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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#271

Post by delaaxe »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #268
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…

I used to think this, but working with DeFi on Ethereum for a while I've realized the killer feature is actually permissionless composability. Which is why enterprise block chains make little sense. Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing. We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the…

Completely agree

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#272

Post by dmitriid »

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…

> Weak institutions, corrupt legal systems, and low levels of trust undermine development and prevent people from building and maintaining wealth for themselves and their families.

> For me, the promise of the blockchain is that it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions

You're trying to solve social and political problems with tech. And you cannot. You could spend 30 seconds thinking abuout the problem and realised why it can't.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

> Is a smart contract better than a written contract? Maybe it is, if there is no well-functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes.

And who is going to enforce this smart contract?

> It's important to remember that what might seem redundant or useless to those of us who reside in the first world may not be redundant or useless to those who live elsewhere.

It's also important to remember that people who claim this (and claim blockchains are solutions to problems) also reside in the first world and have literally no clue about the problems outside their cushy bubbles.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#273

Post by pid-1 »

Terr_ wrote: post #194
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…

> 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 Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the name of such propriety (being resilient to a limited number of adversarial nodes).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#274

Post by inkyoto »

unionpivo wrote: post #264
inkyoto wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple design and you seem to assume a few things about it that are flat out wrong. I am well acquainted with git internals and object types, which include blobs, trees, commits, and tags. But I do acknowledge that I was wrong about git not hashing the object's contents – it does. > A git repository is in fact a Merkle tree. Every commit is chained to the previous c…

You can do the same things with ledger databases, it's just no so convenient, as just typing --force If you have permission to replace database with with your new one (or spin up new instance of DB, adn redirect app to use that, depending on how you are set up), it's just not as convenient (by design). I used centera WORM disks at my previous jobs, for added guarantees. (not by choice, stay away of you have a choice)…

You are not incorrect. Ledger databases, as a technology, do not eliminate a possibility of spinning up a shadow ledger and rebuilding the change history in the new ledger that is purged of inconvenient records.

Managed ledger database services in the cloud (e.g. QLDB in AWS) offer a partial solution to the problem such as platform generated timestamps in the delete/change history table (hard to forge), delete operations not actually deleting the data but moving it into a separate history table, the separation of access to the ledger (app vs account administrator), disallowing direct access to the storage, setting up anomaly detection alarms in the monitoring layer etc etc.

But none of that precludes the possibility of a ledger being nuked or rebuilt (and later nuked).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#275

Post by robertlagrant »

oblio wrote: post #257
louwrentius wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Assuming people who think differently to you must be mostly motivated by hatred works well for a Taylor Swift song, but it's just about the worst way to think of other perspectives and ideas.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#276

Post by paulgb »

nathias wrote: post #263
paulgb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but ignoring the design criteria that an invention solves for is a recipe for using the wrong tool for the job.

'right tools for the right job' seems like just re-stating the original point in different terms, how right a tool is depends on the actual context a big part of that context is culture, preferences, politics etc. not just engineering concerns

If “right tool for the job” is too hand-wavey, maybe “optimal tool given the problem constraints” is a better phrase.

E.g. I’ve seen proposals for “credentials on the blockchain”, but if you assume that a credential issuer has a known public key (as these proposals do), the issuer can just sign a credential, no public ledger is needed. The complexity of using a blockchain for this is just waste.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#277

Post by dsco »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #268
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…

I used to think this, but working with DeFi on Ethereum for a while I've realized the killer feature is actually permissionless composability. Which is why enterprise block chains make little sense. Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing. We've never had this before, and it's incredible how fast the…

See this is where HN has fallen off a cliff, the top commented Runeks supplies a highly theoretical and nonchalant answer to what blockchains _can_ be. That’s been the majority of HNs take on the technology. But the Internet was made for text communication and here we are decades later with social media and streaming video.

TimJRobinson at least states something which is rare on HN, a take on blockchain technology with experimental instead of theoretical knowledge on the subject matter.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#278

Post by dmitriid »

legutierr wrote: post #72
toomuchtodo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replace illegitimate or suboptimal institutions with systems of record or value storage and transfer they don’t have to respect or acknowledge, just as a court who cannot enforce their ruling has no authority. The systems are simply tools, it is the execution layer (ie government very broadly) that determines the outcome. If your property record is on a blockchain but those whose recognize such rights igno…

I don't disagree with you. My point is that blockchains can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent such that many of the institutional deficiencies that exist in the developing world in this regard can be overcome. You couldn't realize such a reform, however, without buy-in from the government itself.

> can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent

No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#279

Post by robertlagrant »

mike_hearn wrote: post #237
dale_glass wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but even that is potentially troublesome. If you're in a low trust environment, then probably nobody trusts the labs either. Like, why do the labs exist? Because the building companies really, really wants to build a solid building but the concrete industry is oddly shady? Or because there's an official/unofficial requirement for it? If the second, you easily end up with labs that rubber stamp whatever you want…

There's not really such a thing as low trust/high trust society. That's an abstraction that sounds good but hides too much detail to be useful when discussing specific projects. You can't just encourage everyone to trust everyone else. To the extent developed countries can be described as "high trust", it's not because they are just magically more trusting. They get that way because there are extensive and mostly wor…

Perfectly put. Needed a comment as well as an upvote.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#280

Post by onetrickwolf »

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…

A reason I have been interested in blockchain is that it seems like a good way to make a decentralized application that could exist beyond the life of the company or person that creates it.

I work in a hobby industry where a lot of community run ledgers are suddenly lost forever due to the death of someone in the fandom (or rarely intentional sabotage or hacking).

Would this be a good use for blockchain or are there maybe other solutions I'm not considering or aware of?

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