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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#471

Post by this_user »

hailwren wrote: post #464
chao- wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know much about sophisticated finance. Can you explain the meaning of this phrase, or sketch out an example, or provide links to assist my understanding? >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). I get that a "blue chip" is supposed to be a big brand (at least that's how I hear the term often used?) but what…

Right, so it turns out that there are a fair amount of operations you can perform on financial objects to change their properties. You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk profiles in different manners to get properties that are useful in different scenarios. Mortgage tranches played a big role in 2008, Black-Scholes helps us describe the behavior of options contracts, and maybe the most accessible for someone…

> The EVM specifically gives you a Turing complete financial system and, hence, probably a complete expression of operations on financial structures.

Which is nice, but doesn't solve any problems that actually exist. That is the running theme with all of these crypto/blockchain/"defi" projects, because they are created by tech people who don't understand the domain. They just start building all of these things that seem useful to tech people, but completely miss what is actually important.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#472

Post by markdestouches »

arcturus17 wrote: post #320
pavlov wrote: post #308

The events described here took place in 2016, over six years ago. That's a long time in technology! Since then additional billions of investment dollars have flowed into the space (a "VC crypto spasm" as the author calls it). Yet zero meaningful products have emerged. But we've witnessed many giant scams and endless crypto startups that happily spun their wheels producing nothing, just minting tokens so that insiders…

Any moment now… I think in any other space, if you had millions of people (some of them wicked smart) m looking for applications of a technology without results, you’d see the space dwindle into irrelevance quickly… Crypto is very special in this sense. Despite massive failures and frauds at scale, people keep flocking to it. Is it the promise of unlimited riches, the romantic aspects of it (“decentralization”, etc.)…

> Crypto is very special in this sense.

I noticed crypto's quality of being special is in reverse proportion to the Fed's interest rates. Just an observation.

In all seriousness, the are two real drivers here: 1) speculation 2) money laundering and avoiding regulation in general. These are the things that keep crypto afloat and cryptomaniacs repeating promises of the next big thing that's gonna change everything tomorrow. The real question is what's gonna happen sooner, Tesla's fool self-driving to Mars or blockchains taking over the world.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#473

Post by daveguy »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #444
hestefisk wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This concept is very interesting. Is there an existing framework that implements this? It would seem there would need to be some baseline tools for development on such a system.

I feel like the tools available for this purpose would need to be more powerful than existing IDE systems in order for it to be adopted on a wide scale.

Is it possible to design such a system without a blockchain?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#474

Post by pjkundert »

dnissley wrote: post #431
pjkundert wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The App's current owner(s) pay, of course. For traditional "installed" Apps, this could easily be the current (and new) end-users of the App. For a purely hosted app (eg. an App that serves web clients), hosting must be arranged.

If the App has no revenue model to pay for hosting, perhaps don't use it (embed it) within your app? That would be a risk.

If you "fork" it, then you're responsible to host it -- if it isn't hosted by each client App installation already. The "forked" version of the App hosts its own DHT, so its data is completely distinct from the original.

So, yes: there are decisions to be made, but they revolve around long-term viability of the encapsulated/forked App -- not the fundamental possibility of doing so.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#475

Post by dmitriid »

miracle2k wrote: post #467
dmitriid wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine that database holds a lot of your money and you live in an oppressive regime That opressive regime holds: - your access to the internet (crypto requires continuous access to internet to function) - your access to exchange offices because crypto is useless if it cannot be converted to fiat So, what exactly have you solved?

> So, what exactly have you solved? Ownership of your funds, which is the primary requirement from which all others stem. You will still have those when you regain access to the internet, or the ability to spend them. The reality is that a government having the ability to confiscate the funds in your bank account, and attempting to restrict you and your neighbours peer to peer actions, personal mobility or internet a…

> Ownership of your funds,

Which ends the moment that oppressive government makes you give up your keys.

> This sort black and white thinking provides lacks a valuable analysis of actual power structures.

The "blockchain is godsend for oppressive governments" is the sort of non-thinking that is currently unsurprising for most crypto enthusiasts pushing it while completely ignoring (or plain not knowing) the realities.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#476

Post by dvt »

hailwren wrote: post #464
chao- wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know much about sophisticated finance. Can you explain the meaning of this phrase, or sketch out an example, or provide links to assist my understanding? >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). I get that a "blue chip" is supposed to be a big brand (at least that's how I hear the term often used?) but what…

Right, so it turns out that there are a fair amount of operations you can perform on financial objects to change their properties. You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk profiles in different manners to get properties that are useful in different scenarios. Mortgage tranches played a big role in 2008, Black-Scholes helps us describe the behavior of options contracts, and maybe the most accessible for someone…

> You can buy, sell, combine, or split their risk profiles in different manners to get properties that are useful in different scenarios.

I would contend that the only reason things like options, futures, etc. are actually useful in markets like, e.g., the stock market, is, in no small part, due to the highly liquid nature of the underlying. Since the underlying is highly liquid, these derivatives are highly liquid, and therefore we can actually use them for things like de-risking. Of course, people on WSB still gamble using options, but basically they're meant as a hedging mechanism.

Even though these "financial primitives" on the blockchain are neat from a technical standpoint, they tend to blow up precisely because the markets are not liquid enough (so second-order effects are amplified).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#477

Post by la64710 »

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…

This problem has been solved in numerous prior computer architecture most notably in the algorithms around leader selection in clusters or very wide distributed systems. The implementation varies from one use case to another but the point is the problem or solution is not new at all and blockchain is certainly not the earliest and most elegant solution for this.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#478

Post by duped »

pjkundert wrote: post #458
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OK, I’ve always considered these types of questions as disingenuous. But, enough people seem to disagree. So, at risk of stating the obvious: - Avoid risk of accidental/malicious deplatforming - Personal control of all data, avoiding incompetence/malfeasance presenting faulty data - Deploying enhanced presentation of existing functionality and data cannot be restricted - Reuse of existing functionality in private env…

Absolutely none of this is obvious.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#479

Post by avereveard »

la64710 wrote: post #477
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…

This problem has been solved in numerous prior computer architecture most notably in the algorithms around leader selection in clusters or very wide distributed systems. The implementation varies from one use case to another but the point is the problem or solution is not new at all and blockchain is certainly not the earliest and most elegant solution for this.

Out of curiosity which solution operate in a zero trust environment?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#480

Post by pjkundert »

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…

Yes, in the case of Ethereum "DeFi", the end user is expected to pay the (significant) cost of executing functionality.

For next-gen "DeFi" systems like Holochain -- the incremental cost of executing functionality is vanishingly small, and can be distributed across a DHT substrate hosted by all users of the App.

A self hosted Holochain "DeFi" app costs a small constant factor C times the average agent's memory / network / storage cost, to each client.

In other words, you gain the benefit of the "DeFi" version of App for yourself, by investing a small C x your own cost to run the App for yourself, alone.

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