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

141–150 of 724 posts

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#141

Post by jacknews »

I think the cost of trust is underestimated.

All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation.

The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where bribes abound.

Another example is foreign exchange trading settlements; I can't trust that if I send you $500mn in swiss francs, you'll actually send me the equivalent settlement in USD. You might go bankrupt half way through the transaction. And so there exists an expensive jointly owned escrow bank for exactly this purpose, CLS bank.

I'm sure there are many other examples, but the point is, trust is actually quite expensive.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#142

Post by deanCommie »

jiggawatts wrote: post #118
amluto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Not to mention that the only thing that actually matters is what's in the government's land title ledger. They're the ones with the guns that enforce (or don't enforce) ownership. These crypto crazies absolutely crack me up. Can you imagine some dirt poor farmer in the arse end of nowhere confronting the local constabulary that were bribed by their rich neighbour? "You see here in my wallet how my Landz Titles NFT cl…

To augment this slightly: It doesn't even matter if the uninformed thugs completely understand, embrace, and accept the technology of the ledger.

They then just simply glance, smirk, and pummel the farmer until they initiate the transfer of the digital ownership record to them.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#143

Post by aserafini »

unboxingelf wrote: post #90

_Well known tech guy thinks blockchain is dumb because he can’t see its value for a private company._ There’s nothing new here. No, a blockchain isn’t a good replacement for a traditional database. It’s a distributed append only database built on zero trust. It’s extremely inefficient. Very few problems require that solution, especially one where a single party would be running all the nodes.

Indeed, I expect the ONLY application where this combination of requirements makes sense is.. a global currency.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#144

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes.

Okay, and why would you use a blockchain over a state-held database?

Because it doesn't matter what your blockchain says about ownership, the state that issued the title deeds are the ones who decide where the boundaries are.

If the state is not recording it, recording it in a blockchain doesn't help.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#145

Post by throw827474737 »

csomar wrote: post #139

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 r…

Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#146

Post by Finbarr »

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…

Arguments like this one strike me as extremely condescending.

Have you directly spoken to developing world farmers who have experienced these problems?

Do you think people with these problems are just clamoring for the first world to come in and solve this for them with blockchain technology?

Do you think all of the participants in the situation you described would even adopt blockchain (the small farmer, the larger farmer who wants to steal land, the corrupt central government officials open to bribes)? If so, why? It seems the only person with an incentive for change is the one least likely to have strong influence for that change.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#147

Post by mnd999 »

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!

That’s an event sourcing architecture, and something like Kafka will do it much better than a blockchain.

The forever problem can be, ironically, resolved with crypto. If you encrypt each employer record with an employee key then, if the employee data needs to be deleted you just delete the key and the data is gone.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#148

Post by giaour »

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…

In the US, property records are maintained by a local government authority. That alone doesn’t stop squatters or unauthorized encroachment on your property. Normally, the boundaries of a parcel of land are not a mystery, but enforcing them requires more than just knowing their location

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#149

Post by csomar »

throw827474737 wrote: post #145
csomar wrote: post #139

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 r…

Total disagree and not sure why you believe why any of those woukd have value added if on blockchain. Especially, health care records, wtf??

Standardized and encrypted healthcare records. It means wherever you travel you can: 1. Access your health records at your discretion; and 2. Make sure these records are never lost and 3. These records are immutable.

Encrypted records can be easily added by any doctor/clinic as your public key is publicly available.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#150

Post by Renevith »

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…

Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see it: if the government were on board with recording property boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a random third-party ledger would help, since the government wouldn't defer to it.
Post reply on HN