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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#201

Post by BatteryMountain »

runeks wrote: post #167

Blockchain was invented to solve one particular problem: distributed consensus on a sequence of transactions, where the choice of which transaction to include from a set of conflicting transactions is irrelevant. The latter property here is key to understanding where blockchain is useful. It was created to solve the "double spend problem", ie. two transitions that spend the same coin but send it to different recipien…

What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top of a blockchain data structure.

The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You can then choose to persist it (file or sql or whatever) or only run it in memory. After that you can get into the concept of ledgers and currencies, and after that into making it distributed via some gossip-y protocols.

So a cleaner definition of a block chain would be, a tamper-proof daisy-chained data structure, similar to a linked list. All the stuff about ledgers, currencies, mining and consensus are separate concerns, stacked on top of a blockchain.

Also checkout: Merkle trees, linked lists, Chain of Responsibility.

Anyone agree/disagree?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#202

Post by mnd999 »

kenniskrag wrote: post #174
mnd999 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really with crypto, if you use a a not forever secure crypto algo.

The usual reason for doing this is to convince auditors or lawyers that the system is in compliance with GDPR or similar legislation, not to resist the attention of three letter agencies. If you can say you’re using industry standard / government approved crypto it should be fine.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#203

Post by darawk »

Nursie wrote: post #92
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 recor…

That's certainly a valid point on the trade-off curve to choose. But you could make a similarly reductionist argument about free speech, guns, home chemistry sets, etc. I think the position that "money is too important to be open" is a potentially reasonable one!

But what I don't think is particularly defensible is the position that the gatekeepers of our monetary system should be the corporations who happen to occupy the current choke points. And I think if you wanted to build a democratically controlled financial system that doesn't have corporate gatekeepers, you'd actually want to start with something very much like a decentralized open blockchain. That is, if you want to build a democratically controlled permissioned system, you need to start with an open fabric, and place the gatekeepers and choke points with intention.

Personally I prefer an open fabric, but I do understand the appeal of walled gardens.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#204

Post by fabianfabian »

EFreethought wrote: post #192
fabianfabian wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the entire reason a bank is needed in all online transactions is because nobody trusts YOU to not double spend, but they do trust the bank to make sure they don't let you spend your money twice.

Then the banks have solved the double-spending problem, so in effect there isn't one. I was asking the question because if double-spending has been solved, then why do we need crypto/blockchain?

Sure, if double-spending has been solved for you, you don't need a blockchain. It hasn't been solved for everyone yet though. A great book to learn about this is: Check Your Financial Privilege (https://www.amazon.com/Check-Your-Financial-Privilege-Gladst...)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#205

Post by chinathrow »

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…

> 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.

People seem to forget that you still have to trust the people and/or hardware doing data entry while tracking shipments. If you can't solve that first, there's no need to have a blockchain as a storage medium.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#206

Post by throw827474737 »

csomar wrote: post #149
throw827474737 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See the other responses for more, but would be curious how that discretion is completely lost when you want to proove something?

Geberally surprised about the false beliefs around anonimity on block chains, as soon as you have the right anchors they are the most tracable.

Or do you mean you sit at the doctor on your vacation, pull out an app to access your CT scan and hand it him over somehow or what is the use case here really? Seems so unrealistic on manu levels and much more easily realized with more solid tech, sorry?!

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

Yes, crypto101, which works fine without any blockchain?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#207

Post by Nursie »

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…

> Blockchain skeptics are all defending the tech of the current financial system, and implicitly arguing it can’t be improved.

Homeopathy skeptics are all defending the mainstream medical system and big pharma, and implicitly arguing it can't be improved.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#208

Post by everfree »

autotune wrote: post #198
everfree wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blockchain, no matter how good it might be or might have been, is clearly not that system due to its now tarnished reputation at this point in time. I never understand how people can consider the reputation of glorified timestamped linked lists to be "tarnished". This isn't a company or even a particular piece of software, it's a class of data structures. You're trying to tell me that a particular way of structurin…

Someone comes out with a new database called "BigBucksDB" that uses a previously unknown technology called "blockchain." Suddenly every scammer and grifter decides to pump up this new "BigBucksDB" and emphasizes how safe and secure it is, thanks to blockchain, because all transactions are public and the ledger or whatever can't be modified in any way except to append new data. Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" de…

> Then the companies using "BigBucksDB" decide to transfer all of their customers funds into their own accounts at a real bank and declare bankruptcy.

Not your keys, not your coins. If some random company that you don't trust has permission on the chain to transfer your funds, you're not doing it right.

> That fraud has still managed to be committed.

FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain. Ironically, blockchains (in particular decentralized exchanges and "DeFi") are a solution to the type of fraud FTX committed. They purported to be in custody of their customer's funds, while in reality they frittered them away, because there was no transparency. From the perspective of people who had Bitcoin and Ether in their own custody, the chain has been chugging along as normal.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#209

Post by ex3ndr »

Very big article that basically buried the core difference: zero trust or some "trusted transaction manager".

Moving from the second to the first is very trivial - just make it based on distributed consensus of nodes that are run by separate entities, may be even several different cloud vendors.

AWS also doesn't have some interesting things from crypto-world - smart contracts, that are just like lambda functions that couldn't be altered in any way and could be trusted by third-party. They have Nitro Enclaves, this is close, but quite hard to use.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#210

Post by everfree »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #199
everfree wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then any operations involve canonicalizing the state by scanning the entire subsequent chain Sounds exactly like what blockchain node software does when you first start it up and it syncs the chain?

The scales are completely different orders of magnitude. Crypto chains are miniscule, a few hundred GB max and even that's problematic for a lot of devices. A single CT scan is something like 20+ GB. There are ~220,000 of those in the US every single day and probably billions or trillions of other little things being logged. You can store offchain, but then you're a. Centralizing things again and b. Probably violatin…

Decentralized data stores exist. IPFS is perhaps the most widely known. But if you discount imaging and store only medical summaries (which if we're being honest is often the only thing doctors look at after the fact anyways), it would definitely be technically feasible.
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