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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#541

Post by sangnoir »

pjkundert wrote: post #533
timmytokyo wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact.

I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when?

There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto, where the in-group think of themselves as superior operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet these suave traders continually fail to recognize peaks and troughs and trade accordingly.

1. Sometimes while trying to scam the noobs themselves. The whole "to the moon"/HODL/meme-stock episode was naked preying on unsophisticated traders/bag-holders

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#542

Post by jasonhansel »

legutierr wrote: post #46
felixgallo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no functioning judiciary to adjudicate contractual disputes, then who is going to effectively and durably tell someone who won and enforce that with the threat of state-level punishment? If a state agency can be bribed, what's claiming to have an NFT going to do for the holder, besides radically increase their property ownership risk if they actually rely on that to be true? The problem with all of these c…

The effectiveness of institutions cannot be measured in black and white. There is a continuum of effectiveness. It is very rare in the developing world that the courts are completely ineffective—it's often just that they are slow, expensive, subject to corrupt influence, etc. They function, to an extent—but they function poorly. How poorly depends on where you are. In addition, bribery and corruption themselves also…

Why not just make the records public? In the US, you can usually just look up who owns the parcels of land in your area. If the records are public, it will be pretty obvious if they've been tampered with; you can just compare the current data against a copy archived earlier.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#543

Post by masklinn »

foobiekr wrote: post #516
TrackerFF wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such people latch onto trends to look smart. Then they scrub history, as most investors are doing wrt blockchain, when trends change.

> Such people latch onto trends to look smart.

Or because they figure the hype will allow them to finally sell (launder) the project they need to management.

smt88's top-level comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688576) is a thing I've seen multiple people mention.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#544

Post by jasonhansel »

darawk wrote: post #52

The utility of decentralized blockchains is that they facilitate permissionless financial innovation. Yes, that means "regulatory arbitrage". But not just circumventing the law, more importantly, circumventing the de facto law of corporate gatekeepers. A substantial amount of de facto financial regulation comes not from democratically elected governments, but from companies that gate-keep access to the databases wher…

> What those intermediaries choose to allow you to do can be arbitrary, capricious, and certainly is not democratic.

In practice, to adopt crypto you usually also need to rely on intermediaries to handle parts of the process for you. Fortunately, in the crypto space, you can use trusted, non-capricious, democratic intermediaries like FTX.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#545

Post by jonathan-adly »

leifg wrote: post #538

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 typic…

Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something!

I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.

Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?

I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#546

Post by kitified »

pjkundert wrote: post #511
niklasd wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is somehow telling that you link to a Twitter post instead to a post on clutter.social.

Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and it was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a few machines by some randos. But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale globally? Just think of what could be done with a bit of planning and a (tiny) revenue model?

> Yup. This is a web app (so, hosting is required), and it was built in a few days by a newbie and is hosted on a few machines by some randos. But, isn't that ... interesting? That something like this could be built and deployed and -- theoretically scale globally?

Sure. It is interesting that someone can build a web app, host it on temporary machines, and then one day scale it into a major business model.

That's not new to blockchain. That's how the internet works at a fundamental level. What specifically drives blockchain to be useful or novel or interesting in this model? How is this application better for being on chain?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#547

Post by nonameiguess »

leifg wrote: post #538

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 typic…

Technically 25 years since Hashcash was first proposed. I'd argue it could have had value sticking to that original application in preventing network spam, but instead it turns out people are more interested in storing the proof-of-work tokens on a blockchain and selling them, as if collecting and trading postage stamps had become more widespread than actually sending mail with them, to the extent that at least some people and a few entire countries proposed replacing currency with postage stamps.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#548

Post by pjkundert »

sangnoir wrote: post #541
pjkundert wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact. I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when? There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto, where the in-group think of themselves as superior operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet these suave traders continually…

Pretty much everyone credible has been warning people to get off all exchanges, since well, forever. Because you can't (and shouldn't) "trust" someone. If you want to trust someone, go to a bank. This isn't really too much a matter of "secret knowledge", but historical fact. But, hope springs eternal.

And, self-referential Crap Coins (like Luna) are just, well, insane at first glance. Trust-based "Staking" for returns w/ no revenue model? Nuts! But, I've been modelling the behavior of wealth-backed currency systems for 15 years, so maybe it seemed obvious to me. I've been boring people to death with warnings about these for as long as they've existed. Again, this time it's different!

And, the risks to all but the absolutely largest PoW and PoS networks are well known (relatively trivial 51% attack, see OFAC "compliance" disaster). And to "permissioned" networks (XRP, etc.); perfect for CBDCs, for liberty not so much. And the list goes on...

So, spare me the "No True Scottsman" whitewash.

The signs were all there, and the warnings were blaring. Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut, for what's coming.

So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.

Buckle up.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#549

Post by PeterisP »

Renevith wrote: post #150
fareesh wrote: post #127

From an Indian pov my take is the boundary markers use-case sounds pretty good. I don't expect an American flying around from EWR to Seattle to ever understand this intuitively without being exposed to the realities in this part of the world, but having thought about it for all of 20 seconds it sounds like a very good idea. Yes - it is a solution to the problem of power and corruption. In India there is corruption at…

Can you help me understand how this would help? The way I see it: if the government were on board with recording property boundaries in a public ledger, it could do it without a blockchain. And if it's not on board, then I don't see how a random third-party ledger would help, since the government wouldn't defer to it.

Not the parent post, but a reasonable implication would be that the government-as-a-whole could be forced to enforce the property boundaries as long as it is difficult for individual government officials to make undetected illegitimate changes to the ledger; such a mechanism would be disempowering the specific officials and force them to follow the rules enforced by the system.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#550

Post by siftrics »

remram wrote: post #357
siftrics wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole proof-of-work, decentralization, ledger, ... are in no way necessary steps in this. If you know of a ledger that's (1) permissionless and (2) avoids the double-spending problem and (3) _does not_ involve those things you mentioned ...then please, do tell me about it. I'd love to know your breakthrough solution.

What I'm saying is that you don't need a decentralized ledger to enable the "financial innovation" we've been seeing, and that it's not permissionless if every meaningful action (buy/sell/trade) happens on good ol' central exchanges.

Truly decentralized exchanges exist and clear tens of billions of dollars in volume every single day.
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