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AWS and Blockchain

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Re: AWS and Blockchain

#691

Post by dvt »

hailwren wrote: post #674
dvt wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you’ve more or less ceded that blockchain provides value. It just needs wider adoption This is a vacuous non-sequitur. It's like saying "my new social network provides value, it just needs wider adoption"—uh, yeah, that's how social networks (or markets) work . If no one is using it, by definition, it has no value. Markets are social games (not merely "financial" ones). And exceedingly few people are using…

> This is a vacuous non-sequitur In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.

> In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.

While this is true on the face of it, I think it's a bit more nuanced when looking at crypto where one can literally mint tokens out of nothing. Plenty of tokens have (or had) unrealistic market caps, and there was plenty of wash trading dredging up liquidity. In fact, there was a famous arbitrage bot that specialized in doing this[1] (faking liquidity via thousands of transactions to make certain assets seem more valuable than they were).

So even though you're technically correct, I think there's a big "but" when looking specifically at crypto land. To make matters more confusing, a lot of liquidity pools and trading is done in non-USD denominated terms. For example, you trade in some weird staking pair sABC/sXYZ (where both of these are some random staked token, maybe not even pegged). And there might be some down-the-road sXYZ/XYZ and XYZ/ETH transaction you can do (and ETH/USD even further down the road), but I'm not exactly sure if you can count your sABC/sXYZ trade as "volume." Even though Coingecko and other token portals will certainly list both sABC and sXYZ in USD terms[2] (market cap/volume).

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/arbitrage-bot-s-spam-attack-o...

[2] https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/lido-staked-ether

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#692

Post by halpmeh »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #688
halpmeh wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that’s a total straw man. Yes, if you redefine the words I used then you can make any argument you want. In CS, correctness means with “behaves in a consistent manner with respect to a specification”. The smart contract is the specification, so yes the output of the smart contract is guaranteed to be correct with respect to the specification. Of course, there can always be be errors in the specification. If…

I'm not the one redefining words here: you've redefined "code" as "specification". Canonically, within the industrial context, there are two processes for achieving compliance of implementation with specification ("correctness"). The first is testing, the second is formal verification. In either case, you need an artifact at a higher level of abstraction (the specification) and one at a lower level (the implementatio…

Ok fair. But you can formally verify your smart contracts or you can test them, so this notion of "correctness" seems orthogonal to the discussion. Even if you formally verify a normal application, you can't trust your verification once you give it to me to execute.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#693

Post by oblio »

halpmeh wrote: post #666
oblio wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are smart contracts Turing complete?

Yes

Then almost by definition I can't really trust your smart contract, except for airtight formal verification, which nobody really does plus I highly doubt smart contract programming languages are formal verification languages.

So this:

> Yes, the output is guaranteed to be correct.

is provably wrong and you either know it and are malicious or you don't know it and this discussion is useless.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#694

Post by halpmeh »

oblio wrote: post #693
halpmeh wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

Then almost by definition I can't really trust your smart contract, except for airtight formal verification, which nobody really does plus I highly doubt smart contract programming languages are formal verification languages. So this: > Yes, the output is guaranteed to be correct. is provably wrong and you either know it and are malicious or you don't know it and this discussion is useless.

I think we're talking about two different things. Imagine you have a generic program A that you've formally verified. Now you ask me to execute it for you. I say: "ok, the output of the program is X." Can you trust the output? No, you cannot trust the output even though you've formally verified the program. If you formally verify the smart contract, you can trust the output.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#695

Post by worik »

pooper wrote: post #638
halpmeh wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They aren't a contract in the legal sense.

I think they can be, I am not a lawyer.

But if our "legal contract" is "do what the code says" then the smart contract is a legal contract. Is it not?

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#696

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

halpmeh wrote: post #692
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one redefining words here: you've redefined "code" as "specification". Canonically, within the industrial context, there are two processes for achieving compliance of implementation with specification ("correctness"). The first is testing, the second is formal verification. In either case, you need an artifact at a higher level of abstraction (the specification) and one at a lower level (the implementatio…

Ok fair. But you can formally verify your smart contracts or you can test them, so this notion of "correctness" seems orthogonal to the discussion. Even if you formally verify a normal application, you can't trust your verification once you give it to me to execute.

The name of the thing I think you're looking for is verifiable computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_computing

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#697

Post by habinero »

helloworld11 wrote: post #675
habinero wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're letting your conspiracy politics cloud your thinking. This entire screed is entirely irrational FUD. Stop. Canadian banks and regulators looking into potential money laundering is entirely reasonable and appropriate behavior.

And you're letting your simplistic take on democratic government being "nice" color your own thinking. Canadian banks and regulators looking into money laundering might be reasonable when carefully permitted by tried legal procedure. A bunch of freely donated money for a peaceful protest of a type with lots of basic precedent being suddenly frozen for blatantly political reasons by pressure from the country's leader…

Take your conspiracy screeds elsewhere, please. This is a technology site, not Reddit.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#698

Post by habinero »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #676
oblio wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for. Whaaaaat? Sorry, but that comment makes no sense. You can buy a share in any small business you want. You're mistaking this for some types of stock market investments[1], which are made to "save people from themselves", from back in the day before 1929 when access was free…

Sounds like you live in the USA right? And probably have a good income? I tried for years but angel list never accepted me being an investor because of income or nationality restrictions. And other methods of gaining access to silicon valley startups didn't work out. Now imagine how hard it is for someone in India or Thailand to invest in USA startups. In crypto I can buy their token in seconds from anywhere in the w…

So go invest in something else and make your money there. The income limit is only $200K. I don't understand why you're so fixated on this one thing.

This limitation was put in place for an extremely good reason: to protect people from getting scammed and also to prevent bailouts. A lot of people think they're savvy investors when they're not.

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#699

Post by snapcaster »

oblio wrote: post #653
TimJRobinson wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flash loans only happen if they're paid back. Pretty cool tech actually as someone pretty skeptical of blockchains

Re: AWS and Blockchain

#700

Post by remram »

ShamelessC wrote: post #632
hanniabu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not GP, but you called it "trivially irrelevant", it didn't seem like you wanted to be invited to learn anything...
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