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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#371

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

throwoutway wrote: post #358
TrackerFF wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 full of product like this in several of their stores.

People seemed to like it when asked, but when given the choice to pay a premium for it vs the unlabeled fish, the majority declined. And this is at a store that caters to the whole hippies with money crowd.

I think the people hawking this idea for consumers utterly fail to take into account that most consumers simply do not care about this. A non trivial portion actually do NOT want to know this information, similar to how some people are fine eating chicken but can't touch a raw one to cook it.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#372

Post by jonhohle »

iterateofen wrote: post #331
BatteryMountain wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The consensus part is the piece that that vast majority of businesses (potentially all businesses) don’t need. There are other mechanisms for trusting nodes and having a shared coordination mechanism is solved many times over.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#373

Post by louwrentius »

oblio wrote: post #257
louwrentius wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve? Isn’t Blockchain just a convoluted solution to a problem nobody has? (Which is the conclusion of the article)

> What real life use case - that resonates with regular people - would this solve? The problem that some people really, really hate authority, and frankly, really hate other people, and would like a magical machine to do away with all that messiness. So they put a million barriers between themselves and that messiness and hope it all works out in the end. It's like a sort of niche religion. After the first believers…

Oh that’s totally what I observe.

Crypto really incentivizes terrible, predatory behavior. A lot of scamming or other criminal behavior. But that’s not the kind of use case I’m looking for.

Obviously I want something beneficial and legal. I don’t believe there is any.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#374

Post by adolph »

pid-1 wrote: post #273
Terr_ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if your problem exhibits the above property (and it's a distributed system) does using a blockchain make sense. I think we also need to specify that it's also an extremely distinct and rare type of "distributed": When you must support unrestricted and unlimited creation of new participant nodes. That's the fundamental requirement that drives an entire cascade of other blockchain design choices, such as proof-o…

I think Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the name of such propriety (being resilient to a limited number of adversarial nodes).

People don’t use that term anymore because the generals of many countries present the same problem, not just those of the Eastern Roman Empire.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzanti...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#375

Post by BackBlast »

legutierr wrote: post #10

> He named a region in Asia and explained that the small farmers there mark their landholdings carefully, but then the annual floods sometimes wash the markers away. Then unscrupulous larger landowners use the absence of markers to cut away at the smallholdings of the poorest. “But if the boundary markers were on the blockchain,” he said, “they wouldn’t be able to do that, would they?” The developed world is distingu…

Currency is the only one of those that actually works within the corrupt legal system because it doesn't require any action on the part of the corrupt system. You can use it directly with other parties.

(smart) Contracts? Without institutional enforcement, doesn't matter. Maybe being all on-chain, but that hasn't really functioned.

Ownership (NFT)? Doesn't work at all without some level of institutional enforcement.

Blockchain does only one thing well.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#376

Post by TimJRobinson »

RandomLensman wrote: post #368
TimJRobinson wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept. Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or…

How do you see current regulations change to make this all fit, i.e., what's your roadmap there?

That's unclear. From a game theory perspective you don't want to be the government that stifles your country by restricting access to a financial system everyone else adopts, so I think many are waiting to see how that plays out.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#377

Post by daveguy »

pjkundert wrote: post #337
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…

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.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#378

Post by noelsusman »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #362
super256 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept. Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or…

This just reinforces my view that the only value crypto provides is evading government financial regulations. Is it actually good that anybody can spin up a new financial firm in a few months with little oversight or regulation?

>Aave is used for being able to borrow against your crypto assets, so if you need a loan you don't have to sell, this isn't a service any bank offers.

Every bank offers this service, unless you're just talking about getting a loan with crypto as collateral.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#379

Post by hailwren »

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,…

> So basically, you guys are re-inventing what tradfi had years ago, just with worthless(?) tokens instead of debt backed assets.

Crypto has debt backed primitives as well. You’ve linked one. AAVE is a lending protocol. If you don’t like AAVE, maybe you’re looking for DAI.

> but no way to cash out to fiat.

This is just a result of US KYC regulation. Like it or not, this isn’t a choice made by crypto.

> What's the value proposition here?

The value prop is, as the gp said, trustless composability. Crypto (post eth) is to money as the internet is to a mainframe. A kid in a garage can build a financial primitive on top of a “blue chip” and the “blue chip” builder doesn’t have to worry (vis a vis bugs, which have been a big problem but a lot of progress has been made in that area).

I’m not claiming crypto(I wish there was a word for crypto minus btc) has achieved its end state, but the goal and road map seem very clear. Composable, trust-less finance is a strong use case.

Aside — you really have to decide whether the price is important in crypto or not. Opponents often use phrases like “worthless tokens” and then claim they don’t care ab the price.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#380

Post by NotYourLawyer »

pjkundert wrote: post #337
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…

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…

What’s the use case for this? I’m not seeing it.
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