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AWS and Blockchain
61–70 of 724 posts
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#62> But the Eth folk managed to get proof-of-stake to work at scale; good on ’em.
That’s a bit charitable IMO. It works with at least two major caveats:
1. You can’t unstake staked ETH. (This seems to have all manner of strange effects.). Fixing this is apparently a big deal, and, if nothing else, could enable attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.
2. It hasn’t actually been that long, and the major validators likely have a strong interest in making Ethereum work well. Just working at scale does not mean it’s secure at scale.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#63Tim 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…
> […] compliance […].
This is the crux of the matter. In a prevailing number of cases, when people ask about a blockchain, they actually want a ledger database with the following properties:
– an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;
– cryptographically verifiable datasets;
– certification and/or compliance validation by externally accredited auditing bodies for SOC, PCI-DSS, ISO, HIPPA etc.
Use cases for ledger databases go beyond finance, and have been becoming a commonplace in health, education, supply change and inventory management, archive record management and similar. Anywhere, where compliance, strict record keeping and/or audit requirements are in place, the ledger databases provide the answer. AWS has QLDB, and Azure will soon have the Azure SQL Ledger Database (built on top of their SQL Server product).
Fully fledged blockchains are not required in most cases.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#64I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.
The government would have to cede control of transfers, which good luck with that. If you require the government to sign the transaction you now effectively have a permissioned database which doesn't require a blockchain to implement.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#65Tim 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.
Hyperledger is one such project: https://www.hyperledger.org/ (mostly the marketing fluff) and https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#66The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers. A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases wher…
But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.
As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those tokens, you are not permissionless or cryptographically secure or free from gate-keepers or anything of the sort.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#67> 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…
An NFT representing ownership of farmland is, frankly, absurd.
If I own farmland and lose my private key (or screw up a smart contract and lock it away forever, etc), should that land never be farmed again?
If a river moves and boundaries must change but the NFT isn’t aware of this, what happens?
If someone with guns takes my land, who cares about my NFT?
Maybe technology can help create a system where transactions really happen on a common-carrier basis and can’t be censored without censorship being documentable and illegal. But at the end of the day, ownership of real things isn’t something on chain and is enforced by centralized institutions, and a blockchain won’t change that.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#68For 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?
Speaking of Tim Bray, in the 1990s people kept using XML in places where it wasn't appropriate.
There have been so many tech fads. Distributed objects (e.g. CORBA), mobile code, object databases, micropayments, push, WAP, and I want to give a special lifetime achievement award to VR which is now on its third hype wave.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they work that way in rural Africa?
If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it . Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information. Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are. EDIT: The parent…
> Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better.
Some things that blockchains would do better than centralized databases in your example:
* Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis, so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of the centralized system.
* Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.
* Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business.
* Blockchains can increase the liquidity of the property market by providing via smart contract services that might not otherwise be available. For instance: escrow, auction, and mortgage lending.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#70The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers. A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases wher…
Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography. Why would you want to participate in a financial system that was incapable of excluding evildoers?
why would you want to participate in an internet that is incapable of excluding evildoers?