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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

#231

Post by tim333 »

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" bit that nobody really wants

Distributed adds complexity but is pretty much essential for illegal activities which is why it is needed for cryptocurrencies which would otherwise be shut down for not KYCing everything and bittorrent which would be shut for copyright infringement. Otherwise centralized is usually easier.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#232

Post by ipaddr »

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?

Here is an article written on techcrunch years ago. The snakeoil is still alive in many services we all use: facebook, youtube, tiktok, instagram..

It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted. This was the central thesis brought forward in the late 1990s and prophesied by thinkers like Bill Gates – who expected a beautiful, customized “road ahead” – and Clifford Stoll who saw only snake oil. At the time, it was the most compelling use of the Internet those thinkers thought possible. This concept – that we were to be coddled by a hive brain designed to show us exactly what we needed to know when we needed to know it – continued apace until it was supplanted by the concept of User Generated Content – UGC – a related movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed propriety in the online world.

That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans, supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached audiences. After all, on a UGC site it’s not a lot of fun for Procter & Gamble to have Downy Fabric Softener advertised next to someone’s racist rant against Muslims in a Starbucks.

Still the Valley took these concepts and built monetized cesspools of self-expression. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are the biggest beneficiaries of outrage culture and the eyeballs brought in by its continuous refreshment feed their further growth. These sites are Web 2.0 at its darkest epitome, a quiver of arrows that strikes at our deepest, most cherished institutions and bleeds us of kindness and forethought.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#233

Post by rsj_hn »

bluesign wrote: post #10
eterm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Docusign really have a problem that couldn't be solved by any other means of publishing the hash? Ultimately the hash comes from Docusign, so I'm not sure I can think of the problem case where someone doesn't trust Docusign to self publish that hash but does trust a hash that Docusign publishes to the blockchain.

it is about timestamping basically nothing else. basically that cannot sign something in the past. Though you can do the same with sequence number, and publicly publishing all signed hashes.

Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#234

Post by sangnoir »

derefr wrote: post #216
mumblemumble wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant in a variety of security and financial (and financial security) areas I'm not so sure about that. IANAL, but I suspect that, at least under US law, a distributed immutable ledger would actually be illegal in many cases. The entire legal environment is set up around the idea that there is a system of record, and that system of record has a single custodian, and…

I think you're talking about different use-cases than the person you're replying to. A distributed immutable ledger has many uses other than recording voluntary transactions, or even recording things to do with specific people. For example, such a ledger can be used to create a tamper-proof security-camera footage log. Just hashes of exported video files, locked into a chain at time of export. You can redact the vide…

> For example, such a ledger can be used to create a tamper-proof security-camera footage log.

What's the use-case here - who are the untrustworthy individuals that society needs to protect itself against? Societal trust is currently rooted in people - it will not be switched over to machines/distributed ledgers any time soon. This is why people can write affidavits/get sworn in to say "That video's legit" under pain of perjury. Frankly, there's little money in turning over trust to a blockchain when there is an individual/organization that can be interrogated. It's not perfect, but trying to perfect it has (evidently) diminishing returns

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#235

Post by Godel_unicode »

newacct583 wrote: post #104
viraptor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a classroom you only need a proof of something happening. A separate answer-checking (or even just timestamping) service is a few times easier to create and operate.

> A separate [...] service is a few times easier to create and operate Because it relies on trust in the service. Blockchains don't. You can run a validation regime for anything you want on a blockchain: legal, illegal, anonymous, public, anything. Store any data you want and you can verify for all of posterity that it was stored before the block timestamp. That's the feature, anyway. But you're right, in practice (1…

Except they do. Blockchains rely on a majority of actors not getting together to commit fraud. This is somewhat reasonable but still a real concern at the kind of scale Bitcoin has; getting 51% of the children in a class to gang up on someone for the lolz is trivial.

They rely on the mechanism which converts from physical to digital being reliable and trusted. Vaccine passports on a blockchain provide exactly 0 assurance that the pharmacist wasn't bribed.

They rely on the blockchain software being free from bugs and no-one-but-us trapdoors. Ask the OpenSSL community how easy verifying crypto code is.

Blockchains are not a magic solution to all trust problems.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#236

Post by TimJRobinson »

derefr wrote: post #109
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…

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…

Scuttlebutt and GUN.eco seem to be what you're describing.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#237

Post by [deleted] »

dale_glass wrote: post #206
mumblemumble wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#238

Post by SubiculumCode »

atanasovskib wrote: post #195
SubiculumCode wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So 7?

Even ETH is 25. This is a handy article in that it lists a bunch of TPS's of different cryptos, but its also a shill article for Aleph, so ignore that. As you would see, TPS ranges from 7 (BTC) to 29,000 TPS (Solana). This also ignores Layer 2 solutions (e.g. Polygon for Ethereum) which vastly increases TPS. https://alephzero.org/blog/what-is-the-fastest-blockchain-an...

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#239

Post by mumblemumble »

dale_glass wrote: post #206
mumblemumble wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> and then maybe submit it all upstream

Right. That's typically the ultimate goal, because...

> the high level view is still centralized

Period. Just because you don't interact with the parent node in the organizational structure for a while doesn't mean it temporarily ceases to exist.

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