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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#391

Post by robertlagrant »

oblio wrote: post #288
robertlagrant wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ja…

> if it makes you feel better

Just to be completely clear, it's not about how I'm feeling, just as people disagreeing with you not meaning they feel hatred.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#392

Post by likeabbas »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #370
bartread wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyo…

You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it. I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities. Then ag…

> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#393

Post by x86x87 »

dale_glass wrote: post #218
x86x87 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed consensus with zero trust.

Only in an extremely limited sense. You have to trust the developers, for one. Also it's only trustworthy as far as everything happens on the blockchain. Once you step off it for even a second, it doesn't help. Eg, witness the absolutely amazing number of scams happening in the area, and the number of well known, and supposedly trustworthy services suddenly crashing and burning.

There are a set of rules that applies to everyone and are enforced by everyone.

Re: trust the devs: do you trust the electricity in your house? What about the wires in the wall? Do you trust others to follow traffic rules?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#394

Post by masklinn »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #371
throwoutway wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they’ve been talking about that agtech solution for over 5 years and no one has built it? They could do the same with a database

A friend of mine is an economist that did a similar project (sans blockchain) in grad school. He set up a program to label fish with information about where it was caught, who caught it, when, how it was processed etc. Some of it on the package including a smiling photo of the boat owner, more details on the web behind a QR code/URL. He worked with a local chain roughly equivalent to Whole foods and had a cold case f…

> people hawking this idea for consumers

Do people actually... do that?

I struggle to think of traceability as a massive consumer boon, as far as I could think the primary customers of such would be:

1. states (regulatory agencies)

2. consumer advocacy groups

3. the corporations themselves

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#395

Post by themihai »

throwoutway wrote: post #355
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…

> I think there would be value but we neeed a real currency(i.e usd) on the blockchain. So making sure I understand, there’s no value today?

I fail to see any value other than fliping "worthless" coins. The coins fliping is not working great either which is the reason we have binance and ftx. The real value seems to be for money launderying and scam payments though so there is indeed some value. Crypto payments for real businesses is not feasible. I've tried that and the volatility and transaction fees makes them unusuable.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#396

Post by Chico75 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #346
underdeserver wrote: post #303

> [Andy Jassey] said something like this: “All these leaders [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.” To me the tel…

I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market. So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data…

I'm not sure I see why or how would blockchain solve this information centralization problem better than other "classic" tools?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#397

Post by oblio »

robertlagrant wrote: post #391
oblio wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ja…

> if it makes you feel better Just to be completely clear, it's not about how I'm feeling, just as people disagreeing with you not meaning they feel hatred.

This is an internet forum, I'm just commenting, I reserve my right to make over the top comments loaded with scandalous language :-)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#398

Post by pjkundert »

daveguy wrote: post #377
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…

How is permissionless composability different from the MIT license? I'm confused what you're composing now that you couldn't before and the benefit of that permissionless composability. Ecosystems of programming libraries and compostable abstractions don't require a blockchain as far as I can tell.

It's like the MIT license, plus AWS with an unlimited account and auto-scaling.

In the case of self-hosted Apps (ie. where you need to "install" something on your phone or computer), each peer provides their own compute/storage/networking to host their own usage of the App, plus a small fragment of everyone else's usage (proportional to a few average user's worth).

So, the cost to each user is a small constant C times the average user's utilization. And the benefit is that the application persists, in its entirety, as long as any number of users >= 1 continue to use the App.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#399

Post by smoldesu »

_8j50 wrote: post #389
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 chang…

Blockchains wouldn't fix anything here, though. The last-connected device doesn't necessarily have the canonical file, and the blockchain doesn't have any way to resolve syncing conflicts. Git is a much better choice for transactional history, and it didn't need a blockchain to implement this concept.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#400

Post by diseasedyak »

TrackerFF wrote: post #346
underdeserver wrote: post #303

> [Andy Jassey] said something like this: “All these leaders [CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises] are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.” To me the tel…

I recently attended a trade show, which mostly revolved around emerging ML/AI and other "hot" tech products in the market. So it actually seems that in the logistics line of things like manufacturing / production / etc. there is a place for blockchain, mainly due to the immutability and decentralized distribution properties. What could take a whole week to track down using older methods, takes seconds if all the data…

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say, a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be done easily and fast with a database?

Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved or something.

Honestly just trying to understand, thanks!

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