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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#21

Post by franklampard »

legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

> But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?

Or they could store the makers are stored in a free-tier dynomodb instance…

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#22

Post by x86x87 »

l33t233372 wrote: post #16
legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this: > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve no…

You cannot enforce the physical world through virtual means. It does not work.

What you can enforce is digital goods via virtual means. Depending of what you want to enforce the presence of a central authority in the physical world may still be needed

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#24

Post by smt88 »

I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).

I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.

It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn't hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.

We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.

That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#25

Post by jollofricepeas »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #6
yumraj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Clearly not

I’m lost.

I think @grogenaut is actually saying he agrees with OP and that super bowl ads and stadium deals are precursors to busts, no?

The big question is whether there’s any utility left. The dotcom bust wasn’t an indictment of the internet and maybe the web3/exchanges busts don’t spell doom for blockchain and related tech either.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#26

Post by rippercushions »

legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems.

To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivially subverted, but it gets worse.

The hard part, you see, is defending their property rights. Local bigwig casually stomps on their land, now they need to convince the corruptible police to investigate (good luck with that when they're on the bigwig's payroll), find a lawyer willing to take this on (in exchange for what?), get the corruptible land rights registry to verify their claim, get a corruptible judge to give a true verdict, and then convince that corruptible police to carry out the verdict. If you're a poor subsistence farmer, it's nearly impossible to navigate this morass, and blockchain solves precisely zero of these problems.

Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#27

Post by tbrownaw »

l33t233372 wrote: post #16
legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

I have some serious problems believing your argument. For example, this: > Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes. If there’s no functioning judiciary, then who will enforce the contract? Who will decide if one side is not acting in good faith, or if there was coercion, or deception? I claim that smart contracts solve no…

They're public in a way that written contracts usually aren't. I can at least imagine scenarios where that might matter (even if I'm not at all certain they're realistic).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#28

Post by gjs278 »

smt88 wrote: post #12
x86x87 wrote: post #8

I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain. I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same. > After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not. Blockchai…

No post body was provided.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#29

Post by acdha »

legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true without something like an outside force requiring use of the blockchain. For example, if my neighbor uses some of my land, who cares if I say it’s not valid according to someone’s computer? If the local legal system is inept or corrupt, who’s going to do something about it? In almost all cases the local control of state power wins.

This is especially relevant when you think about the long history of how lane has historically been stolen by tricking or threatening people, bribing surveyors, or by making promises which aren’t kept. Blockchains not only improve none of those situations but also add new ones like tricking people into using exploitable smart contracts or phishing their transfer approvals.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#30

Post by Spooky23 »

felixgallo wrote: post #20
legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true? The problem with all of these c…

One of the interesting aspects of blockchain for many scenarios is that it makes the ledger of ownership or whatever universally available.

Hopefully with some of the charlatans going bust this will transform back into a technology instead of some bizarre religion.

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