You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...
AWS and Blockchain
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Re: AWS and Blockchain
#252For 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…
I work (well, serving out my notice period) for an SMS aggregator in India. All SMS operators in India use blockchain to manage SMS marketing campaigns
https://dltconnect.airtel.in - for context, Airtel is India's largest GSM provider. https://www.tanla.com - the best known DLT-as-a-service provider in India.
DLT (branded as being built on blockchain) is alive and well in India.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#253Blockchain 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…
the original purpose of an invention does not limit the scope of its application
No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#254> 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…
> The developed world is distinguished from the developing world often by the strength of its institutions, by the general accessibility of legal recourse, by the prevalence of trust within the society at large.
The developed world is not immune to some of the problems, namely: genuine human errors, negligence and a great uneasiness to accept the personal responsibility for making mistakes, inadvertent or out of sheer incompetence (rampant in the British culture). The latter two somewhat step into a gray area, but I digress.
Ledger databases/blockchains provide a technological solution to the problem in multiple areas where a full immutable temporal history of changes is necessary even in the developed world where the governance is strong and corruption is less frequent.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although I take slight issue with how you've worded it, I think I'm in agreement. I'll attempt to add clarification to the parts I find difficult to parse. Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits. This can be confusing because the term "double spend"…
> Blockchains only ensure that coins are never spent twice. They make no attempts to ensure that coins are sent to the correct recipients. At the end of the block, they only care that debits are equal to credits. I know the origin is tightly linked to bitcoin, but I feel like even this muddies the definition. Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins", more facts? contracts? Maybe that's a useless nit to pick,…
> Blockchains are not implicitly related to "coins" ...
That was definitely an oversimplification, and a slightly wrong one at that. In bitcoin, there isn't actually a concept of "coins". Just transactions which spend numbered UTXOs.
If I'm remembering correctly, the term "block chain" came from a conversation between Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto about Bitcoin. If so, one could argue that it IS implicitly related to cryptocurrency.
That being said, the underlying "block chain" data structure is just an alteration of a previously existing data structure called a Merkle Tree which has data blocks that can be used for things that are not transaction data.
Blocks in a blockchain have a payload section reserved for transaction data. Theoretically you could put anything in the payload section but if you're calling the data structure a blockchain, people are probably going to expect transactions in it.
> I assume you could build a mastodon like that distributes and "authenticates" posts via a blockchain - perhaps with terrible performance though.
This has already been done many times actually and it's quite impressive. Basically, a cryptocurrency full node is modified to serve as a social client and an appropriate user interface is built on top. The mechanism by which cryptocurrency transactions are shared with other validating nodes is the very thing that keeps user's "streams" updated and in sync.
It has some major drawbacks but performance doesn't have to be one of them. With UTXO based blockchains like bitcoin, the "mempool" portion of the client code receives transactions containing social data embedded within. This means they are able to show the social media content immediately upon it being sent, even if the transactions containing that data have yet to be included in a block. One problem though, is that like transaction data, the social data doesn't get "finalized" until it's included then mined in a block. So you'd be able to see the messages in your feed but the content might change ten minutes later after it's finalized.
In my opinion, the Achilles heel of blockchain based social media is the Achilles heel of so many otherwise brilliant technologies: "What is someone uses it for child porn?"
Otherwise, most of the other drawbacks can be dealt with.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#256Blockchain 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…
> Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense. I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes. That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-o…
I think the word is "decentralised" rather than distributed: no single authority that controls membership of a distributed system, in a P2P style
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#257Blockchain 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 real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve? Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has? (Which is the conclusion of the article)
> What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve?
The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness.
So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end.
It's like a sort of niche religion.
After the first believers announced their faith, a much, much larger group of grifters realized that they could shout: "FREEDOM! PROFIT! FREEDOM! PROFIT!" and make a ton of money.
Like a real religion, basically, just read up about incense and Christianity to see the real believer versus grifter dichotomy happen in another case.
Anyway, so here we are now :-)
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#258Blockchain 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…
No, that its not the problem that bitcoin solves. You can do distributed consensus just fine without a block chain - if you have to make a choice between two options, everyone broadcasts a vote for one of the options and the option with the most votes is the accepted option.
The problem that bitcoin solves is that you can not prevent me from casting a million votes because the system is anonymous - or pseudonymous if you want - and therefore there is no list of participants that would prevent casting more than one vote. This is called a Sybil attack.
Bitcoin's solution - and similarly that of other block chains - is to make casting a vote expensive, either in terms of computational resources or owned tokens or whatever.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#259reminds me of my post where i tried to understand blockchain in good faith:
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#260From 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…
A petty criminal visits your farm with a gun in his hands. You tell him that the blockchain says this land belongs to you. What happens then? Does he say "oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice day" and go away? Or does he just shoot you and take over the land?
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