Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#151

Post by whateveracct » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #127

lars wrote: post #32

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand. Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That…

>> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem It's not a rare problem. Fiat currencies don't work for the majority of people. The problem is ubiquitous. We need to separate money from state and blockchain provides a mechanism to do that. Just because fiat works for a handful of rich people, doesn't mean that it works for everyone. Everyone can see that the current system is unfair.

rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist currency only works for "a handful of rich people."

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#152

Post by lstamour » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

TomSwirly wrote: post #123

mrits wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized approaches to trust would go a lot farther.

The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems were improved through blockchain-like technology would be Certificate Transparency https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also, https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-transpar... is a good read.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#153

Post by motohagiography » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #147

motohagiography wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, it's doing something very desirable. Maybe invent a protein coin?

Even if you think the Blockchain itself is valuable, the "proof of work" is almost entirely wasted in the end. Some trillions of hash computations are thrown away for each one that is used.

Even as a blockchain non-fan, those computations are necessary to produce the desirable thing, and the same could be said for protein folding. There are a lot of great and devastating criticisms of blockchains, but the environmental concern is more of a proxy or even dogwhistle for a general political objection to cryptocurrencies - even reasonable objections in the context of their worldview. Greenwashing those objections seems like a canard.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#154

Post by whateveracct » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

rodiger wrote: post #83

Clewza313 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

There's a weird insistence (especially here on HN) that if blockchain isn't doing something that can't be done in another way then it is useless. In reality just doing normal, established processes in a distributed way often is the value-add. See decentralized finance[0]. All these tools and primitives exist in traditional finance, but when it's decentralized all market participants can get a cut of the rewards inste…

dfinity is pretty centralized. they cut corners and basically hand-pick their mining data centers. they only qualify as "decentralized" because they work with multiple unrelated data centers. i am pretty sure multiple hard problems that they need to solve to reach true decentralization have been punted because they hand pick their miners.

also, more than decentralization, they mostly sell their dev-friendly programming model (Motoko, wasm) but a centralized version hosted by AWS would be cheaper faster better. Lunch waiting to be eaten.

most people making cloud software don't need the decentralization. Dfinity papers over this by having their president go pontificate to make it seem like the fate of the world depends on it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#155

Post by iudqnolq » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

pragmar wrote: post #142

TomSwirly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In the current system some people think really hard and then consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws are in the human bits. Where they write down their decisions is an implementation derail.

How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured out how to have a computer figure out what inventions should qualify for protection and what infringes on them, I don't see it.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#156

Post by lordlimecat » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

lars wrote: post #32

Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand. Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem. It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a setting where contributing compute power is economically incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That…

>Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing blockchain and its problems.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#157

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

rodiger wrote: post #102

rajin444 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust - trust being the key part. If you don't need decentralized trust you don't need blockchain. And outside of a global currency, there isn't much that needs that. DeFi is just unregulated speculation / ponzi schemes. People came up with new systems (supposedly faster than bitcoin) to send currency back and forth. People are flocking to it hoping to get ri…

I can be a market maker for an exchange with just $100... not sure how that isn't anything new. I can get a flash loan for $10,000,000 with zero credit to profit off of arbitrage opportunities. Yes, this is all focused on money but nothing to do with speculation or ponzi schemes. DeFi is sort of billed as an "internet of money," so it makes sense that it's focused on financial systems. Unfortunately many do just dump…

The pump and dump hype around cryptocurrency turns a lot of people off.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#158

Post by simonw » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

pragmar wrote: post #142

TomSwirly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

Physical property registries: if you guess my password (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my house.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#159

Post by dale_glass » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #141

mumblemumble wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed" bit that nobody really wants. For example, distributed version control systems are often held up as an example of some form of precedent for blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to happen. Similarly, I'm not sure people ac…

Git is used almost exclusively in a centralized fashion. The use patterns really aren't all that different from SVN, even if having a local copy is kinda nice. But, like you said, having a local copy isn't really the same thing as decentralized. "master" is still a thing. More importantly, the next big shift in version control technology is/will be back toward centralization . You already see this with eg Google Docs…

Git is very much used in a distributed fashion. Eg, on github.

Right now, I'm working on one of the forks of a dead commercial project.

Our fork in turn has 61 forks right now, some of which may diverge further and have multiple people working on them, which at some point may or not contribute things upstream.

Re: Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

#160

Post by pornel » Thu, May 13, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

pragmar wrote: post #142

TomSwirly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

Here are a couple. Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism. Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.

Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property, they're not going to care what some blockchain says about it.

If you only need an informational registry for well-behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be completely trustless. There are many other ways to decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't require mexican-standoff level of distrust.