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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#331

Post by iterateofen »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #201
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…

What you are referring to is a distributed ledger, built on top of a blockchain data structure. The word Blockchain is so overloaded, people forget you can build a "blockchain" in 50 lines of code if not less. "Mining" new blocks is added on top of that, it's not a hard requirement - you can just create new blocks and link them up. You can choose to "mine" on CPU (slow) or on the GPU, if you want "mining" at all. You…

Git has nothing to do with blockchain and is essentially what you are describing.

There’s already a word for that: distributed version control. We don’t need to move the goal posts on what blockchain is to make it have an interesting use case.

Blockchain is more specific to the consensus part not really about the self proving data structure part.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#332

Post by kkielhofner »

everfree wrote: post #193
Nursie wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already 14 years in. Where is the evidence it can make anything better? Why hasn't the amazon thing happened in the last ten years of blockchain?

To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date. And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.

I don't understand setting the internet "big bang" date somewhere in the 80s.

The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web. Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).

For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#333

Post by oblio »

v-erne wrote: post #195
smt88 wrote: post #24

I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not). I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future. It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background…

>>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.

Small nitpick: "You" and "Your" don't need to be capitalized. It makes reading the text a bit weird.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#334

Post by speleding »

inkyoto wrote: post #215
jillesvangurp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history. And git is used between many different developers and companies working on the same projects. It was actually designed for this use case. The reason git doesn't need blockchains for this is because…

> Ledgers are quite easy to build. Git is a ledger. It doesn't use a block chain but it does link commits via their hashes; which makes it an audit proof ledger. Unless you can break the hashes, you can't modify its history. Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. You are also disregarding the immutability of the data and the append-only property of stored d…

> Easy as an arm chair theory, impossible in practice without a complete rewrite of git from scratch. > Git is absolutely the wrong tool for the job

Our company uses ledger.cli on top of git as a bookkeeping ledger [https://www.ledger-cli.org]. Works brilliantly, so much easier to use the text wrangling tools we know and love instead of some brain dead GUI of an accounting program.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#335

Post by dmitriid »

fareesh wrote: post #127

From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea. Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at…

> Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption.

It's not.

Question: who is the rightful owner of the marked land? See my comments in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212564

> The wealthy and powerful could absolutely influence some levels and steal land. Even petty regional criminals are able to do it.

So the wealthy and the powerful get the person entering data on the blockchain to enter that the land belongs to them. What exactly has blockchain solved?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#337

Post by pjkundert »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #268
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…

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 decentralized manner, with transaction rates that grow linearly with the DHT size.

Such a system is now in public beta. It could be world-changing (at least for programmers).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#338

Post by dmitriid »

legutierr wrote: post #291
dmitriid wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights and adjudicating contractual disputes to a meaningful extent No, they can't. A blockchain is, at best, a database. A database cannot do anything.

So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records? A database cannot do anything?

> So you would assert that the use of centralized relational databases would would not reduce the cost and complexity of enforcing property rights, in comparison to the use of paper records?

1. No, I wouldn't assert that

2. It depends entirely on implementation (there are numerous examples around the world where transferring paper records to digital records mad a lot of things less efficient due to bad implementations)

3. You have to show that blockchain as a store of record is significantly better than a traditional relational database (given e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691566 and other like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688603 and other issues that you dismiss or ignore)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#339

Post by themihai »

super256 wrote: post #316
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…

> 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,…

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 transact online.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#340

Post by pjkundert »

aniijbod wrote: post #336

Ironic that CBDC systems are being built on a technology exclusively aimed at eliminating the C in that acronym.

How so?

Central Bank Digital Currencies are being implemented exclusively on systems that allow the "Central" authority to absolutely ensure that nobody except that central authority can control every transaction in those ledgers.

And I don't think you meant the "C" in "Currency".

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