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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#281
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.

This argument is equivalent to saying a data center isn't secure because a nuclear bomb can fall on it.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#282

> 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…

Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence? And if they did, why wouldn't they use violence to force the owner to transfer the property?

> Why would a corrupt state agree to use a system resistant to their influence?

Blockchain isn't resistant to their influence. Case in point: courts still exist. What's to stop me to get a court order showing I'm the rightful owner of something? How can blockchain prevent that?

Moreover, what if I actually am the rightful owner, and the original record was incorrect?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#283

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…

Never once as a retail investor have i needed any of those features. Blockchain a solution looking for a problem.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#284
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be there. A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.

Isn't the whole idea of certificate transparency to detect that situation? That's why the system also has auditors which would detect such tampering.

CT doesn’t require anonymity: the trust in CT comes from the tamper-evident design creating a risk to your reputation if you cheat. Once you have third-party trust relationships you no longer benefit from the expensive blockchain mechanism designed to work without them.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#285

In case anyone needs a thorough source to explain why you don't need a Blockchain, I found the NIST paper (esp the flowchart on page 42) quite helpful: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/nist.ir.8202.pdf It worked wonderfully to cut the BS coming from a greedy manager, in a non confrontational way ("so, what do you actually need?" , "you say 'security', but which aspect do you need? immutability ? non-repudiab…

That's an excellent flowchart. BTW, there is a real example of meaningful blockchain use for auditing single source data (the "caveat" in the flowchart). It's the hypercore protocol https://hypercore-protocol.org/

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#286

With regards to the land markers. You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue. If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database? Big land owner will say "I do…

No post body was provided.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#287
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

sure, but the problem contraints arent reducible to engineering, so in the example you're giving an established centralized authority can profit from selling credentials using only a key signature, but a new decentralized bottom-up credential system needs a blockchain and smart-contracts to do it ...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#288
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Replace hate with "are mildly inconvenienced by", if it makes you feel better :-)

It doesn't change the fact that the whole idea here is to replace human judgment with algorithms, with little thought into how the technology will actually be used by humans.

Trick question.

Let's say I'm not tech savvy. I can barely use my iPhone, I'm frequently confused by Instagram UI updates.

> Bitcoin

> Initial release 0.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (13 years ago)

How can I buy Bitcoin, sell it, use it to buy things with it, 13 years after the fact, in a decentralized fashion, just as Satoshi Nakamoto-sama originally intended?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#289
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…

> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing.

Isn't that also an open door to bad actors?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason for payment processors to be liable. If you have a problem with Bitcoin, you need to support a general, unrestricted right be all persons and orgs to be served by the financial system, except maybe for a narrow and limited set of injunctions through the courts. No other position is cohesive.

Sorry, I do not support your right to be serviced by financial system if it supports your wrongdoing. Your freedom stops where mine begins. My position seems pretty cohesive to me. If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government. This is a human problem and won't be solved with tech. (And again, it was pretty clear to anyone that ther…

> If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government.

So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the financial system by private actors who dislike me, despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to ensure my right to be served.

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