[HN Gopher] Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service
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Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service
Author : Clewza313
Score : 245 points
Date : 2021-05-13 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Has Microsoft noticed that blockchains are just crappy databases,
| or did their customers?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Microsoft certainly knew that since the beginning.
| kierenj wrote:
| I used it to experiment - it was super easy to set up a
| consortium, use their API to upload smart contracts, and try
| stuff out. Easy UI for visualising stuff. Can't think of an
| actual use-case, really.. but for experimenting, it was handy.
| Havoc wrote:
| Good. The concept of a centrally supplied & managed blockchain
| was ridiculous from the start
| lars wrote:
| Similar to how "god of the gaps" arguments work, there's a "god
| of complexity" phenomenon in tech, where people will project
| infinite possibilities onto technology they don't understand.
|
| Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.
| It lets you do distributed consensus among untrusted nodes in a
| setting where contributing compute power is economically
| incentivized (e.g. where there's mining). That applies to
| cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.
|
| It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of
| "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into projects
| that are technically unsound or that had no use for a blockchain
| to begin with. This has been going on for years.
| derefr wrote:
| I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
|
| It's because "blockchain" software is a thing that already
| exists, but its superclass, "distributed log of signed proofs"
| software, _isn't_ a thing that already exists (except in the
| form of the subclass, blockchain software.)
|
| There are tons of use-cases for which a "distributed log of
| signed proofs" is the perfect fit. Have you got an architecture
| where nodes independently make "stuff" and want to publish it
| "somewhere" for other nodes to find -- where the other nodes
| have some independent criterion they can apply to validate
| published "stuff" to decide whether to accept or ignore it for
| their own use? For example, have you got a sharded data
| warehouse, where each shard is publishing its own write-ahead
| log segments for replicas of that shard to use? Well, add a
| "distributed log of signed proofs", and now your closed data
| warehouse becomes an open network where anyone can have their
| own "shard", and anyone can choose to replicate from a "shard"
| they trust.
|
| (Yes, DHTs and/or gossip networks are sort of like this -- but
| neither provides durability or linearization. If you want a new
| node to be able to look up historical "stuff" from publisher-
| nodes that aren't online any more, then you need durability;
| and if you want your "stuff" validation algorithm to -- at
| least within a sliding window -- reject duplicate "stuff" from
| the log, then you need linearization.)
|
| It just so happens that all the software that exists, that
| offers the "distributed log of signed proofs" guarantee, also
| offers the _additional_ guarantee of all the nodes doing the
| validation of proofs serially, reducing over each new proof
| against an accumulator of an existing global consensus state,
| to build a new global consensus state, where proofs can only be
| valid _relative to_ a specific "base" global consensus state.
| We call such proofs-relative-to-a-state "blocks", and we call
| the resulting system "a blockchain."
|
| Most of these use-cases don't _need_ that additional guarantee.
| It doesn't get them anything, _and_ it costs a lot (e.g. in the
| inability to concurrently validate proofs; in the requirement
| to keep a forever-growing durable representation of global
| consensus state around on disk; etc.)
|
| But the people building these systems are generally practical
| engineers, who "buy" blockchain software (and just ignore the
| features they don't need), rather than attempting to "build"
| their own "distributed log of signed proofs" software with no
| known antecedent.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed"
| bit that nobody really wants.
|
| For example, distributed version control systems are often
| held up as an example of some form of precedent for
| blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen a
| truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of
| Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to
| happen.
|
| Similarly, I'm not sure people _actually_ want immutability.
| They want the ability to edit history, they just want it to
| not be an everyday thing. In a discussion about the relative
| merits of different distributed version control systems,
| someone invariably points out that the thing Git has that
| makes it more usable in practice than any of the others is
| that it allows you to rewrite history. In the repositories I
| manage, I even mandate it, in the form of requiring people to
| rebase before merging into the main branch so that we can
| linearize history. As salty former Mercurial user, I used to
| do the opposite and ban the practice, until I realized that
| rebasing and squashing is more practical in the long run. I
| 'm trying to run a software project, not an episode of
| _Hoarders._
| tim333 wrote:
| >"distributed" bit that nobody really wants
|
| Distributed adds complexity but is pretty much essential
| for illegal activities which is why it is needed for
| cryptocurrencies which would otherwise be shut down for not
| KYCing everything and bittorrent which would be shut for
| copyright infringement. Otherwise centralized is usually
| easier.
