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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#651

Post by oblio »

halpmeh wrote: post #626
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You're the one with the "output is guaranteed to be correct" line. A smart contract is just code.

Yes, the output is guaranteed to be correct. Let’s say you give me a program and ask me to run it for you. Can you guarantee that I won’t tamper with the executable? No you can’t. You can’t trust the output of an arbitrary program you give me to run. The only way you could trust my result would be to run the program yourself and verify I provided you the correct output. If you run the program yourself, then what’s th…

Are smart contracts Turing complete?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#652

Post by oblio »

halpmeh wrote: post #624
habinero wrote: post #622

Earlier 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.

Then call it "blockchain app" instead.

Just like Tesla's AutoPilot, smart contracts were named that for a reason, to mislead (and make money along the way).

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#653

Post by oblio »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #618
noelsusman wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Give me a bank that can loan me $100M without even asking for an ID? Without a collateral, of course. Like Aave Flashloan provides on blockchain. That seems like a really bad idea!

It's great for levelling the playing field of finance. In traditional finance only the most capitalised players are able to do small arbitrage opportunities, and many firms make billions of dollars this way. In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans.

> In DeFi anyone can take advantage of them using flash loans.

Ok... how do you repay flash loans when things go bad?

Please, do elaborate.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#654

Post by oblio »

splix wrote: post #577
notamy wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original commenter, but here's my stab at it: > In the morning I bought stuff on Amazon, but it also doesn't solve any real problem. Sure it does. It solves the problem of "I need something, I have money, and I don't have the time/ability/car/... to go to a physical location to buy it." > Not sure AWS is solving anything since we can rent servers directly. AWS gives you you - The ability to spin up MANY class…

I would disagree with all the reasons. I understand that it's some real problems the mentioned services solve for you, but I can easily point to a person who has none of those problems. Like my grandma. She doesn't see any point in any of the mentioned products. Even the coffee maker. So we must agree that it depends on the person and is not an objective criterion. Same for blockchan/defi/evm/etc. Some people argue t…

> Again, not arguing. Just trying to say that there could be multiple points of view. And if something works one way for someone, it may be completely useless and even stupid for others.

Yeah, but it's about who the thing is useful to, and how many people are in that category.

Amazon is very useful to the general population.

AWS is very useful to startup and corporations in general.

Zoom is very useful to the large amounts of people that like human interactions and consider text-only to be cold and distant.

Crypto so far is useful to... not that many people, and worst of all, many of those people are scammers and grifters and criminals. Many of the others it's "useful" to look a lot like marks, gullible people that lose a lot of money.

When a business the size of AWS decides it's not worth investing into it, that's a bad sign. They'll go for anything that can make them a ton of money long term.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#655

Post by oblio »

pjkundert wrote: post #604
dmitriid wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could potentially scale to 1B users -- and nobody could stop it. Some static assets would need to be tuned in a real App, to be hosted by a CDN like Cloudflare You've just show at least one way how it would be stopped. Who exactly is going to pay for static assets delivered to 1B users via Cloudflare? > but the App itself would scale. Of course it wouldn't. None of the blockchains have the required throughput. Yes,…

Hmm, okay. For others that come later in search of information, I'll address some of these. > ... one way it can be stopped. Yes, this newbie developer made some decisions that couldn't scale to 1B users. Alternatively, each node can serve static assets, thus scaling linearly w/o CDNs. This isn't required for most apps, as they aren't targets for state-level actors seeking to deplatform them from CDNs. But, if a tota…

> Obviously. That's why "this is new." Blockchains enforcing global consensus on a "total order" of unrelated events cannot: the laws of physics forbid it, besides it being wasteful and unnecessary. Holochain does not enforce such unnecessary "total order" consensus; it is not necessary, as it turns out, for maintaining state consistency in distributed systems. That is the breakthrough. This is a low-research "Bro" comment.

I really want to see the peer reviewed research published in respectable science publications.

Otherwise this stuff is a dime a dozen like battery breakthroughs.

This is the kind of thing that gets that person Nobel prizes and Turing awards.

Odds are 99.999999% that whoever's against this thing is right and it's just vaporware or dead ends somewhere months of years down the line.

In any case, go have fun meanwhile, any lesson is good, including about what NOT to do :-)

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#656

Post by jillesvangurp »

inkyoto wrote: post #417
jillesvangurp wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were arguing it's not a proper merkle tree and it is. You are not a little bit wrong there but flat out barking up the wrong tree. It's a merkle tree with full immutability and append only behavior. This is not an accidental/conceptual similarity. It's the single most important design decision that Git is based on. Force push only allows you to wipe out repositories that you control. The whole point of git is tha…

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…

> every block's cryptographic signature derives from the contents of the preceding block

Eh no. Every git commits hash derives from the previous commit hash. That's a bona-fide cryptographic hash. And you can verify it. And git in fact does that when you merge changes. By recalculating the hashes. And it rejects your changes if things don't line up.

