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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#381

Post by rapind »

pjkundert wrote: post #337
TimJRobinson wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're dead on. It's staggering in its power -- permissionless composability, even if most of the data is not on-chain, and the programs are very limited in size/complexity due to the expense of running them. Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain, and the programs you can compose are full-complexity applications... All while maintaining every independent program's data invariant in a completely…

> It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).

If you don’t mind, could you give an example for a programmer who isn’t building finance or crypto related applications? I think that would help me understand what we’re talking about.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#382

Post by ceejayoz »

jeremyjh wrote: post #354
wodenokoto wrote: post #186

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…

Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and suddenly the records match what the large landholder says instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve the problem. How would you get local government to buy into…

An immutable record adds problems.

What do you do when a river moves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia%E2%80%93Serbia_border_...

Who owns new land in Hawaii when the volcano meets the sea? https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/who-owns-the-land-created-...

What happens when someone makes a surveying mistake and enters that permanently into the blockchain?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#383

Post by jgalt212 »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #365
themihai wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there would be value but we neeed a real currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain. It's obvious that all those pegged currencies are prone to "bank run" scenarios. Not to mention the fiat conversion ruines the whole experience. With a real currency we could have at least real open and standards based p2p payments which would be great! Just like with cash offline we would no longer need visa, paypal or banks to tra…

There is already USDC, USDT, DAI that are all US dollars. I use Argent wallet for payments between friends using them and it is a nice experience (especially because Venmo and Cash both aren't available outside the USA), the friction is sending them to and from a traditional bank account, you currently have to use an exchange - but this will change soon.

And there will be a huge amount of friction there:

- ACH is reversible

- wires are expensive

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#384

Post by jillesvangurp »

inkyoto wrote: post #249
jillesvangurp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Read up on git internals, it's a very elegant and simple design and you seem to assume a few things ab…

> 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 were arguing it's not a proper merkle tree and it is. You are not a little bit wrong there but flat out barking up the wrong tree. It's a merkle tree with full immutability and append only behavior. This is not an accidental/conceptual similarity. It's the single most important design decision that Git is based on.

Force push only allows you to wipe out repositories that you control. The whole point of git is that you do not need write access at all to share commits. That's why it's called a pull request and not a push demand. You invite others to look at and maybe merge your changes. There is no way to force the other side to do that and force push rewriting their commit history is not going to help your case for obvious reasons.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#385

Post by DebtDeflation »

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 has been a failed use case from the start because there's no effective way to control the entry point from the real world onto the blockchain. Farmer in South Carolina imports a boatload of tomatoes from China, enters them onto the blockchain as his own during harvest season, now you have a permanent indelible record of those tomatoes as they make every stop along the way to the consumer, with a completely fraudulent point of origin.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#386

Post by likeabbas »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #362
super256 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's similar to AWS where it got exponentially more valuable as each new service was added But... I have yet to see a service which really adds value . All I've seen so far are: A) collection games, which are not different from collecting Pokémon for real money. B) liquidity PvP, where users open leveraged bets to hunt other market participants' stops/liquidations, so the hunter can reduce their position for cheap,…

You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept. Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or…

> How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or the NYSE? It's almost impossible. In DeFi I can spin up my own app in days

This sounds nice in theory, but aren't most of the guard rails of the financial institutions for complying with government regulation? If anyone could interface with these companies then it would be too easy for abuse. USG is not going to let that happen, which is why these DeFi applications will be limited to unregulated cryptocurrencies where the user will have to trust the "bank" that has no Federal Reserve backing.

> Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets... You can also just deposit your assets and earn interest on them.

Why would any crypto supporter want to hold their decentralized currency in a centralized exchange after the FTX fiasco

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#387

Post by some_furry »

function_seven wrote: post #234
v-erne wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.

Can we design an append-only database that also allows for deletions if you replace those deletions with a direct reference to the hash that was once computed at that point in the chain? Yes, I know this isn’t strictly “append only”, but it still gives the ability to prevent silent updates and silent deletes. Any record that’s deleted must be replaced with something that indicates that it was deleted.

Use envelope encryption and wipe the key after the fact.

Bonus: use a committing AEAD mode and use the previous record as AEAD when writing the record.

You can keep the ciphertext in the ledger forever. Zeroing out the wrapped key makes it unretrievable.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#388

Post by x86x87 »

acdha wrote: post #41
x86x87 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho blockchain == distributed consensus in a low trust environment. When you are talking about a database and managing it you are by default outside of the low trust zone (or there exists an authority that everyone trusts)

Yes, that’s the anonymity part. You only need that if the parties don’t have some kind of relationship and reputations to maintain. This distinction matters because almost no real world situation is like that: people need to know that what they’re buying is what they were promised, sellers want to avoid doing business with anyone who fraudulently claims damages, etc. If you need to add reputations and/or trusted thir…

Is it anonymity? Afaik, everything is available on the blockchain (except for maybe some cryptos like Monero).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#389

Post by _8j50 »

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 lot of applications have that problem though.

Take a text editor, it would be improved if edits or saves which are just transactions are stores on a blockchain if the text is being stored and shared synchronously and live between devices.

Basically, people have more devices, want to collaborate and add redundancies to important systems which means changes to data (transaction) where the historical sequence of changes is important to someone can use blockchain, but of course it isn't neccesarily the best solution, especially if there is trust between nodes or out of sync nodes causing a mess can be solves by simpler solutions.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#390

Post by pjkundert »

rapind wrote: post #381
pjkundert wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're dead on. It's staggering in its power -- permissionless composability, even if most of the data is not on-chain, and the programs are very limited in size/complexity due to the expense of running them. Now, imagine a system where all of the data is also on-chain, and the programs you can compose are full-complexity applications... All while maintaining every independent program's data invariant in a completely…

> It could be world-changing (at least for programmers). If you don’t mind, could you give an example for a programmer who isn’t building finance or crypto related applications? I think that would help me understand what we’re talking about.

https://twitter.com/pjkundert/status/1590009435619217413

The clutter.social App is a decentralized Twitter-like app implemented on Holochain. This one is hosted on https://holo.host (only in public Beta, so it doesn't scale automatically), but illustrates a full-complexity app that is deployed. You can compose this (eg. re-skin it, or build it into another app as a commenting back-end), without having to copy the implementation or host the data.

You can also "clone" such an app (with or without any functional changes) and host that fork yourself (eg. on a company’s or family's computers), and nobody can stop you.

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