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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#101

Post by throwaway290 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #78
tootie wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pornhub was cut off for failing to police child pornography. Why would you want to participate in a financial system that was incapable of excluding evildoers?

My understanding is they policed it a lot better than facebook does. And the solution they were pushed into was extreme overkill. Either way, I don't want a financial system to punish a Canadian company for breaking the law, I want the government to do it.

Your understanding is wrong.

In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts images or videos has this problem, but with all its shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly worse. PH pre-2021, obviously, too (and the bar is higher since it distributed this content for actual profit).

This is all public information.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#102

Post by legutierr »

dastbe wrote: post #84
legutierr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally and most fundamentally, a land registry is by nature a centralized registry of holdings with a legal monopoly. Why on earth would you need to use a blockchain here, when an append-only database does the same job? Records within an append-only database running on a central server can be altered or deleted by whomever has the root password to that server. The only way to guard against that risk is to replicat…

> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentrali…

You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#103

Post by stephen_g »

legutierr wrote: post #46
felixgallo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true? The problem with all of these c…

The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are. In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also…

Yeah, but these kind of ideas don't really work in the complexity of the real world. If somebody hacks a computer and steals my land title token, we need off-chain ways of adjudicating that and fixing the database. So we have exactly the same kind of problems, can't rely on the blockchain for actually saying somebody definitely owns something, and may as well just not have bothered with the blockchain...

Unless you want to change it so 'code is law' and if you can hack someone and transfer ownership to yourself, then you legally own it. But I think few want to live in that kind of society...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#104

Post by TheDong »

legutierr wrote: post #69
XorNot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one knows if you own something, then you don't own it . Literally the entire concept of "ownership" it based on socialized distribution of that information. Which means anyone within range of an item for ownership rights to matter, by definition, is either aware of your claim by some means and respecting it, or unaware and you now get to see how good your legal or kinetic protections of it are. EDIT: The parent…

> Once again, "blockchain" fixes nothing that a central database wouldn't do faster, cheaper and better. Some things that blockchains would do better than centralized databases in your example: * Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis, so you wouldn't have to worry about data loss due to disruption, inaccessibility or incompetent management of the centralized system. * Blockchains cannot be corrupted…

Many of these seem like downsides.

> Blockchains cannot be corrupted by bad actors managing the central system. As I've noted in another comment, a Postgres DBA can be bribed to modify a property record and wipe the backups. That can't happen to a blockchain record.

What is to happen if a land-owner drops their cell-phone with their private keys, and now needs to re-gain ownership of their land? Well, either the government/admins can update the blockchain to have a new private key as an owner (in which case they could be bribed to do the same), OR the blockchain will be inaccurate, it will have an old address owning some land even though no one can use that address. See also, a farmer dies and has no beneficiary.

Also, how is new land added to the blockchain and old land removed? If the government needs to exercise eminent domain to build a railway, the farm's boundaries are changed. Perhaps the farmer does not want to make the update... so how does the land get updated to align with reality?

Natural disasters can also make land change drastically.

> Blockchains can streamline the availability of credit, making it easier for a property owner to leverage their property to grow their business

This just seems bad. Easier access to credit has not been great.

> Blockchains are natively replicated on a massive basis

They are if you have a lot of nodes. Which you do if you use bitcoin/eth/whatever (but then the cost of doing anything is incredibly expensive for those in the global south, so it's unusable). If each town builds their own to manage their land, it would be just as replicated as a .json file in s3 people can mirror if they want, which is to say archive.org might save a copy, a few farmers and companies in the area might, but most people would not care. Heck, people mirroring a json dump of a database would be more likely to happen than people figuring out how to spin up weird blockchain software I bet.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#105

Post by TheDong »

legutierr wrote: post #102
dastbe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way to guard against that risk is to replicate and publicize the data, make sure all data modifications are cryptographically signed and valid according the logic of the application, and incorporate into each new version of the data a hash of prior versions of the data, in order to guard against data deletions. In other words, to implement a blockchain. nothing you’ve described here requires the decentrali…

You are quibbling with semantics. What you have quoted is the definition of a blockchain. Any "centralized" database with these properties is a blockchain, for all intents and purposes.

A system with all those properties is a git repository containing all this data. Which would also scale to more operations per second than a block chain, is much more battle-hardened than any blockchain...

And decidedly isn't a blockchain. It's just a merkle tree that can easily be replicated / updated via "git clone" / "git fetch".

Your definition of a blockchain seems to be different than what most people use, though I admit a lot of blockchain advocates seem to make the definition tighter or looser depending on which is more convenient for the current argument.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#106

Post by stephen_g »

dilyevsky wrote: post #23

I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.

Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to themselves?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#107

Post by smt88 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #34
smt88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong In what way is a blockchain not a cryptographically-verified, distributed, append-only database? If you added a consensus protocol to git, you'd have a blockchain. I'd say it's fundamentally right because the fundamentals are the same. > After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not. Blockchai…

> Blockchain has been around for more than 10 years. If it had any valid use cases, we'd see them in use already I think modern darknet markets use smart contracts for escrow, so that you don't have to trust the escrow arbiter to not run off with your cryptocoins.

This isn’t any difference than traditional escrow SaaS companies. They’re fully automated unless you have a dispute.

In your stated case, “smart contract” means software. It can’t verify that both sides of the transaction have met their obligations unless both obligations are on-chain, in which case there’s no added value.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#108

Post by ShamelessC »

darawk wrote: post #80
remram wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not even true. You can always get people's money and turn them into some tokens. You can run whatever code you want to manipulate those tokens, then at the end of each day you tell them their new balance of tokens. The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this. As long as you go through creepy, deregulated, fallible exchanges to obtain/trade/redeem those token…

What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.

Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#109

Post by dilyevsky »

stephen_g wrote: post #106
dilyevsky wrote: post #23

I think the farmers use case can totally work as long as those land parcels are also on the blockchain.

Armed mobs probably don't care about the blockchain though. And shall I lose the ability to sell my land if I or somebody else loses a private key? Shall my land be taken from me if a criminal is able to hack a computer and transfer it to themselves?

The worst part is cryptocow's milk tastes like shit

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#110

Post by hanniabu »

ShamelessC wrote: post #108
darawk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, precisely, are you saying is not true? You need a decentralized consensus mechanism in order to solve the double-spend problem, unless you've come up with something novel.

Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.

And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a subject before speaking about it.
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