Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

aws.amazon.com

171–180 of 183 posts

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still too early for most people to understand how amazing the concept around MakerDAO and DAI actually is. They will, but it will take a bit of time.

Been hearing about it but must admit I don't fully understand it. Would you mind a sentence or two on why the concept is so amazing?

MakerDAO is basically a community run central bank on the Ethereum blockchain. You can lock away assets you own (currently only ETH but eventually even your house will work as a collateral). By locking away your collateral you can withdraw DAI which will be generated based on your collateral. This is comparable to how banks worked in the past where they only printed money for which they had gold as collateral.

You need to at least have a collateralization of 150 %. If you fall below that, your collateral will be seized, the same amount of DAI that you own will be bought from the market and burned. The rest of your collateral minus 13 % liquidation fee will be send back to you.

At any time you can pay back your loan in DAI or add more collateral.

This mechanism keeps DAI stable at 1 USD.

The entire mechanism runs entirely on the Ethereum blockchain.

Know why is that cool?

1. You have a 100 % decentralized token that you can keep in any crypto wallet that supports ERC-20 token (Be your own bank)

2. You have a token that isn't volatile so it is safe to pay out salaries or buy groceries with it.

Stablecoins that are pegged to Fiat money like the USD still have one centralized aspect though. The currency that they are pegged to is still controlled by centralized organs (e.g FED, European Central Bank etc).

The cool thing is, this stuff is just getting started. MakerDAO is just a few month old and pegging to the USD is really just the beginning of a new era.

In the long term, imagine you have a stablecoin that is pegged to the purchasing power of North America or Europe or any other region of the world.

It's totally possible. The data feeds are the hardest part but there are solutions for that.

Imagine having a currency that is pegged to the purchasing power of your region without any governmental control. This is where we are heading.

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#172

Interesting, I actually implemented a simple immutable ledger on top of mysql this year to track balance mutations of our InToken coin. The coin exists on Stellar as well but we track federated stellar accounts in our database for most of our users. This means that we represent them with a single stellar account. We allow users that clear our aml procedure to send/receive tokens to stellar. Having our own ledger mean…

Given your problem with serializability, why not use a database which supports it better than MySQL?

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#173

Interesting, I actually implemented a simple immutable ledger on top of mysql this year to track balance mutations of our InToken coin. The coin exists on Stellar as well but we track federated stellar accounts in our database for most of our users. This means that we represent them with a single stellar account. We allow users that clear our aml procedure to send/receive tokens to stellar. Having our own ledger mean…

Given your problem with serializability, why not use a database which supports it better than MySQL?

By the time we had to debug this as a thing, we already had our implementation ready. Also cost for a small mysql RDS db in amazon and the convenience of not having to administer that were a factor.

But you are right, I have considered switching to cockroachdb since they advertise their support for serializable transactions.

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#174
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have many vendors that handle the product. The farm, multiple distributors, and transportation companies. Having a consolidated/consistent view of transactions from the full supply chain relative to tangible product could be genuinely helpful for reducing errors that could be consequential from a food safety perspective. It's unlikely to stop cheating since many of these food vendors will almost certain being hum…

So you’re saying blockchain won’t help too much?

Pretty much.

There are attributes of blockchain implementations which are desirable attributes to solve this problem, but they can exist outside of block chains.

In fact, it's part of why I find this Quantum product interesting for this... they seem to have those qualities that would be helpful without bring much of the other baggage.

The only thing that's not clear is how you handle authority (who says who can participate, for example). So I don't think this Amazon approach is the complete answer, but this sort of approach seems like a path which might bear more fruit than trying to implement blockchains for the problem.

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#177
Amazon QLDB does solves some of the QDPR compliance shortfalls of blockchain, for example the physical location of the data could be guaranteed. But it doesn't solve the big one: the right to full erasure, also known as the right to be forgotten. The tactics suggested by other users here, such as 'losing' the key, do not fully qualify as full erasure, just pseudo-erasure. So far, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has as yet developed a GDPR-complaint, public-facing DAO application. It's a grey area. I am working on a blockchain wallet that allows contractors and gig economy workers to request, own and administer their own employment references. The main problem we're facing is to guarantee full erasure, and to guarantee the physical domicility of data (for example,in the EU region). I was excited about QLDB but I see many problems in its current state.

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been hearing about it but must admit I don't fully understand it. Would you mind a sentence or two on why the concept is so amazing?

MakerDAO is basically a community run central bank on the Ethereum blockchain. You can lock away assets you own (currently only ETH but eventually even your house will work as a collateral). By locking away your collateral you can withdraw DAI which will be generated based on your collateral. This is comparable to how banks worked in the past where they only printed money for which they had gold as collateral. You ne…

How does it monitor the peg in a decentralized, sibyl-resistant, manner?

Re: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your problem with serializability, why not use a database which supports it better than MySQL?

By the time we had to debug this as a thing, we already had our implementation ready. Also cost for a small mysql RDS db in amazon and the convenience of not having to administer that were a factor. But you are right, I have considered switching to cockroachdb since they advertise their support for serializable transactions.

Why not PostgreSQL? It's also on RDS.
Post reply on HN