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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#581

Post by _8j50 »

smoldesu wrote: post #576
_8j50 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and speed up git to commit/push/merge very fast. Or use a blockchain. I feel like there is stigma against the term, shall we call it distributed leger instead?

You can call it a BitTorrent magnet for all I care, it doesn't change the fact that a distributed ledger only has so many uses. Git already has consensus mechanisms baked into it's architecture, and immutability is provided with GPG signing if you care enough about it. Both of those features have been available in Git since the 90s. You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquito…

> You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP or SSH.

I did not propose that. I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts. A simple blockhain over https is easier for me than trying to get git to do something it wasn't designed to do (it works with files and repos, can you imagine having a commit+push+merge for every word edit in my example?) there are ready made libraries for this. The path of least resistance to acheive desires goals is what I would take. To each his own, blockhain can solve these problems outside of crypto.

Another big problem area is PKI as well. I'm sure you've seen stories about suspicious CAs, a distributed ledger of CA issuance and in the wild certificate observations is one legitimate goal that can be solved by blockhain (better than centralized CT logs that don't take ITW observations).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#582

Post by WorldMaker »

markdestouches wrote: post #445
TimJRobinson wrote: post #362

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. It's the rate of innovation that is important, not the current y-intercept. Furthermore this is a global system that anyone can contribute to. How hard do you think it is for I as an Australian to build a financial firm that interfaces with Bank of America or…

>> 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…

I've been making more than a few jokes lately that Games Done Quick should have pre-banned categories like "Great Depression-era Wall Street Finance Speed Run ANY%".

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#583

Post by acdha »

everfree wrote: post #559
acdha wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was responding specifically the implicit assumption that the timeframes can be directly compared — since things happened on different scales, that doesn't make sense especially when you're comparing different things. The number of people using the internet changed as a function of reasonable speed/price connectivity becoming available where they lived so the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network because it involved things like getting permits and deploying crews to install cables.

That said, even if you want to ignore Bitcoin, things like Ethereum still are lagging far behind — if that network shut off tomorrow, nobody not involved in selling tokens would notice. The same would not have been true of the web 7 years, or even 2 years, after it launched because tons of people were using it for things unrelated to selling web services.

It's certainly possible that at some point some level of functionality will make it more attractive but I suspect that this will involve rolling back parts of the current sales pitch and that will unfavorably affect the cost relative to other models like distributed ledgers or standard APIs.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#584

Post by everfree »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #574
everfree wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's merely a tool in our arsenal of confirming trust, that makes it easier to tell where the problem lies if someone along the chain is lying. That makes it a useful tool, no? > people trying to create the "feature" of not having that feature are called anarchists Smart contracts are partial to neither law nor anarchy. It's trivial to write token code that allows a centralized service to transfer said token withou…

No, much cheaper and easier solutions to that already exist, in the form of "Every postal tracking app"

> the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#585

Post by smoldesu »

_8j50 wrote: post #581
smoldesu wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can call it a BitTorrent magnet for all I care, it doesn't change the fact that a distributed ledger only has so many uses. Git already has consensus mechanisms baked into it's architecture, and immutability is provided with GPG signing if you care enough about it. Both of those features have been available in Git since the 90s. You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquito…

> You're not revolutionizing anything by proposing a migration to an even less ubiquitous protocol than HTTP or SSH. I did not propose that. I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts. A simple blockhain over https is easier for me than trying to get git to do something it wasn't designed to do (it works with files and repos, can you imagine having a comm…

> I didn't know git had a consensus mechanism built into it other than manual resolution of merge conflicts

Git has cryptographic identity baked-in, so people can assert authority over their own contributions. That enabled mailing groups and IRC channels which encouraged discussion before arriving at a consensus and merging relevant files to the master branch. It's not decentralized, but it could just as easily be hosted as a torrent if that was something people cared about. However, decentralized development has historically been a farce, so most people use something like Github to control and moderate their repos. You're right, this is a "to each his own" situation, and there's literally no one on the "hosting Git via BitTorrent" side of the room. Moving to a less-efficient, more-convoluted process does not fix this. I've been following decentralized technology and the likes of Bitcoin for almost a decade, and the successes and failures of the space are self-evident.

> Another big problem area is PKI as well.

To who?

To the scary boogyman white-supremacist KiwiFarms NBC fearmonger types? Yeah, have fun getting anyone to rule in favor of them. To the rest of society, centralized CAs are a boon. Not only are they wicked-fast (good luck querying a blockchain faster than a DNS request), they go out of their way to prevent systemic abuse and domain-squatting in ways that crypto can't. You want to apply PKI to this space? Convince me that it wouldn't start another FTX-like situation, with powerful individual exerting economic power to centralize the market a-la crypto exchanges.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#586

Post by pjkundert »

habinero wrote: post #565
pjkundert wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 return…

> Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut Ok, then call it what it actually is: tax evasion, fraud, and laundering money. You're getting caught up in an anti-government agenda and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.

I think most reasonable people would agree that desiring the freedom to invest your personal wealth in non-government approved investments isn't "tax evasion, fraud and laundering money".

Isn't such a claim a bit ... bizarre?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#587

Post by bo1024 »

thwayunion wrote: post #499
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…

No. Tim did not miss an important point about trust. You missed an important point about power. Those large land owners do not give a fuck about your blockchain. They'll take the land and farm it anyways. You can "own" the virtual stake; they're happy to cede you cyber nonsense as long as they get to control who touches the actual grass. The large land owners, who have local authorities in their pocket, would simply…

A central part of the quote I was responding to is "fiddle the records". I agree with what you said otherwise.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#588

Post by pjkundert »

habinero wrote: post #560
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…

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…

At this very moment, reasonable people are debating the very real possibility that Twitter could be removed from both the Apple and Google app stores.

So, doesn't that astonishing fact deny pretty much every claim in your post?

Crazies (the least perjorative term I could think of) that have the power to eject an App used by hundreds of millions of people, from those people's own platform, are dangerous -- to our liberty.

And, when people are starving, and are forced to use only their oppressive regime's worthless money: these issues put citizens' lives at risk.

So, yes: these are things people care about. Many just don't yet realize they could be the victims of these dangerous bullies forcing these sub-standard tools on them.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#589

Post by ChadNauseam »

habinero wrote: post #562
ChadNauseam wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exec…

Because "there are no regulations" is not permission to defraud others.

The fact that fraud is a crime is a form of regulation, although it's clearly not sufficient on its own (just like how smart contract code being auditable isn't sufficient on its own)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#590

Post by everfree »

acdha wrote: post #583
everfree wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I was responding specifically the implicit assumption that the timeframes can be directly compared — since things happened on different scales, that doesn't make sense especially when you're comparing different things. The number of people using the internet changed as a function of reasonable speed/price connectivity becoming available where they lived so the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blo…

> the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network

The process of creating a system for private, energy efficient smart contract transactions took 12 years. To make them scalable and foolproof for the general public will likely take another 5-10 years.

Blockchain updates are less like the process of laying physical cable, more like the process of building up a very large piece of software with lots of moving parts, like an operating system. They both require a lot of effort, but with laying cables the effort is physical and legal whereas with operating systems (and blockchain platforms) the effort is heady and research-oriented.

We've seen that shipping an update to a blockchain network can be extremely slow indeed, if that update requires a lot of R&D.

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