Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.
And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a subject before speaking about it.
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AWS and Blockchain
631–640 of 724 posts
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trivially lying to the ledger makes that irrelevant.
And those transactions will fail. Please learn about a subject before speaking about it.
That’s an incredibly rude way to try to invite someone to a learn about a subject.
Having said that, I think that if these things are so obvious in your opinion, you haven’t considered real world scenarios.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#633I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not). I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future. It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background…
> I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.
Stomps on brake with both feet
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#634Blockchain 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…
reading this, it struck me how ironic crypto was built to "stop the doublespend" but here we have all these crypto exchanges doing things way worse than that.
company minting their own token and then using it as collateral, accounting it as if they had billions. the "stable coins" cannot produce basic accounting audits that a low level book-keeper could do on any normal business.
there has been so much fraud in crypto the past few years. and the algorithm did not help to stop that.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your understanding is wrong. In fact, Facebook has been consistently reporting millions of videos even before PH got heat. Any platform that hosts images or videos has this problem, but with all its shenanigans FB has been among the best at identifying and removing the content. It is ridiculous to blame them for actually doing the right thing, which includes reporting found CSAM. Microsoft with Bing done markedly wor…
Reporting millions of videos is a good thing, but having millions is pretty crazy too. And Bing doesn't host things.
Anywhere you can upload images they have this. No one is on the radar because no one cares except few companies. For a porn-oriented platform however, having this and not reporting this and selling this, that's egregious.
> host
If it's findable on Bing with previews and all, Bing has ingested the content at some point.
In some cases it's justified to get all technicalities fully clarified before taking an action, otherwise we'd be wondering and litigating whether PH did something wrong.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I do not support your right to be serviced by financial system if it supports your wrongdoing. Your freedom stops where mine begins. My position seems pretty cohesive to me. If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government. This is a human problem and won't be solved with tech. (And again, it was pretty clear to anyone that ther…
> If you do not do evil, then you have nothing to fear. If you have something to fear despite doing no evil, let's fix the government. So - if I have to fear being being shutoff from the financial system by private actors who dislike me, despite not having been convicted of a crime, a law to ensure my right to be served.
What private individual was blocked by MasterCard? Private actors significant enough don't care about you enough to not deal with you unless dealing you puts them in legal jeopardy. At which point you might want to ask yourself why.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#637Tim didn't mention a contemporary sibling tech at AWS which should not be thrown out with the bathwater: private (centralized), immutable, signed ledgers. Their version is called QLDB and does have concrete applications where you need an provable audit trail of a stream of transactions with search and index on top. I was on a team at a fintech closely engaged with AWS to prototype a money movement system using that a…
Azure has something similar as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/s...
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contracts aren't for when things go right, they're for when things go wrong. It's just as true to say contacts aren't "necessary" 99% of the time, because people follow through on the agreement.
I think you’re conflating legal contracts and smart contracts. Legal contracts are instruments used by two or more parties that outlines their responsibilities to one another in a way that is protected by civil law. A smart contract is just a program that runs on the blockchain.
Do you see how the name "smart contract" makes no sense? They aren't smart. In fact, they are obviously dumb. They do what the code says. They aren't a contract in the legal sense. Smart contracts are neither smart, nor contracts.
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people. you are living in a bubble to assume that governments are always good and anyone bucking their government is a bad actor. Try to learn more about Venezuela, Iran, Russia, North Korea or Syria. Or even truckers in Canada whose accounts were frozen because of peaceful protests. At this point, the best thing for crypto would be for someone like Trump to freeze all…
This ridiculous straw man comes up all the time. Stop it. Nobody said "governments are always good" or denied that dictatorships exist. The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships. A president doesn't have the legal authority to freeze finances like that. They are not a king.
> The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships.
Please get your facts straight. This happened in Canada, one of the supposedly best democracies out there
"The Attorney General of Ontario sought and was granted an Ontario Superior Court of Justice court order under Section 490.8 of the Criminal Code of Canada against GiveSendGo,[69] to freeze the funds collected from two campaigns, "Freedom Convoy 2022"—US$8.4 million and "Adopt-a-Trucker"—over $686,000,[73][74] and prohibit their distribution.[72][69] The court order binds "any and all parties with possession or control over these donations".[73] The Mareva injunction was issued on February 17 by Justice Calum MacLeod.[75] GiveSendGo funds go directly to campaign recipients such as The Freedom Convoy campaign, so Canadian banks cannot interfere. The largest donation, which was anonymous, as were six of the other top ten, was US$215,000.[74] The Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance (FINA) members, who are investigating Freedom Convoy's fundraising, voted on February 10 to include a study of the "rise of ideologically motivated extremism".[74] The FINA Committee invited GiveSendGo to testify.[74]
By February 19, at least 76 bank accounts linked to the protests totalling CA$3.2 million were frozen under the Emergencies Act.[76] Most accounts had been unfrozen by February 23.[77]"
Re: AWS and Blockchain
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not arguing the case of git having or not having Merkle trees (git has a «weak» implementation of the Merkle trees, for in a ledger database every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block – a property that git does not possess as it does not support the concept of blocks and operates of commit trees instead that are allowed to be moved around). I am arguing two points, spe…
Git provides all of those things, as long as everyone agrees on what the current HEAD commit id (hash) is. You could publish that hash in a printed newspaper or with a government regulator. After publishing it is impossible to rewrite commit history without evidence of tampering. Rewriting history and amending commits forces the recalculation of all commit hashes that follow it, and you end up with a completely diffe…
Publishing a commit ID in a printed newspaper does not prevent the data loss nor the tampering with the data.
Destructive operations in a ledger database are simply not available at the API/interface contract level.
A delete operation in a ledger database is non-destructive and does not delete the data but rather creates a new «deleted» revision in the history table. The deleted revision is always available, and it can be «undeleted» as there is nothing special about the deleted revision: it is merely another document revision with the N+1 revision number. The document can be deleted (revision N+1), undeleted (revision N+2), updated multiple times (revision N + M1, N + M2 …), deleted again (revision N + M1 + M2 + P), yet the entire history of all past and current revision(s) is always available, and it can be retrieved/inspected; even after the table is dropped, it can still be undropped without incurring a data loss – all of that is the append-only ledger guarantee.
The only destructive operation that is practically possible is tearing down the entire ledger at the infrastructure level, which is irreversible and will result in a full data loss. However it can be mitigated (to a very large extent) through segregating and locking down access to the infrastructure.
git does not provide the immutability guarantee as it allows destructive operations, therefore it does not qualify for a ledger proper. A commit history can be rewritten or deleted resulting in a data loss. Published commit ID's are of no use if the data has been tampered with later and valuable revisions have been deleted in perpetuity.