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

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#201

Post by mumblemumble » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

dale_glass wrote: post #183

throwawaygh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization.

You can chuck blockchain out of the conversation like that. But then we'd no longer be having a conversation about blockchain.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#202

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #192

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#203

Post by agumonkey » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #40

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…

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…

It's also the most profitable trading category for old traders who know how to ride cycles safely. Not advocating, just adding another bit of info

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#204

Post by bob33212 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #94

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…

> classroom where the first one to get the answer wins. Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?

If you didn't trust the teacher. The distributed ledger would prevent them from editing the database of timestamps. But then the question is, if you don't trust the teacher why are you in their class?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#205

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #193

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's what I thought, but I'd like to see a proponent of private blockchains explain it with out resorting to answering a different and more general question about "the purpose of blockchain is..."

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#206

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #199

dale_glass wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they do. Not 100% of the time, certainly, but it very much happens.

Eg, under SVN, people would check-out our project, do some work and then either need commit rights, or create a patch.

Under git, people have full power to clone the entire thing, explore the entire history, rewrite whatever they want to, easily collaborate with other people with the same interests, and then maybe submit it all upstream.

So for instance right now in Vircadia we're having a big project of redoing the scripting engine. This work could conceivably take months, and thanks to git it doesn't have to happen in the main repo. It can happen between the people interested in that part of the code, where even several people can collaborate on a gigantic PR that would hopefully get merged in the end. SVN doesn't allow for that kind of workflow.

Yes, the high level view is still centralized, but the ability to break away from the centralization to do something big is very helpful and important. Even if it's not the dominant way of working.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#207

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #201

dale_glass wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for decentralization. You can chuck blockchain out of the conversation like that. But then we'd no longer be having a conversation about blockchain.

But we aren't. We're talking about git. We're having a digression from the main topic because git is kinda tangentially related.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#208

Post by marktangotango » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

google234123 wrote: post #137

peterkelly wrote: post #14

> Microsoft's documentation suggests users start migrating to an alternative now So, a database?

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

Well done, beautifully well placed comment.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#209

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

picardo wrote: post #177

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I don't see a lot of news on that since 2016. Are they still using it?

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#210

Post by Terretta » Thu, May 13, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #138

derefr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s because “blockchain” software is a thing that already exists, but its superclass, “distributed log of signed proofs” software, isn’t a thing that already exists (except in the form of the subclass, blockchain software.) There are tons of use-cases for which a “distributed log of signed proofs” is the perfect fit. Have you got an architecture where nodes independently m…

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…

Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant in a variety of security and financial (and financial security) areas, but good luck explaining to the non-tech execs why they should fund projects using that rather than FOMO on “but blockchain!!!”

For purposes of talking w/ execs or boards, there are something like seven yes/no reasonably explainable properties of chains of blocks that toggled some ways give you alt coins and in one particular other way give you a fantastically high performance distributed ledger a trusted authority can keep an eye on — you can have your cake and eat it too if you aren’t being a coin.

Businesses often want that outcome, but they verbalize what they want as “bLoCkChAiN!!! to the moon!!!” and it’s tech’s job to say wait, what are you trying to do?

Quite probably, they actually could benefit from something like QLDB:

https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/