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#175

Post by pragmar »

simonw wrote: post #158
pragmar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

Physical property registries: if you guess my password (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my house.

I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a government registrar) than held in a local instance of filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was going.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#176

Post by UnpossibleJim »

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…

Technically, there are multiple tracking applications, but they're more easily and cheaply handled with in place technologies, is the issue. If you were designing and building tracking ultra secure shipping infrastructure from the ground up, where everyone had to be held absolutely responsible, then there's an edge case for it, maybe.... But the use cases for blockchain are pretty small. Like small batch digital art assets and the like.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#177

Post by picardo »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #113
picardo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure. Here is a story from 4 years ago. [1] Barclays says blockchain cut this process from 10 days to 4 hours.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-barclays-blockchain...

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#178

Post by velcrovan »

dale_glass wrote: post #159
throwawaygh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is used almost exclusively in a centralized fashion. The use patterns really aren't all that different from SVN, even if having a local copy is kinda nice. But, like you said, having a local copy isn't really the same thing as decentralized. "master" is still a thing. More importantly, the next big shift in version control technology is/will be back toward centralization . You already see this with eg Google Docs…

Git is very much used in a distributed fashion. Eg, on github. Right now, I'm working on one of the forks of a dead commercial project. Our fork in turn has 61 forks right now, some of which may diverge further and have multiple people working on them, which at some point may or not contribute things upstream.

Github is not an example of decentralization. Github is the center hub for the vast majority of git-managed projects. The fact that you can fork a repo is not the kind of distributed use we're talking about. Github is still the "default" host for those forked repos, and the identity provider for people working on most software projects. That's centralization.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#179

Post by marcinzm »

humanlion87 wrote: post #77
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.

That's not PR impact, that's material impact. The PR impact is not on the current users of the service but on all future potential users of Azure. Like every GCP thread being filled with doom and gloom about Google killing services from people who have never used GCP.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#180

Post by throwawaygh »

dale_glass wrote: post #159
throwawaygh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is used almost exclusively in a centralized fashion. The use patterns really aren't all that different from SVN, even if having a local copy is kinda nice. But, like you said, having a local copy isn't really the same thing as decentralized. "master" is still a thing. More importantly, the next big shift in version control technology is/will be back toward centralization . You already see this with eg Google Docs…

Git is very much used in a distributed fashion. Eg, on github. Right now, I'm working on one of the forks of a dead commercial project. Our fork in turn has 61 forks right now, some of which may diverge further and have multiple people working on them, which at some point may or not contribute things upstream.

I think mumblemumble hit the nail on the head -- this isn't really distributed in the same sense as, e.g., blockchain. There is no peer-to-peer distributed ledger, no consensus mechanism, etc.

In addition to what they said, I'll also point out something else that's perhaps even more important -- you just measured "number of forks" in terms of the number of forks on github (as opposed to eg the number of people who have git cloned the repo).

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