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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#401

Post by subradios »

Nursie wrote: post #128
subradios wrote: post #123

Blockchains are an incredible technology. It is obvious that their first attempted uses are contractual and monetary, because blockchain guarantees can make things better fastest in those arenas. The unfortunate part is it doesn't seem like anyone has really figured out the how yet. I am reminded of the Web, Amazon was the first company to really "get" e-commerce and made all the money - there will likely be a simila…

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?

The biggest reason is social, or occasionally legal. There are tons of barriers in place to getting the legal system to agree that smart contracts are legitimate - which creates a barrier to real world, because regulators of real world business want to see contracts and legal language. (And you can't get away from if if you're operating a physical store with physical employees)

The only group that has managed to beat this was early Uber, and their political lobbying arm was legendary.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#402

Post by pjkundert »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #380
pjkundert wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You see no benefit in Apps that cannot be "disappeared" by anyone (even the person who deployed it), and which scales without bound and can be composed (re-skinned or extended) without restriction? Or, forked and restricted to your own cryptographically identified and secured set of users?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#403

Post by x86x87 »

Nursie wrote: post #99
x86x87 wrote: post #8

I believe that putting the equal sign between a blockchain and a database is fundamentally wrong. I also think that a lot of "cryptos" were just get rich quick schemes. After the dust settles we will see if blockchain is really useful or not.

We're 14 years in. I think the dust settled some years ago, personally. But (and this is an honest question) how long should we give this? What is the appropriate amount of time before we can say "This was basically a bust"? Because AFAICT the blockchain revolution never came. It's been talked about endlessly for over a decade, it's been hyped to hell and back, it's been oh-my-god-so-full-of-amazing-potential-just-th…

If the dust settled why are we still talking about this?

If you want my personal opinion: blockchain had/has great potential but once bitcoin exploded the whole crypto world was hijacked by snake oil salesmen whose only goal was to get rich. People have been scammed (and continue to be scammed) by these techno babble and the dream of getting rich.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#404

Post by culi »

Blockchain needs a good "winter" imo. Stuff like hashgraph and some other non-proof of work protocols have a lot of potential but there's way too much hype in the industry and way too much investment ensuring BTC's dominance for them to ever really emerge

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#405

Post by Spooky23 »

deanCommie wrote: post #140
Spooky23 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read upthread, the example given was that of Asian farmers who struggle with markers being damaged by floods. A cheap device that was able to locate reference points with GPS to some sort of online land registry would potentially avoid these disputes. Blockchain could be a tool to mitigate the limited connectivity available. It’s potentially a way to make information more available and maybe facilitate certain…

So what happens when a rich baron approaches a farmer who's exact GPS ownership record is registered on the blockchain and says "transfer digital ownership of your land to me, or i kill your sister"? Exactly the same thing as what happens without a blockchain. Weak institutions are absolutely a problem in human society, but they are not solved by decentralization technology.

It sounds like you’re throwing hands up and stating that no change is possible.

Land records are by definition ledgers. A distributed ledger is also a ledger. Does it protect you from a physical harm? Of course not.

Weak institutions are a problem, but technolgy can be used to strengthen them. If you can make facts more available and easier to access, perhaps you can push disputes to local magistrates and improve access to justice.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#406

Post by RandomLensman »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #376
RandomLensman wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fear, if the DeFi community doesn't engage with policy makers and regulators it will not magically fall into place.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#407

Post by subradios »

acdha wrote: post #363
everfree wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazon’s book unit was profitable within a couple of years (say by the time Clinton was re-elected), and that pattern continued for each business line. They invested all of the profits in expansion so “analysts” would say they were doomed but anyone who looked at the numbers could see they could report a profit any time they wanted by halting expansion. Comparisons to the internet timeframes are hard to make because…

Many people see the value of decentralized ledgers, including. the head of the SEC: https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-chairman-satoshi-nakamotos-inno...

My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well, there was the Ecuador thing.

The hydraulics behind financial movements take decades to really shift, and I still regularly use crypto when sending or receiving money from international friends because international payments are a cartelized mess.

Investment dollars cannot make regulatory and social shifts happen sooner.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#408

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

rippercushions wrote: post #26
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…

The technology here is the least of that small shareholder's problems. To register that land, they need to convince a corruptible human to accept their application, get another corruptible human to enter the data correctly in the database and get a third corruptible human to give them an authentic certificate proving that their land holding has been registered. You can already see three points where this can be trivi…

This.

A friend of mine moved down to Mexico and bought land on a beach to build his dream off grid eco airbnb.

After he'd been there a while and had completed some construction, a bunch of police came walking up his drive armed with assault rifles. They were with a local politician's sister that's known in the area for various land scams. They tried to kick him off his land under some pretext. My friend stood his ground despite them threatening to shoot him. After a standoff they left.

Now in my friend's case he's a remote tech worker with plenty of income as well as a bunch of social/professional connections to a bunch of wealthy business owners in Mexico city. So he was able to get connected up with the right kind of lawyer to go intimidate the captain of the police office the goons came from.

What was recorded on the deed in the county office mattered not one bit in this scenario.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#409

Post by jgreen10 »

When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.

The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.

Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.

Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#410

Post by msworddebugger »

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…

Permissionless means hizbulla or the Syrian regime can make revenue generating financial products just as easily as an Australian. As long as there is conflict (forever), permissionless systems will not be embraced by the global powers. There is potential for lower permissions within some sort of financial sandbox where there’s strong controls at the entrance to the system and strong auditing and logging within the system, but there’s no potential for a global permissionless system.
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