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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#71

Post by yokem55 »

andreareina wrote: post #60
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That's not the full story, certificate transparency logs (and many other applications) achieve that without using a blockchain.

This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be there.

A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#72

Post by legutierr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #15
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…

You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome. If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights igno…

I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome.

You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#73

Post by siftrics »

remram wrote: post #66
darawk wrote: post #52

The 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 token…

> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this.

If you know of a ledger that's

(1) permissionless and

(2) avoids the double-spending problem and

(3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned

...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#74

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

siftrics wrote: post #73
remram wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 token…

> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this. If you know of a ledger that's (1) permissionless and (2) avoids the double-spending problem and (3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned ...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.

Ethereum's Proof of Stake?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#75

Post by imglorp »

mariusor wrote: post #49
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.

Here's one https://github.com/codenotary/immudb/

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#76

Post by throwaway290 »

cypress66 wrote: post #58
tootie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That should be dealt with by the justice system, not some corporations.

Payment processors saw the writing on the wall. The reason they did what they did and PH made a 180 and disposed of incriminating content all in one month is because justice system has teeth and they did not want to find themselves liable.

And justice system has teeth because PH is a proper company participating in a financial system. Good luck stopping a criminal in another country profiting from crime by accepting bitcoin

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#77

Post by wmf »

amluto wrote: post #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. I…

You can’t unstake staked ETH.

This is temporary and AFAIK all the other PoS systems allow unstaking.

attacks in which one unstakes and then uses knowledge of old staked private keys to attack other parties.

These "long-range attacks" are not real. They're impossible to pull off in reality.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#78

Post by Dylan16807 »

tootie wrote: post #55
darawk wrote: post #52

The 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?

My understanding is they policed it a lot better than facebook does.

And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill.

Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government to do it.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#79

Post by hahnchen »

Unrelated, but

> Which was pretty nice, except for it was stinking hot that August and we were on multiple steamy subway trips every day; got back to our hotel rooms pretty well emptied out.

Upper level amazon engineers can’t take ubers through new york?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#80

Post by darawk »

remram wrote: post #66
darawk wrote: post #52

The 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 token…

What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.
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