| rektide wrote:
| > For example, distributed version control systems are
| often held up as an example of some form of precedent for
| blockchain-type technologies. But I've never actually seen
| a truly distributed (in the blockchain sense) deployment of
| Git. It's technically possible, but it just doesn't seem to
| happen.
|
| The truth is, git provides only a narrow set of
| capabilities we use for development. Git being
| decentralized is insufficient. That is why the world uses
| github (and to lesser degrees bitbucket & gitlab): they
| provide the collaborative experience, they provide
| regulation/control/flow across the distributed systems.
|
| There is ongoing & active work to build many of these
| social protocols ("Pull requests", code comments, issues,
| &c) in a distributed fashion, under the ForgeFed[1]
| project. Popular git workspace applications such as Gitea
| are working towards implementations.
|
| It's been long overdue, but we're filling in the gaps, to
| make a distributed git possible & interesting.
| Historically, one of the few & only successful models of
| distributed/decentralized development has been the Linux
| kernel itself, which has stuck to using patches sent by
| email to coordinate the distributed work. But that status
| quo will soon be changing, or at least, there will be other
| options, than github or email.
|
| [1] https://forgefed.peers.community/
| Terretta wrote:
| Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant in a
| variety of security and financial (and financial security)
| areas, but good luck explaining to the non-tech execs why
| they should fund projects using that rather than FOMO on
| "but blockchain!!!"
|
| For purposes of talking w/ execs or boards, there are
| something like seven yes/no reasonably explainable
| properties of chains of blocks that toggled some ways give
| you alt coins and in one particular other way give you a
| fantastically high performance distributed ledger a trusted
| authority can keep an eye on -- you can have your cake and
| eat it too if you aren't being a coin.
|
| Businesses often want that outcome, but they verbalize what
| they want as "bLoCkChAiN!!! to the moon!!!" and it's tech's
| job to say wait, what are you trying to do?
|
| Quite probably, they actually could benefit from something
| like QLDB:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > Distributed immutable ledger is astonishingly relevant
| in a variety of security and financial (and financial
| security) areas
|
| I'm not so sure about that. IANAL, but I suspect that, at
| least under US law, a distributed immutable ledger would
| actually be illegal in many cases. The entire legal
| environment is set up around the idea that there is a
| system of record, and that system of record has a single
| custodian, and that custodian is not just responsible for
| tending to it, but also someone to whom you can appeal
| (or sue) for remediation if something goes wrong.
|
| The immutable bit is also often incompatible. There are
| laws and contracts out there laying out cases where data
| needs to be deleted - not reverted, not being flagged as
| no longer relevant, actually deleted - from the record.
| In the US, the Fair Credit Reporting Act is probably the
| most familiar example, but there are others.
|
| Yes, we can say that it hasn't taken off because people
| just don't understand it because it's a complex technical
| topic. But we should also consider the possibility that
| the business environment in which we are trying to
| ininuate ourselves is a complex technical topic, too. And
| also watch out for Chesterton's Fence.
| derefr wrote:
| I think you're talking about different use-cases than the
| person you're replying to.
|
| A distributed immutable ledger has many uses other than
| recording voluntary transactions, or even recording
| things to do with specific people.
|
| For example, such a ledger can be used to create a
| tamper-proof security-camera footage log. Just hashes of
| exported video files, locked into a chain at time of
| export. You can redact the videos themselves (i.e. make
| all copies of the referenced video unavailable), but you
| can't change the hash, and so there's no party you can
| collude with to _substitute_ one video for another. Even
| if you 're a state actor. You either have the videos --
| which can be proven to be the _right_ videos -- or you
| don 't; but you'll never be able to present the _wrong_
| videos.
|
| Or, in the same vein, a chain-of-custody log for the
| contents of a safety deposit box at a bank. Any time
| someone opens the box, an entry is automatically appended
| to the log saying what authorization (e.g. access card)
| was used to open the box. Once again, the fact that the
| log is distributed on a wider multi-party-controlled
| system, makes it impossible (or at least impractical) for
| the bank itself to tamper with the logs to steal
| something from your box.
|
| These are "finance" / "security" / "financial security"
| use-cases. But they're not PII. There's no point at which
| any of this data would ever legally require redaction or
| purging, because it doesn't relate to a specific client
| profile. It relates either to _metadata of_ public-point-
| of-view sensory data capture; or it relates to _employee_
| actions against customer accounts, where the mapping back
| to an individual isn 't given in the public log but
| rather exists in a private database.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > For example, such a ledger can be used to create a
| tamper-proof security-camera footage log.
