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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#531

Post by jasonhansel »

harryf wrote: post #526

The notion of smart contracts might have a perfect use-case when it comes to setting up and maintaining infrastructure on AWS. E.g. something like "I want an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL instance with such and such specs. full daily backups and 99.999% uptime and I'm will to pay $xxxx for it". From there solution providers "bid" on the contract and are paid automatically on the basis of meeting the requirements of the contr…

> the determination of whether requirements were met also being automated.

That seems like the sticking point. Most likely, someone "fulfilling" the contract would try to fool the (publicly available) verification code, rather than actually providing a PostgreSQL instance. It would be hard to create a bulletproof, automated way of verifying that something is a fully functioning PostgreSQL instance with working backups. If verification code was shared across many contracts, any bug discovered in that code could allow someone to wipe out the entire market.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#532

Post by lowbloodsugar »

TrackerFF wrote: post #425
masklinn wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is recorded on the blockchain...for example, food production. You want to find out exactly which animal your food comes…

I'm no expert on that, but we had a bunch of senior researchers (NGO) advocate blockchain for that exact task. I'm not going to argue against people with combined decades and decades of research and development experience in the food logistics community.

Using the definition of blockchain as: "A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing list of records, called blocks, that are securely linked together using cryptography."

Then, no, you don't need "blockchain" for that. You don't need it to be distributed. You don't need them to be linked using cryptography. In fact there are good reasons not to use blockchain, such as "I don't want my competitors seeing the exact details of my business transactions". I've heard, "oh but we can fix that with encryption", and then silence when asked "so how are you going to distribute those keys?" etc.

Looked into this for large medical supply chain company. Blockchain isn't merely no use, it's actively unfit for purpose.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#533

Post by pjkundert »

timmytokyo wrote: post #517
markdestouches wrote: post #445

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. 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…

It's almost as if the "anyone can do it without permission" argument is one of the reasons traditional finance evolved into the regulated system it is today.

TradFi - Anyone can do it without permissions and lie, except regulations force accounting practices, revealing malfeasance.

DeFi - Anyone can do it without permissions, and everyone can see they didn't lie.

Crap-coin FTX Crypto Bros - Let's lie, do "TradFi" and call it "DeFi", comply with no regulations or accounting practices, and steal the Crypto. What could go wrong?

HN low-research "Eternal September" Bros: Told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb!

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#534

Post by rglover »

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…

> How long will this have to go on?

As long as money flows into it (which seems to be ending) and people accept that Bitcoin was the "killer app," as the kids say.

Everything else was just slower database apps jazzed up with buzzwords front-run by narcissists who realized they needed a new grift beyond Uber for Cats.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#535

Post by jasonhansel »

bo1024 wrote: post #448

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 rec…

Here's the issue.

In a country with a stable, effective government, you don't need a blockchain for this: you can just have a centralized database.

In a country without such a government, a blockchain wouldn't help: the government will care more about the large landholders than about the blockchain records, and will have little incentive to enforce the latter.

(Also: I won't look forward to the day when some hacker figures out how to get into a bunch of farmers' crypto wallets and takes all their land. If the government doesn't respect the hackers' claims, then the blockchain isn't really the source of truth; if it does, then a bunch of people's lives are destroyed.)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#536

Post by ChadNauseam »

markdestouches wrote: post #462
ChadNauseam wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep your promises. I haven’t audited Uniswap’s smart contract code, but if I did I feel I could be pretty confident they won’t steal my money. Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted. disclosure: I work for a crypto company

> One benefit is that you can more credibly offer to keep your promises. We are yet to see a working example of that. > Meanwhile, users of FTX depended on government regulation and pinky-swears to keep their money safe, but since SBF owned the platform he could do whatever he wanted. These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little r…

> We are yet to see a working example of that.

I referenced Uniswap, which seems like it works to me

> These two sentences contradict each other. And no, there was no government regulation that insured FTX deposits. There was so little regulation, they didn't even keep their transaction history.

There's no public insurance for it, but if there were no regulations against doing what FTX did I'm not sure why their executives are fleeing the country

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#537

Post by jasonhansel »

jeremyjh wrote: post #354
wodenokoto wrote: post #186

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…

Well suppose you nominally have the support of local government and police, but in practice they can bought cheaply, and suddenly the records match what the large landholder says instead of the markers you used to have. An immutable record would help solve this, but the point stands that it is not convincing that you need a blockchain or that it would solve the problem. How would you get local government to buy into…

You don't even need a database with immutable records. You just need to make the contents of the database public, so that people can archive a copy and thus easily tell when the data has been altered.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#538

Post by leifg »

I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".

It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.

The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.

So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#539

Post by yokem55 »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #122
yokem55 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true as long as you trust the issuer of the transparency log to not go back and re-write the history of the log. That's a trust assumption that most folks are fine with, but it should be explicitly be understood to be there. A blockchain takes that trust assumption and spreads it out amongst the social consensus of the chain, so re-witing of history could only occur if there is a consensus to do so.

Isn't the whole idea of certificate transparency to detect that situation? That's why the system also has auditors which would detect such tampering.

The challenge is that if a discrepency is shown, how do you know who is lying? The whistleblowers or the CT log vendor? A consensus mechanism built on top of the log would be able to show the 'history of the history' to enable folks to make better determinations on who to trust or not.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#540

Post by jasonhansel »

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…

> it can provide a technological framework upon which to build new kinds of institutions

But will those institutions be democratic or respect human rights? Proof-of-work blockchains are effectively plutocracies, controlled by those with the most computing power.

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