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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#91

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #88
yokem55 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is both internal enough to get a copy of your HR database but external enough that their logs can't be changed as easily as a non-blockchain system's?

Honestly, it might be possible to do this magic by having the third party issue a signing certificate based on a hash.

Send me a hash as new data is added to your DB and I cut you a cert... the next cert includes hash of the last cert plus the new hash you just gave me...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#92

Post by Nursie »

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…

> fundamentally, having an open fabric for finance, in which anyone can build any kind of application they wish, seems like a pretty cool thing to me.

Where money is concerned, no.

Having gatekeepers, boundaries, approvals, registers, participants and authorities is onerous, but it keeps things more honest and it makes them much more traceable in cases of negligence or fraud. We have ... well pretty much all of recorded history to show us how very many people will use any and every means available to remove money from others and disappear.

So no, this idea of an open fabric, in which anyone can build anything is a recipe for disaster by its very nature.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#93

Post by Nursie »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #42
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!

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

in a distributed, trustless fashion

If it's not distributed or trustless, you can do the same without the blockchain.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#94

Post by ricochet11 »

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…

One little clarifier: You can unstake and stop running your validator, the exit-validator process already exists as it is necessary for slashing. What you cant do is withdraw exited ether until withdrawals are enabled.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#95

Post by Spooky23 »

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 .

If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by floods.

A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available.

It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain transactions.

Again, it’s just a technology. It may make sense as a solution or not.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#96

Post by [deleted] »

legutierr wrote: post #69
XorNot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#97

Post by Dylan16807 »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #91
Dylan16807 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is both internal enough to get a copy of your HR database but external enough that their logs can't be changed as easily as a non-blockchain system's?

Honestly, it might be possible to do this magic by having the third party issue a signing certificate based on a hash. Send me a hash as new data is added to your DB and I cut you a cert... the next cert includes hash of the last cert plus the new hash you just gave me...

An external service that signs and dates [a hash of] your database is very viable! But at that point there's no longer a distributed ledger.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#98

Post by ricochet11 »

petesergeant wrote: post #48
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 inf…

couldnt find this, but given the india connection at a guess probably something on polygon. there are other india anti-corruption uses on polygon too e.g. police complaints records https://twitter.com/firozabadpolice/status/15794707131234058...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#99

Post by Nursie »

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.

We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally.

But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"?

Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-think-of-the-uses for all this time and the only thing that ever seems to come out of it is a variety of schemes that reward early entrants and then crash into the dust, without delivering the utility that was so vaguely promised for so long.

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