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

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#181

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #170

dale_glass wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But not in the blockchain sense. All those forks aren't independently contributing to a single source of truth in a peer-to-peer manner. In practice, those forks generally serve one of two purposes. Either they're for working separately on changes that you intend to submit upstream to the agreed-upon central repository, or you're intending to legitimately fork the project and create your own new central repository th…

They kind of are. I mean, the hierarchical structure is mostly fictional. In git any fork is as valid as any other. This is very much unlike any SVN setup. Any of those forks could conceivably become the main one, if the former official repo died, or somebody just started developing their fork faster.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#182

Post by iudqnolq » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

pragmar wrote: post #168

iudqnolq wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail. How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infrin…

>>> How will blockchain make it better? You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error. With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a particular time, and a system that stores the data perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to adj…

But if I trust the courts they could just have md5s.sqlite?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#183

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #180

dale_glass wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization. It's just how Bitcoin does it.

Also, I used github and its number of forks because it's the number I can easily work with. I have no clue how many copies of our tree are floating out there, nor is there a way of finding out.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#184

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

velcrovan wrote: post #178

dale_glass wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Github is a completely optional thing though. If it were to die tomorrow, everyone still has the code locally, and code sharing is still very much possible.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#185

Post by aeturnum » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

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 it is worth thinking about systems which do not have (or need) a single source of truth (i.e. git) v.s. systems which include a mechanism for an arbitrarily number of nodes arriving at a single source of truth (i.e. blockchain).

I agree that there are often many versions of a git repo at different places and the system gets much of its utility from that quality. But this strength actually comes from git eschewing the idea of a central truth. You can have one or more remote git repo with different sets of commits. You can freely integrate whatever changes you want. That flexibility allows the free movement and sharing of code, but it is key in that movement that the system does not force a single idea of truth.

The blockchain allows new and old nodes to participate in a process of agreeing on a central truth. This is actually very cool from a technical perspective, but I think it's pretty rare that we want it in a technical system. Most things, like git, benefit from the ability to branch when needed and use social organization to handle centralization (e.x: linux development centralizes on the linux kernel git because the kernel development community has agreed to use that particular git, there are no protocol requirements to do so, and various branches are independently created in various places to the benefit of all).

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#186

Post by hackinthebochs » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #140

jandrese wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always saddened that the energy that goes into those blockchain signatures is basically wasted. Why couldn't bitcoin work by having the miners fold proteins or something? Proof of work comes from advancing the state of the art just a hair each time. Imagine if all of the computation power being used to prop up bitcoin were also doing something productive?

Arguably, it's doing something very desirable. Maybe invent a protein coin?

These already exist, e.g. foldingcoin. One problem is that they require a centralized authority to approve and distribute workloads, and so this entity has undesirable power over the network. I do believe there are some cryptocurrencies where you can submit arbitrary workloads and you pay for it with the currency of the network. But they never took off, probably because they don't match the efficiency and/or data privacy of AWS.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#187

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

picardo wrote: post #171

bydlocoder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who manages access to the blockchain, and how do you trust them?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#188

Post by ac29 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #63

simias wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it is that, some of it is just simple greed. Many people think they're too good to fall for pyramid schemes and MLM, yet they'll dump money into cryptocurrencies or some meme stock because they think it'll make them millionaires. I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online, yet I don't think cryptocurrencies are going anywhere any time soon. It's effectively become a cas…

> I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have finally changed that.

How? My best understanding of Uniswap is that it provides liquidity to exchange between cryptocurrency pairs. There is no evidence that it is providing liquidity for anything actually useful - with traditional finance, companies issue shares or debt to increase production lines, fund new R&D, etc.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#189

Post by SubiculumCode » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

I don't know that much about current crypto technology, but enough to know the majority of comments in this discussion have not been keeping up to date with block chain innovations, the surge away from proof of work to proof of stake, the massive increases in transactions per second through innovations in both Level 1 and Level 2 block chain tech. Moreover, there are real applications: Look to Vechain for supply chain authentication, and Theta, a project by a founder of YouTube, that is live now and enables efficient delivery of 4k+ hidef video streaming.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#190

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #38

haukem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also set up a git repository and prevent history rewrites on the central server. Some third party could also offer this as a service. Each entity can check this by doing a pull every minute in a cron job, which fails when history rewrite happened. If they detect this, their legal department can take some actions.

Just because Encarta existed, didn't mean Wikipedia shouldn't; or because NFS exists, Dropbox shouldn't. They can be solutions to the same problem. In git's case though, it sounds more like a abuse of its underlying properties (not to mention, you'd have to block all git commands that can rewrite history).

> not to mention, you'd have to block all git commands that can rewrite history

Okay, so use mercurial or fossil.