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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#441

Post by DiggyJohnson »

adolph wrote: post #374
pid-1 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This seems like another case of deprecating language based on an individual or cohort realizing something that a reasonable person would have already assumed.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#442

Post by humanizersequel »

iterateofen wrote: post #328
api wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one other case where a structure like a block chain can make sense. It’s an easy way to build an unalterable log. If you give me hash 200000 in the chain I know that log entries 0-200000 are all unaltered. This is perhaps the simplest easiest use case for a hash based linked list. Of course this is not the complete picture of what cryptocurrencies are; the hash list is just part of the system.

That tech exists without blockchain in a distributed way. Look at Git or GitHub. Saying that is a unique feature or reason to use blockchain is similar to saying blockchain can add two numbers together so we should use it to build a calculator.

Then you're just trusting Github, and they don't have a perfect track record on neutrality:

https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/04/19/github-suspendi...

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#443

Post by halpmeh »

noelsusman wrote: post #378
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…

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 y…

Have you ever implemented a smart contract? If not, I highly recommend you do so before holding an opinion on blockchains. I've never owned crypto, and I've recommended others to stay away from investing in crypto. Yet, I think the computing platform has a lot of promise. Implementing a smart contract for fun helped me see why.

The block-chain can be thought of as cryptographically secure state. That is, everyone agrees on the state of the blockchain and no one can modify it save for modifications in accordance with the "rules". A smart contract can be thought of as a cryptographically secure program, i.e. it cannot be modified. So you have cryptographically secure inputs (the blockchain), and a cryptographically secure program (the smart contract), which means the output is also guaranteed to be cryptographically secure. That is quite a strong premise. You can give your program to anyone and they can execute it for you without you needing to worry about nefarious modifications. This level of trust allows for the creation of a global computing platform. Software authors need only to bring their program and can have it executed on-demand without needing to maintain their own infrastructure. That is quite an innovation.

Of course, in its current form, this "global computing platform" is actually pretty shitty. It is prohibitively expensive to store / operate on a lot of data. However, crypto-currencies are there first viable "apps" built on this platform. If you think about it a crypto-currency is basically a very primitive program that stores a series of transactions as two addresses and an amount. The total amount of data per transaction is tiny. And yet, just by operating on this tiny amount of data you can basically implement the entire financial system: currency, stocks, bonds, options, etc.

We're basically in the dot-com bubble for crypto. People are starting to realize that this new computing platform is cool and has a lot of potential, just as many realized the computers and the internet were cool in the late 90s. Yet, just like in the 90s, the tech sucks and isn't good enough to bring much of anything valuable to the market.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#444

Post by pclmulqdq »

hestefisk wrote: post #435
pjkundert wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's like AWS serverless compute with inefficiency built-in as a feature and a jacked-up billing rate.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#445

Post by markdestouches »

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…

>> 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.

Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#446

Post by ceejayoz »

Spooky23 wrote: post #405
deanCommie wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acc…

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

No, they're saying there must be a point to the change. If adding blockchain doesn't help in any way, why add it to the mix?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#447

Post by coredog64 »

diseasedyak wrote: post #400
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…

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…

A database works if you have a central authority that manages it and accepts inputs. I’m going to switch to a different animal for a better perspective.

In the Pacific, tuna is caught within the EEZ of a number of (mostly) poor island nations. Some boats are part of the national fleet, but most are foreign flagged. The privilege to fish in an EEZ is costly, so there are a number of measures used to ensure that there is no cheating. The boat owners keep records, there are third party observers on board, and vessels broadcast positions. You need to cross check all these records, and do it in an environment without broadband.

To make things more complicated, there are incentives between countries. Fishing days are a finite resource governed by treaties. Poor countries have an incentive to oversell, and it’s possible to look the other way within an EEZ sometimes. Not only that, but countries have legitimate reasons for not broadcasting anything but gross yields from their EEZ.

All of this means that there’s not one central authority that can provide a single database.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#448

Post by bo1024 »

Very nice article. As others have alluded to, I think Tim does miss an important point about trust. He writes:

> we just couldn’t convince ourselves that the real world wanted zero-trust; so there was a transaction manager you had to trust.

And then later:

> It seems a good idea to have a land-registry database but, blockchain or no, I wonder if the large landowners might be able to find another way to fiddle the records and still steal the land? Perhaps this is more about power than boundary markers?

Yes. Blockchain is about decentralization of power. It's exactly the most interesting in situations with no trusted third party (i.e. weak rule of law) and an imbalance of power. I think Tim missed that aspect of this discussion (which is no knock on him in 2016, but should be reevaluated now). The rest I found insightful and very interesting.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#449

Post by Nursie »

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.

This sort of nonsense thinking is exactly why governments have been such a soft touch and allowed scam after fraud after Ponzi after rug-pull to bloom.

Fingers crossed that sort of time is over and the cryptocurrency space can be made to comply with regulations or be cut off from on-ramps.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#450

Post by miracle2k »

threeseed wrote: post #318
gatewaynode wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It's not like all innovation that has occurred in the crypto-currency space is useless, there are some real valuable innovations there. Blockchain as a whole is just too tainted to see the forest for the trees in all the greed, specifically the word "blockchain" has become magical and deceptive. "Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone c…

> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality. Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a defensible moat i.e. lock your users in w…

The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart contracts and the balances. This is why what Tim talks about has actually played out, and we have seen incredible composability between different protocols.

> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.

If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.

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