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AWS and Blockchain

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431–440 of 724 posts

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#431
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could be world-changing (at least for programmers). If you don’t mind, could you give an example for a programmer who isn’t building finance or crypto related applications? I think that would help me understand what we’re talking about.

https://twitter.com/pjkundert/status/1590009435619217413 The clutter.social App is a decentralized Twitter-like app implemented on Holochain. This one is hosted on https://holo.host (only in public Beta, so it doesn't scale automatically), but illustrates a full-complexity app that is deployed. You can compose this (eg. re-skin it, or build it into another app as a commenting back-end), without having to copy the imp…

Who pays the hosting bills for the app? If whoever is responsible fails to pay the hosting bills, presumably the app will cease to function and perhaps even disappear? When I fork it, do I maintain my ability to communicate with users who live on the "source" app?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#432
post #423

Amid all this sudden blockchain skepticism, one question remains prominent in my mind: where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise? Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but you have to wonder if this chorus of I-toldya-so's were genuinely right, or if they are merely rewriting history to boost their own credibility. Blockchain was always experimental. The chance of success on any given project was a…

> where were all these skeptics when blockchain enthusiasm was on the rise

You might need to define the exact period when it was "on the rise", but as far as I've seen, in the last six or seven years they (we) have been very vocal and all over the place - including on this very site.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#433
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchains wouldn't fix anything here, though. The last-connected device doesn't necessarily have the canonical file, and the blockchain doesn't have any way to resolve syncing conflicts. Git is a much better choice for transactional history, and it didn't need a blockchain to implement this concept.

Git requires a human to resolve conflicts, a blockchain comes to a majority consensus. But yeah, I would use git and try to automate conflict resolution but it stands to reason blockchain can also solve the problem. If you have 10 people live-editing a text content git will be messy for example but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who made what changes and when between participants (assume p2p connection).

> but you can come to a consensus on agreeing who made what changes and when between participants

How is this different from Git's model of development?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#434

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…

I think there are still legalities to follow when you are offering anything to public with financial implications.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's like the MIT license, plus AWS with an unlimited account and auto-scaling. In the case of self-hosted Apps (ie. where you need to "install" something on your phone or computer), each peer provides their own compute/storage/networking to host their own usage of the App, plus a small fragment of everyone else's usage (proportional to a few average user's worth). So, the cost to each user is a small constant C time…

It’s not really an unlimited account. Execution on eth is expensive…

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#436
from a developer perspective, “smart contract” platforms are very unique and cheap

pay to write once and never pay again at any level of traffic, customers pay. no SaaS service offers this

developers bring their whole communities to that platform and this keeps happening

you know whats most important? I don’t care what the underlying consensus model or blockchain is, or whether there is one at all, but there is no [meaningful] smart contract platform operating any other way, and I don’t care about that being the case either. but the equilibrium in consensus mechanisms are why it is this way.

its cheaper for developers and as far as customer acquisition and convincing a customer to pay, it is a highly optimized version of the web 2.0 funnel, as every call-to-action is a payment

the development stack is dead simple - frontend website with a single call-to-action (possible even a static site), and a few variables stored in a smart contract - and the customers already want to pay

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#437
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you answer the question with use cases and examples instead of this rhetorical question? It doesn't help your credibility when you can't list off 10-20 use cases and examples for your groundbreaking technology without contorting yourself.

I'm sorry; but isn't this sort of like demanding an answer to the question "I can't see a use for the motorcar; horses work just fine"?

no

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#438
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Decentralized ledgers are very different because they reuse existing trust relationships - that’s why they’re so much more efficient and safe to use.

This is an important point to understand because when cryptocurrency salespeople use those experiments as examples of real-world adoption they don’t spell out the connection — fully aware that if the Fed sets up a distributed ledger, it won’t have a step which involves making Bitcoin holders wealthy.

> My home state passed a law allowing me to pay taxes in bitcoin as well,

Do they actually accept bitcoin or do they just convert it into hard currency first? For example, when Colorado did this they implemented it by using PayPal and converting to USD at the time of the transaction so it’s like paying with a credit card including the single vendor charging a processing fee.

> there was the Ecuador thing.

Yes. Specifically the one where people protested against it, most people never use it, and the country has lost most of the money it put in? You were going to mention that, right?

https://nayibtracker.com/

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#439

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…

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a blockchain would be helpful, even in your example. How is tracking say, a cow, from farm to lot to slaughterhouse, and knowing what all was done to said cow, not simply something that could be done easily and fast with a database? Is the portability of the blockchain the thing? I could see maybe how that would help, if there wasn't a standard across the databases involved…

The problem with traceability systems comes down to interfacing between the various nodes. Interoperability is probably the largest obstacle on the road to provide a full farm-to-table product tracking.

Probably not so much of a problem for the fully vertically integrated companies - especially those that also build or control their electronic systems, but large parts of agriculture still consists of independent actors on each node.

IIRC, the argument was that blockchain does not explicitly "solve" the problem, but rather that interoperability between blockchain-based systems will be easier than between those using completely different standards.

And of course, then you have the problem that food can travel around the globe many times before ending up on the table. Which again means more trust.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#440

With regards to the land markers. You could have a database at the government land authority. If markers in the field don't match up with records, the land authority will ask police to correct the issue. If neither police nor land authority can be trusted to keep records and uphold the law, who is going to help you when a marker in the field doesn't match up to some distributed database? Big land owner will say "I do…

Imagine that the govt and the police actually treated the blockchain record as the infallible final source of truth, without any ifs and buts, without any traditional database on the side overriding what the blockchain says.

If an attacker came to your house, kicked your ass until you give your private key, and then transferred the land to themselves on the blockchain — the land would be fully legally theirs now! It's a valid transaction, and the courts can't reverse it — there's one source of truth, and it's cryptographically unchangeable without the private key. That's what the blockchain says, and the police will evict you from your own house.

(and then to prevent that you build enough off-chain trust systems, escrows, and side databases on top, and courts gain ability to dictate changes, and the actual blockchain becomes an irrelevant implementation detail).

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