|
| What's the use-case here - who are the untrustworthy
| individuals that society needs to protect itself against?
| Societal trust is currently rooted in _people_ - it will
| not be switched over to machines /distributed ledgers any
| time soon. This is why people can write affidavits/get
| sworn in to say "That video's legit" under pain of
| perjury. Frankly, there's little money in turning over
| trust to a blockchain when there is an
| individual/organization that can be interrogated. It's
| not perfect, but trying to perfect it has (evidently)
| diminishing returns
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Git is used almost exclusively in a centralized fashion.
| The use patterns really aren't all that different from SVN,
| even if having a local copy is kinda nice. But, like you
| said, having a local copy isn't really the same thing as
| decentralized. "master" is still a thing.
|
| More importantly, the next big shift in version control
| technology is/will be _back toward centralization_.
|
| You already see this with eg Google Docs. Far inferior to
| Word, but preferred by many because of the free and highly
| functional live-multi-collaborator-editing feature.
|
| Someday we'll look back and wonder why merge hell lasted so
| long into the age of ubiquitous gigabit internet. Not that
| there won't sometimes be merges, but far rarer.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Bit of a nitpick but even in a team with a central
| origin, I think git is still mostly used in a
| decentralized way. Try to use Perforce on spotty internet
| vs git. There's a big difference.
|
| Merge is a fundamental issue across all source control.
| Its not going away.
| [deleted]
| dale_glass wrote:
| Git is very much used in a distributed fashion. Eg, on
| github.
|
| Right now, I'm working on one of the forks of a dead
| commercial project.
|
| Our fork in turn has 61 forks right now, some of which
| may diverge further and have multiple people working on
| them, which at some point may or not contribute things
| upstream.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| But not in the blockchain sense. All those forks aren't
| independently contributing to a single source of truth in
| a peer-to-peer manner.
|
| In practice, those forks generally serve one of two
| purposes. Either they're for working separately on
| changes that you intend to submit upstream to the agreed-
| upon central repository, or you're intending to
| legitimately fork the project and create your own new
| central repository that's relatively independent of the
| original.
|
| Despite from the fact that, thanks to our industry's love
| for overloading technical jargon, we happen to use the
| word "distributed" to describe both use cases, they're
| really quite different in practice.
| dale_glass wrote:
| They kind of are. I mean, the hierarchical structure is
| mostly fictional. In git any fork is as valid as any
| other. This is very much unlike any SVN setup. Any of
| those forks could conceivably become the main one, if the
| former official repo died, or somebody just started
| developing their fork faster.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| That's what I'm getting at, though. Even though Git does
| support a non-hierarchical organization structure, nobody
| actually uses it that way.
|
| Almost as if not every tool in search of a problem
| eventually finds one.
| dale_glass wrote:
| But they do. Not 100% of the time, certainly, but it very
| much happens.
|
| Eg, under SVN, people would check-out our project, do
| some work and then either need commit rights, or create a
| patch.
|
| Under git, people have full power to clone the entire
| thing, explore the entire history, rewrite whatever they
| want to, easily collaborate with other people with the
| same interests, and then maybe submit it all upstream.
|
| So for instance right now in Vircadia we're having a big
| project of redoing the scripting engine. This work could
| conceivably take months, and thanks to git it doesn't
| have to happen in the main repo. It can happen between
| the people interested in that part of the code, where
| even several people can collaborate on a gigantic PR that
| would hopefully get merged in the end. SVN doesn't allow
| for that kind of workflow.
|
| Yes, the high level view is still centralized, but the
| ability to break away from the centralization to do
| something big is very helpful and important. Even if it's
| not the dominant way of working.
| groby_b wrote:
| The very notion that you are a fork, and that you have
| forks, implies a hierarchical sense of authority. And I
| think that's the thing that confuses a lot of these
| debates: "Distributed" can mean "independent nodes", and
| it can mean "hierarchical authority".
|
| Almost everybody is OK with the latter, and that's the
| only issue that blockchain meaningfully addresses.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think it is worth thinking about systems which do not
| have (or need) a single source of truth (i.e. git) v.s.
| systems which include a mechanism for an arbitrarily
| number of nodes arriving at a single source of truth
| (i.e. blockchain).
