Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS and Blockchain

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 724 posts

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#131

Post by LilBytes »

hanniabu wrote: post #113
inkyoto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] 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…

We want permissionless, which requires decentralization, which requires blockchain

For what purpose or enabler does permissionless benefit this use case you have in mind? Or in another way, what does requiring permissions block your use case?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#132

Post by marcell »

Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved. They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really bad. For example:

(1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges?

(2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform?

(3) How can I launch a new financial app, as a small startup, and open it to assets held on ETrade.

All of these are impossible in the current system. In contrast they are all trivial using Ethereum’s blockchain.

https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#133

Post by Dylan16807 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #101
Dylan16807 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your understanding is wrong. In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts images or videos has this problem, but with all its shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly wor…

Reporting millions of videos is a good thing, but having millions is pretty crazy too.

And Bing doesn't host things.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#134

Post by deanCommie »

fareesh wrote: post #127

From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea. Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at…

As we've learned from the "They've stolen my apes" scenarios, the very nature of blockchain as the central authority of trust means that there is no such thing as theft on the blockchain.

Today, corrupt powerful people use violence and intimidation to go move physical markers to change landownership.

If land ownership was on the blockchain, the same corrupt powerful people will use violence and intimidation to force digital transfer of ownership.

The same threats to the safety and wellbeing of family members works equally well to induce the desired actions in the physical word or the digital one.

This is why Tim wrote to be wary of technical solutions for political problems.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#135

Post by alexjurkiewicz »

fareesh wrote: post #127

From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea. Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at…

But how will poor people own enough computation to ensure rich people can't mount a 51% attack?

If the database relies on trusted nodes run by eg, the government, why can't the government use MySQL and periodically publish a dump?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#136

Post by deanCommie »

namdnay wrote: post #121
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…

Kind of off-topic: in what kind of weird organisation is a product manager dictating engineering decisions?!

In most of them.

It's not difficult: You simply dictate requirements that can be only solved by one engineering solution.

But that, in essence, is part of the challenge with blockchain. People treat it as a self-describing requirement. ("This must be on the blockchain") rather than a technical solution for a dubious set of problems most people don't have.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#137

Post by philliphaydon »

marcell wrote: post #132

Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved. They are wrong. The tech underlying the current system is really bad. For example: (1) How can I perform an atomic transaction across two stock exchanges? (2) How can I take stock held on one exchange, and use it as collateral on an unaffiliated lending platform? (3) How can I launch a new fina…

I opened the site thinking it would be serious but got a popup for web3. So I closed it.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#138

Post by autotune »

>A huge, almost incomprehensible, volume of venture capital was flowing into the sector, and that money was localized in the Finance sector, specifically in Manhattan.

I think the worst part about this whole thing is there are still millions if not billions of dollars being pumped into it. I literally just got a job interview request for a crypto exchange with hundreds of millions supposedly in the bank. It's absurd.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#139

Post by csomar »

It is a shame that we are ending up here with "Blockchain technology". Beyond the financial aspect (Bitcoin/Stablecoins), here are a few use cases where a Blockchain will shine:

- Tracking shipments across countries. This is an append-only operation, across multiple jurisdictions/languages/infrastructures. A blockchain ledger can play the role of standardizing operations for the tracking of shipments.

- Healthcare records.

- Company registry records. Once submitted, they are publicly available and immutable.

- Title deeds. You wouldn't own the NFT yourself. The government could assign it to you and be the only one able to transfer it across its "subjects".

- Stocks/Assets. For this one I'll blame ASE for failing to deliver. They have picked the wrong company to build such a thing while spending a gigantic sum of money in the process.

- Digital Identities. There was never enough investment in this area, especially for key retrieval in the case of loss.

- Decentralized DNS. The tech is there (Namecoin) and roughly functional. There was never any investment in this comparing to the billions thrown in NFTs and other crap projects.

Instead of addressing any of the above points, Blockchain and Crypto degenerated into fancy websites and gifs aimed to drill money from everyone who can be influenced. We are here 5-6 years later after the Defi/Smart Contracts fever and all we have to show for it is some apes NFT. This could have been done a lot earlier with Namecoin which has a much more native support of NFT. But Namecoin never took off because the founders were never interested to make money out of this.

It does seem that governments might be more fundamental than we thought. They might be protecting us more from ourselves than we see them as an imposition on our freedom. Here we have a worldwide experiment of a government-less operation at wild.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#140

Post by deanCommie »

Spooky23 wrote: post #95
XorNot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your land to me, or i kill your sister"?

Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain.

Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.

Post reply on HN