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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#41

Post by acdha »

x86x87 wrote: post #17
acdha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that he wasn’t saying that it was identical to a classic database but rather that the applications being built were treating it like one. I’ve seen a number of hypotheticals batted around and it was clear that most of them could have been a database, perhaps with signatures on certain records, because they didn’t need any of the anonymous aspects. That could be a sign that developers don’t know how to architect…

Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)

Yes, that’s the anonymity part. You only need that if the parties don’t have some kind of relationship and reputations to maintain.

This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted third parties, you get no value from a blockchain to make up for all of the negatives unavoidably added by using one.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#42

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

smt88 wrote: post #24

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…

Blockchains are great for one-thing... guarantee that data is being appended and never modified.

When you want to display a record, you can aggregate the data historically and allow people to see changes and attribute them to users and time but you can always see what was originally added.

However that's kinda risky for HR because anything committed to that DB will be there... forever!

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#43

Post by muglug »

arduinomancer wrote: post #39

For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this? As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?

NoSQL!

Rep from comes along, shows a CTO some graphs about how well it performs vs . If developers are unlucky CTO mandates a migration to NoSQL.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#44

Post by yumraj »

dang wrote: post #37
yumraj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apologies. My mistake.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#45

Post by XorNot »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
felixgallo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#46

Post by legutierr »

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…

The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are.

In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also operate on a continuum. In the example cited in the article, the rich landowners don't just remove the property markers—they wait for flooding to wash them away before illegally expanding their claims. In other words, even in a society where official corruption is rampant, there are still societal limits within which corruption is possible.

The impact that blockchains can have is to simplify the tasks that systems of adjudication must undertake in order to enforce property rights and contracts. They also remove individual judgement from most decisions, and make it impossible to alter or destroy records.

I'm not saying that blockchains can entirely replace all human governance systems. Rather, blockchains can make it cheaper and easier to maintain functioning and accessible systems for adjudication. They reduce the surface area for the use of individual judgement, and thereby reduce costs and opportunities for the injection of corrupt influence.

Yes, many of the things that blockchains can do can also be done by centralized database applications—maintaining property records, for example. Those centralized databases still need to be maintained by trusted parties, however—trusted parties who themselves may be subject to corrupt influence.

By moving title records from paper to a centralized database all you are doing is changing who becomes the bribery target—the Postgres DBA instead of the clerk at the records office. With a public blockchain, there is no one you can bribe.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#47

Post by legutierr »

XorNot wrote: post #45
Spooky23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you even talking about? Who owns what has always been available to everyone, that's how land title deeds work .

Do they work that way in rural Africa?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#48

Post by petesergeant »

saimiam wrote: post #2

For whatever reason, SMS operators in India rely on blockchain to validate SMS templates and customer’s do-not-disturb settings. For a sense of scale, SMS is a 12.5 billion dollar business in India.

Do you have a link to more information about this?

EDIT: So doing some googling finds that Telecom Regulatory Authority of India implemented “Distributed Ledger Technology” for fighting spam, but roll-out seems to have lasted not long (a week? A month?) because it didn’t work (didn’t scale?) and every so often tech vendors suggest they’re going to re-do it? Honestly there’s a lot of promo articles and conflicting information that I’m struggling to understand what’s going on there, my take-away is that it’s not currently being used because it didn’t work?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#49

Post by mariusor »

imglorp wrote: post #35

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 a…

Do you have any other clues for finding that open source project?

It sounds very interesting to me.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#50

Post by vishnugupta »

arduinomancer wrote: post #39

For the older devs, has there been anything in the past like this? As in some new hyped tech that people kept trying to insert into their business?

The last hype cycle, from about 10 years ago, I remember is that of BigData and associated technologies such as MapReduce, Hadoop, NoSQL DBs, data pipelines and so on. That lasted for about 4 years I guess? Then ML took over.
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