> git is not a proper ledger due to .... an immutable, tamper proof, append-only transaction log;

Also no. It's called a commit log which is exactly this. It's tamper proof because you can verify the chain of hashes (and git does this). It's append only because of those hashes. If you break the chain, git will reject your merge attempts. Any repository fork you don't own, is read-only and won't be able to accept your force pushes with modified hashes because you won't be able to push anything at all. You can only request others to pull; which triggers the before mentioned checks. So you have no way of tricking others into pulling your broken chain of commits. You can only do that to your own repositories. And you have to opt in to it via force push. This is not a weakness but a simple feature. Your data, your choice.

> ... cryptographically verifiable datasets

Also no. Git uses sha1 hashes, which are cryptographic hashes that you can verify. Better hash algorithms are available and sha1 is not super safe at this point. But good luck creating commits that look legit and preserve the sha1 hash. As mentioned before, they include the hash of the previous commit.

Your central, and only, argument is that you can modify your own copies of a repository via force push or poking around on the filesystem. Or whatever. Yes you can; just like with your local copy of whatever blockchain! But don't do that. Because you won't be able to get others to accept your changes/transactions because they'll trivially detect that you tampered with the merkle tree and reject your changes. That's why it's called force push, you opt into this. And others will opt out of it.

So, that too is simply wrong.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#657

Post by oblio »

pjkundert wrote: post #521
Erikun wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, removing the last paragraph would improve your post immensely. It would be a shame if the post got downvoted to oblivion because of it.

I agree. But, my last 30 years of laissez faire has resulted in forums like HN becoming toxic with smug "Crypto is a solution in search of a problem" and "told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb" Bros, yelling low-research insults without anyone pushing back on them... So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just "let them have their opinion", as usua…

> So, I'll leave it. If only the "Eternal September" crowd is allowed to be comfortable here (because we all just "let them have their opinion", as usual), we know what happens.

Smug-o, not all of us here were born yesterday.

This is actually the wrong audience as the concentration of people who have been around the block a while is higher than for the average internet community.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#658

Post by oblio »

pjkundert wrote: post #510
duped wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what "permissionless composability" means. "Permissionless" isn't even a word (without permission or permission-less to be pedantic), and I can think of several overlapping contexts that those words could be meaningful in finance and/or software. The problem is the language you're using sounds like bullshit.

Ah, sorry! Mea culpa. Permissioned vs. permissionless systems has been used for so long in my circles that I thought it was a thing... Even "DeFi" systems may not be permissionless, though. It's just that the permissions are visible constraints (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to deplatform you because, you know, "reasons". This is an emerging risk to eg. Ethereum. Now, most "Staking" validators are "OFA…

> It's just that the permissions are visible constraints (ie. in the code) -- not just randos deciding to deplatform you because, you know, "reasons".

Those "reasons" are called market forces and law.

Law is, you know, written, it's very complex (people are complex), but not some hidden thing.

Market forces are more abstract but they're the thing making human systems work.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#659

Post by oblio »

markdestouches wrote: post #629
ChadNauseam wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Then you are arguing for allowing fraud and crime.

Yeah, but if they're not personally affected, it's fine.

People who are affected are just dumb or they had it coming, anyway.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#660

Post by gendal »

mike_hearn wrote: post #649
gendal wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi everybody... Richard Brown, CTO of R3, the firm behind Corda, here. As Mike says, we're somewhat unusual in that there are many live, successful Corda deployments around the world. Mike's comment about how Corda is blockchain-like but not, strictly speaking, a chain of blocks is at the heart of this I think. Here's what I mean: How many 'introductory' presentations have you been to (or, worse, given ) to semi-tech…

I think your interpretation is fine :) Maybe I was aiming for a fully generalized decentralized database, but in the end there's probably too many finance or business-specific concepts in the core model to really deserve the title. At least in Corda 4. And I should have given you more credit in my post, apologies for that. Indeed Corda has successful 'blockchain' projects where other platforms often don't, largely be…

No need to layer on the flattery... I was hand-waver in chief (and like to think I did a good job in bringing people with us and creating the space for you and the team to work without too much distraction and noise), but it was you who actually brought all the pieces together into a coherent platform. There was nothing in your post I disagreed with!
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