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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#481

Post by _8j50 »

smoldesu wrote: post #433
_8j50 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Git is too slow for the use case I mentioned you resolve conflicts when you merge to your repo but you don't establish a consensus allowing everyone to accept your conflict resolution without centralizing.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#482

Post by Erikun »

pjkundert wrote: post #468
pjkundert wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A specific application I'm working on right now involves using Crypto for direct payments between software Licensees (end users) and the App developer. Presently, there is a high risk of loss of income (see: every small individual Russian or Iranian software developer. Their families are now suffering because their income has been shut off, even though this is a textbook example of "Group Punishment" under the Geneva…

In my opinion, removing the last paragraph would improve your post immensely. It would be a shame if the post got downvoted to oblivion because of it.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#483

Post by dmitriid »

Karunamon wrote: post #469
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?

Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.

> Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.

In dreams, maybe. In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto. For obvious reasons immediately obvious to anyone who could care to think about the supply chain for more than 30 seconds [2].

This is especially true for oppressive governments where the use of crypto is grounds for criminal persecution [1]

[1] E.g. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-journalists-alexei...

[2] Let's say you buy bread from a shop. That shop has to pay salaries, rent, pay suppliers of flour, spice, herbs. Those suppliers have to pay their salaries and their suppliers. The owner of the place who rents out to the shop needs to pay for his stuff.

Almost no one in this chain accepts payments in crypto. So even if the shop accepts payments in crypto, they need to convert it to fiat. So the shop's question becomes: is it worth the hassle? in the absolute vast majority of cases the answer is "no".

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#484

Post by pjkundert »

duped wrote: post #478
pjkundert wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does "permissionless composability" in DeFi mean, if not this?

Sure, its very expensive presently under the Ethereum version of "DeFi". Just like the original motorcar was expensive and fragile, and would break your arm occasionally while you crank-started it.

Now, if the cost basis of each "DeFi" transaction is reduced by 5 orders of magnitude (see: Ethereum vs. Holochain) -- what are the potential outcomes of that?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#485

Post by Karunamon »

dmitriid wrote: post #483
Karunamon wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own.

> Point 2 is strictly false, crypto can be exchanged for goods or services on its own. In dreams, maybe. In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto. For obvious reasons immediately obvious to anyone who could care to think about the supply chain for more than 30 seconds [2]. This is especially true for oppressive governments where the use of crypto is grounds for criminal…

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/

Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list. Now, to head off what will certainly be a response absolutely loaded with special pleading and/or strawmen, the claim was "crypto can be exchanged for goods and services on its own". Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants of various sizes which accept one kind of crypto in exchange for goods and services. QED.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#486

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

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…

They simply need to record the location of the property markers. They could even use paper. The problem is that they don't have surveying equipment and the training to use it so all they have is the sticks.

As others have said, you can't (usefully) represent ownership in the blockchain because ownership can change or be made irrelevant outside of the blockchain.

While blockchain wouldn't be useful for this, a host of cryptographic tools would be.

If a country used signed survey data they could prevent a host of crimes and bugs changing boundaries, and if they issued signed land titled you could check their validity offline - helpful for remote areas. They could be tied together entry to entry, like a blockchain, to assure that no records "go missing". There could be a single-core proof of work stored regularly, checkpointing the data, to prevent the country's IT team from rewriting the whole database. It just doesn't need to be "a blockchain" because there is a centralized authority who we all follow, if not trust, so the decentralized thing isn't that important. And we don't need to limit publishing so we don't need a currency.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#487

Post by buttersbrian »

jacknews wrote: post #141

I think the cost of trust is underestimated. All those shiny skyscrapers that the banks build? It's for trust, along with a good deal of banking licensing requirements and regulation. The example with the farmers' fields is quite valid. We forget in our relatively well-governed western nations that some governments really can't be trusted to simply keep records straight and not 'lose' vital documents, in cases where…

Trust is arguably the most expensive thing in society.

For those looking for a fun read about trust read some Francis Fukuyama.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#488

Post by v-erne »

oblio wrote: post #333
v-erne wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit's for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant. And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.

Small nitpick: "You" and "Your" don't need to be capitalized. It makes reading the text a bit weird.

Thank you [see what I did here :)] for pointing this out - I'm not native and on top of that used to learn german (never went anywhere with it, but the capitalization of every noun somehow stayed with me longer than necessary).

Add english oddities such as capitalizing first person pronoun (which I do, as you probably noticed) and it's kinda easy to be oblivious that I do this.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#489

Post by elysian-breeze »

pjkundert wrote: post #468
pjkundert wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A specific application I'm working on right now involves using Crypto for direct payments between software Licensees (end users) and the App developer. Presently, there is a high risk of loss of income (see: every small individual Russian or Iranian software developer. Their families are now suffering because their income has been shut off, even though this is a textbook example of "Group Punishment" under the Geneva…

Defi doesn't solve this at all. It is currently illegal for me and a lot of the world to buy software from Iran and Russia. Using blockchain to circumvent the law is the only use case people can scrape together.

It doesn't matter if blockchain allows you to break the law. You are still breaking the law and punishments exists outside of the chain.

Blockchain enthusiasts get confused between "a solution" and a "better solution". A car with an airplane propeller engine is technically a solution that solves a use case of getting a person from point a to point b, but is it the best solution when compared to current cars? Right now the crypto industry is slapping all sorts of stuff on and then just because their car makes it down the street, suddenly they think somebody in africa who never had a car before will want it.

The use case you describe has been beaten over and over in crypto over the past 5-7 years. DRM. Its old news. But no major company wants anything to do with it. Its a social problem not a technical one.

Blockchain is an engineers wet dream. Infinite solutions that make theoretical sense and the math works, but lack any way to solve the current problems better.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#490

Post by cactus2093 »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #268
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…

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 is a neat property but lines like this trip me up: "it's incredible how fast the DeFi space is moving because of it".

The crypto/dapp/defi/etc spaces have supposedly been "moving incredibly fast" and "all the smartest people are working on it" for ~5 years now. That's a long time to be moving really fast without really getting anywhere. Where's the payoff?

To me this space feels like a solution without a real problem. The decentralized part is a neat trick, but on the margin a centralized authority to mediate financial platforms is more good than bad.

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