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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#31

Post by x86x87 »

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…

Focus on the distributed aspect of it. What does distributed mean to you? In fact if you look at blockchain itself it's not dostributed in the sense that you need all the blocks to verify current state.

The innovation is that 2 parties that don't know each other and don't trust each other can transact without a central authority and without trusting eachother.

Has blockchain been around for 10 years? Most of this time was spent in obscurity or making it super hard for the average joe to distinguish useful tech from scams.

Also think about neural nets. How long have neural nets been around? Did we figure interesting new ways to use them in the current AI/ML cycle?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#32

Post by Spooky23 »

grogenaut wrote: post #5
obblekk wrote: post #3

It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were doing the same level of diligence, on average.

Yes I didn't see a single .com name a stadium or bowl game or have most of the super bowl ads in 1999 at all, none at all. Oh wait yes I did, literally every superbowl ad was a dot com right before the .com bust. https://www.cnbc.com/2010/01/20/The-Stadium-Curse:-Naming-De... puts a nice writeup of all the comapnies that went under after naming stadiums, there's quite a few from the .com bust. Aah WorldCom how I miss…

Good point. Most of the B2B sites that died in 1999 are valid ideas that were too early. Intel tried cloud computing. Online grocery is a thing now, etc.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#33

Post by x86x87 »

l33t233372 wrote: post #19
x86x87 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are 2 scenarios really: 1) btc and eth go to zero or 2) we have btc and eth gaining the full recognition and regulation Blockchain as a technology is revolutionary and will be used in niche problems outside of crypto. One thing that most people seem to miss is that money is only as good as our faith in it. No matter what instrument you use this has to apply.

In what sense is blockchain revolutionary? Merkle trees are many decades old.

Distributed consensus with zero trust.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#34

Post by tbrownaw »

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…

> Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already

I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#35

Post by imglorp »

Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that as a central ledger. There's an open source one with similar properties on GH somewhere, also.

It's not sexy like blockchain so it seems marketing had to slip in some Quantum to bump the buzzword sex count.

If financial industry regulators were serious about catching laundering or book cooking, they would demand this kind of tech as a foundation of compliance reporting.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#36

Post by acdha »

x86x87 wrote: post #22
l33t233372 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even digital goods are pretty limited because you need a situation where both parties honor the system. If that doesn’t fall naturally out of the model you need something like a government enforcement to prevent cheating.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#37

Post by dang »

yumraj wrote: post #4
obblekk wrote: post #3

It's interesting to read how much research tbray did on crypto back then. Definitely doesn't seem like new entrants today were doing the same level of diligence, on average.

Quoted post unavailable.

Ruh roh. Please don't do that here.

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#38

Post by dkokelley »

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…

Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#40

Post by Gigachad »

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…

There is also a problem of what happens when the farmers computer gets hacked and their land NFT stolen. Are the police meant to roll in and kick out the farmer who clearly still owns the land? Or do they just ignore the blockchain record as it's obviously wrong but not fixable.
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