AWS and Blockchain

Say, how would you build a skyscraper without trust? Are you going to set up an on-premises laboratory to test the quality of the concrete and steel? Are you going to personally verify the entire building's plans? Check whether the geological study was accurate? Follow every worker around to make sure they don't cut corners anywhere?

The less you can trust that the many people involved did their job, the harder and more expensive it gets to actually get the work done, until it turns out it just can't be practically done.

A lack of trust gets you a place like Afghanistan -- where the moment you stop looking stuff starts disappearing.

Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. You are also disregarding the immutability of the data and the append-only property of stored datasets in ledger DB's: the entire temporal history of changes to a document (or a table) must be available in a ledger database. Changes are linked by virtue a Merkle tree, and the content of each node (i.e. revision) can be cryptographically proven to be untampered with. QLDB documentation provides a visualisation of the cryptographic verification process and of a sequence of steps: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/verif...

Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job as hashes in git are used as identifiers to identify a specific change, but not to cyrptographically checksum the document/the change to the data. Git commits can also merged, rewritten, squashed or deleted – something is absolutely unacceptable in the compliance space.

So no, Git it is not easy to build a ledger database out of git if there are strict compliance requirements as I can pull out a revision M out of N revisions of my documents stored in a ledger database, run the revision N through the proof interface and use it in a court hearing as evidence or turn it over to external auditors. And no external auditing body will ever certify a git based solution.

0 caution about this was offered in the MSM. Everyone agrees that the average crypto investor was clueless about how it all worked behind the scenes, but that didn't stop them from FOMO and wanting to jump on the fail whale anyway because investment firms like Sequoia Capital pumped it up.

> FTX was plain old fashioned fraud, the fraud wasn't committed on a blockchain.

Whether it was legitimately committed on a blockchain or not is not really relevant here. It was marketed as being a way to prevent fraud for all these exchanges who claimed they were using it for its intended purpose. How is the average investor, who got shafted thinking everything was safe thanks to this emerging new technology, supposed to keep thinking that any exchanges existing presently are going to implement it the way it was intended if they got so duped by what was supposed to be the one exchange that legitimized the whole industry?

The tech is rapidly improving and it’s pretty easy to see where things are going from here: soon we’ll have general purpose decentralized databases where data is open as open source code is open. In fact, state-of-the-art smart chains can be viewed as special (financial) purpose decentralized databases.

As to why decentralized databases are desirable: imagine if you could fork databases like you can fork code in a completely permission-less manner. This is how web development would look like:

You, the programmer, take a look at a public data schema (eg. a smart contract that implements the ERC-721 interface) and decide to build on top of it. Then, a user, who has already interacted with what you built on, decides that they like what you built and lets your app use their data. You, the programmer, can be sure that the data you built on remains available, and the user can be sure that they'll be able to port the data produced by your app into new apps.