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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#551

Post by VHRanger »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #545
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 - sure…

Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#552

Post by kristjansson »

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…

So … circumventing sanctions?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#553

Post by worik »

halpmeh wrote: post #443
noelsusman wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agr…

> Have you ever implemented a smart contract?

No

> 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.

The output is not guaranteed to be correct, what you intended, or even what you agreed to. Even the most trivial computer programme can have unexpected properties.

Why would I have to explain that here?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#554

Post by dmitriid »

Karunamon wrote: post #485
dmitriid wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Apparently, I must be dreaming this entire list.

I'll say this again: "In reality there are vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto."

> Provided was a rather substantial, yet not exhaustive, list of merchants

So. What started with "money in oppressive regimes" became:

here's a list of companies in first-world countries many which at one point played with crypto, but now:

- don't accept crypto anymore due to its volatility or for other reasons (many links no longer work or don't list crypto as payment: Wikipedia, Microsoft etc.)

- actually accept payments in fiat provided by an external exchange because the need actual fiat (AT&T, everyone else who uses BitPay)

- don't accept crypto because it was a limited time marketing gimmick (KFC in Canada, and this is written directly in the list)

- don't exist as a company anymore if they existed at all (do not search, or open, Lumfile the cloud-based service at work)

This leaves us with, again, "vanishingly few goods or services that can be exchanged for crypto" because reality doesn't care for your dreams.

> QED.

QED indeed

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#555

Post by PeterisP »

sebo2000 wrote: post #251

You guys have issues with elections and vote couting. I think Blockchain would solve this problem once and for all, but I'm afraid it is not a problem anyone wants to solve...

Specifically for election security, the key problem that's not easy to solve via blockchain is ensuring a hidden ballot - namely, that after voting there must be no way for you to verify how your specific vote was counted to someone who might be coercing or bribing you, but you still want to verify that the votes were counted properly. A physical ballot box mixing up envelopes under supervision of representatives of all the parties trivially solves that, a block chain does not.

You also need a mechanism for preventing (or invalidating afterwards) votes made remotely under coercion/bribery - current mechanisms for handling mail-in votes implement mitigations for that, but a fully digital remote voting makes it tricky.

Also, one of the major discussion points regarding USA voting is the eligibility of voters, ensuring that certain people are prevented from voting, but that eligible people can vote without requiring a centralized ID. Again, blockchain only makes this problem more difficult.

And finally, by far the most important factor of vote counting is having the losing voters trust that the votes were counted fairly - and a formal mathematical proof is bad at that (for the majority of voters) compared to a relatively simpler, clearer physical system.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#556

Post by everfree »

kkielhofner wrote: post #332
everfree wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date. And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.

I don't understand setting the internet "big bang" date somewhere in the 80s. The big bang was the web which was at least 1990-1993 (CERN says 1993). In 1990-1993 and beyond for the next few years a tiny portion of US households even had a computer that was capable (modem, etc) of getting on the internet/web. Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjus…

> blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption

Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only supports balance transfers and has a hard-coded throughput limit of 1 Megabyte every 10 minutes (1990s modem speeds), and that effectively represented the state of the art of blockchain technology for 6 years. Until 2015, you couldn't even run a simple script on a blockchain (I don't count Bitcoin's extremely limited stack-based language).

The official 1983 birthday of the internet is very much analogous to the 2009 birthday of the blockchain. It was the "spark moment" where the tech was there but extremely limited, and thereafter was a long "dead period" where it didn't do much for a long time as it waited for the world to catch on. Then 10 years later in 1993, the underlying internet technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, the web. 7 years later in 2015, the underlying blockchain technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, a turing-complete programming language. It would take the web another 20 years until the 2000s to build its first true killer apps, and I predict that blockchain's true killer apps (e.g. an Uber killer) won't be seen until the late 2020s to early 2030s.

> Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).

Until layer-2 technologies (conceived ~2017 and still maturing), blockchains were also extremely expensive, peaking at tens of dollars for a simple transaction or hundreds for a more complex one. When I first interacted with a blockchain it was through a heavy client that downloaded tens of gigabytes of data to my computer, extremely low network bandwidth for transactions, zero hardware support for key management, one shady exchange that required international money transfers, and effectively zero support for publishing code on the blockchain. That's all changed now.

> For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.

The internet was a technology built on the progression of hardware and software tech; blockchains are built much more on progression of software tech. Blockchains as a framework need to get good enough to be able to support killer apps; they are not good enough today, but they are in intensive development along straightforward roadmaps to alleviate a lot of the pain points.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#557

Post by leifg »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #545
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 - sure…

I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.

A good metric is: "people are using it".

That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.

So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#558

Post by boredtofears »

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 all honesty -- whenever I hear "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem", I really have trouble not rolling my eyes.

..and some of us can't help but roll our eyes when we hear yet another crypto use case being skirting government laws / regulations.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#559

Post by everfree »

acdha wrote: post #363
everfree wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Amazon didn't hit their stride as a retailer until the 2000s, roughly 20 years after the internet's "big bang" date. And while we're 14 years into distributed ledger technology, we're only 7 years into turing-complete distributed ledger technology, which I would argue is the actual innovation.

Amazon’s book unit was profitable within a couple of years (say by the time Clinton was re-elected), and that pattern continued for each business line. They invested all of the profits in expansion so “analysts” would say they were doomed but anyone who looked at the numbers could see they could report a profit any time they wanted by halting expansion. Comparisons to the internet timeframes are hard to make because…

> computers were expensive and slow, and network connectivity was very limited

Blockchains have been expensive and slow, and functionality was very limited. When Bitcoin launched, you couldn't run turing-complete scripts, it only supported balance transfers. It had a hard-coded 1 Megabyte per 10 minutes throughput limit (slower than dial-up). There were no transaction privacy tools.

That has been changing. The first turing-complete chain, Ethereum, was launched in 2015. It launched a sustainable consensus model in 2020, and switched over to it ("merged") in 2022. Private smart contract support came in 2020-2021, with projects like SCRT and Aztec. Layer-2 scaling technology is just beginning to hit its stride this year, with several competing companies. Still on the base layer roadmap is single-slot finality, data availability sampling to expand the chain's storage capacity, zero-knowledge-proof based VMs to expand its execution throughput, and state and history expiry to automatically prune it.

Once all of those technologies are complete and have had a chance to mature (much like dial-up matured into broadband), I expect blockchains to look more attractive for certain applications.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#560

Post by habinero »

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…

None of those are things people care about, though, outside of a tiny niche.

Most people find it pretty easy to avoid getting kicked off social media, and even if they do, it doesn't affect them.

Likewise, "personal control of data" is meaningless. It's not like you can prevent people from taking the data and doing things with it.

I struggle to think of any actual use cases for your last three points that don't boil down to FUD.

Blockchain is neat, but it has no real use outside of extracting money from other people involuntarily.

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