Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 260 posts

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#191

Post by agumonkey »

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…

What I found interesting about Blockchain were (in case of utilitarian projects).

- country agnostic scale in mind

- constantly working network

There's a project for supply chain tracking which wants to take care of .. well, tracking. But by attempting of being a universal solution, I'd foresee a lot of time saved for just about everybody on the planet.

Maybe I'm misguided

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#192

Post by jayd16 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #141
mumblemumble wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed" bit that nobody really wants. For example, distributed version control systems are often held up as an example of some form of precedent for blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to happen. Similarly, I'm not sure people ac…

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…

Bit of a nitpick but even in a team with a central origin, I think git is still mostly used in a decentralized way. Try to use Perforce on spotty internet vs git. There's a big difference.

Merge is a fundamental issue across all source control. Its not going away.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#193

Post by jnwatson »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #47
speeder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other some amount as proof of their sactions deal... US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russi…

> The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when neither side of a transaction trust the other. So what's the purpose of _private_ blockchains then? Grandparent comment was about "Permissioned blockchains can be useful..." not blockchain in general. How does it remain private in a trustless case? Alternatively, who keeps the blockchain private? Who manages access? If there is an impartial 3rd party, an "auth…

There's no purpose of private blockchains, unless your definition of blockchain is just chained signatures perhaps with a Merkle tree.

The intersection of the set of "private" and "mutually distrustful parties" is essentially 0.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#194

Post by rbanffy »

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…

> That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.

A shared append-only document is useful for a number of applications.

> It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into projects that are technically unsound or that had no use for a blockchain to begin with.

Capitalism is very good at extracting wealth gradients out of information ones.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#195

Post by atanasovskib »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #167
google234123 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can a database handle more than 5 transactions per second?

If you think modern block chain is still stuck at 5 tps, then you have not been paying attention.

So 7?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#196

Post by this_user »

shawnz wrote: post #99
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That is true, but it's also useless for almost all applications. Because in the real world agreements, contracts, and laws exist to create trusted relationships between parties. Relying on an inefficient technical solution instead is neither necessary nor desirable.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#197

Post by groby_b »

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.

The very notion that you are a fork, and that you have forks, implies a hierarchical sense of authority. And I think that's the thing that confuses a lot of these debates: "Distributed" can mean "independent nodes", and it can mean "hierarchical authority".

Almost everybody is OK with the latter, and that's the only issue that blockchain meaningfully addresses.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#199

Post by mumblemumble »

dale_glass wrote: post #181
mumblemumble wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I'm getting at, though. Even though Git does support a non-hierarchical organization structure, nobody actually uses it that way.

Almost as if not every tool in search of a problem eventually finds one.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#200

Post by bob33212 »

grey-area wrote: post #43
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…

Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes. They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology, a new paradigm etc, etc.

Casinos have existed for a long time and are known to be a place where a lot of people loses money, but that doesn't stop others from showing up and losing more.
Post reply on HN