|
| I agree that there are often many versions of a git repo
| at different places and the system gets much of its
| utility from that quality. But this strength actually
| comes from git eschewing the idea of a central truth. You
| can have one or more remote git repo with different sets
| of commits. You can freely integrate whatever changes you
| want. That flexibility allows the free movement and
| sharing of code, but it is key in that movement that the
| system does not force a single idea of truth.
|
| The blockchain allows new and old nodes to participate in
| a process of agreeing on a central truth. This is
| actually very cool from a technical perspective, but I
| think it's pretty rare that we want it in a technical
| system. Most things, like git, benefit from the ability
| to branch when needed and use social organization to
| handle centralization (e.x: linux development centralizes
| on the linux kernel git because the kernel development
| community has agreed to use that particular git, there
| are no protocol requirements to do so, and various
| branches are independently created in various places to
| the benefit of all).
| velcrovan wrote:
| Github is not an example of decentralization. Github is
| _the center hub_ for the vast majority of git-managed
| projects. The fact that you can fork a repo is not the
| kind of distributed use we 're talking about. Github is
| still the "default" host for those forked repos, and the
| identity provider for people working on most software
| projects. That's centralization.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Github is a completely optional thing though. If it were
| to die tomorrow, everyone still has the code locally, and
| code sharing is still very much possible.
| velcrovan wrote:
| That is also not what is meant by decentralization in the
| blockchain sense. A decentralized use of git would be a
| graph with no central hub: each developer syncing their
| repo with one or more other developers directly, not with
| a central "source-of-truth" repo. In reality if Github
| disappeared everyone would just find a new host to
| centralize on. Furthermore Github creates lock-in by
| hosting data that actually would not survive any
| migration attempts: issue tracking and pull request
| discussions.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| You were the person who wrote "Eg, on github."
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yes, it just didn't come out quite right.
|
| The main reason to mention github at all is that it gives
| me stats. There's probably a bunch more repositories out
| there just from people doing git clone, but I can't count
| them.
|
| Also, while github helps it's not a critical part of the
| whole thing. If it disappeared it wouldn't be a critical
| problem. Everybody would still have the source, and could
| figure a way to reconnect again.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I think mumblemumble hit the nail on the head -- this
| isn't really distributed in the same sense as, e.g.,
| blockchain. There is no peer-to-peer distributed ledger,
| no consensus mechanism, etc.
|
| In addition to what they said, I'll also point out
| something else that's perhaps even more important -- you
| just measured "number of forks" in terms of the number of
| forks on github (as opposed to eg the number of people
| who have git cloned the repo).
| dale_glass wrote:
| A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for
| decentralization. It's just how Bitcoin does it.
|
| Also, I used github and its number of forks because it's
| the number I can easily work with. I have no clue how
| many copies of our tree are floating out there, nor is
| there a way of finding out.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > A peer-to-peer distributed ledger isn't needed for
| decentralization.
|
| You _can_ chuck blockchain out of the conversation like
| that. But then we 'd no longer be having a conversation
| about blockchain.
| dale_glass wrote:
| But we aren't. We're talking about git. We're having a
| digression from the main topic because git is kinda
| tangentially related.
| [deleted]
| guenthert wrote:
| > You already see this with eg Google Docs. Far inferior
| to Word, but preferred by many because of the free and
| highly functional live-multi-collaborator-editing
| feature.
|
| Only for those in (roughly) the same time zone, which
| appears to be less often the case today.
|
| I've seen a lot of different VCS, all the way back to
| RCS. I don't want to go back to the awful scheme of
| versioned virtual filesystem like the one of ClearCase.
| You can pry git from my cold, dead fingers.
| [deleted]
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Scuttlebutt and GUN.eco seem to be what you're describing.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.
|
| A shared append-only document is useful for a number of
| applications.
|
| > It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the
| flag of "blockchain". Millions of dollars have been poured into
| projects that are technically unsound or that had no use for a
| blockchain to begin with.
|
| Capitalism is very good at extracting wealth gradients out of
| information ones.
| lordlimecat wrote:
| >Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare
| problem.
|
| This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing
| blockchain and its problems.
| ipaddr wrote:
| This is common with new technology. It was amazing what was
| sold under web 2.0. It was amazing what was sold before the
| dotcom craze.
|
| Blockchains are here to stay. Replacing money is probably not a
| medium term goal but allowing trustless entities to reach an
| agreement could be interesting. No one has explored it in
| smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first
| one to get the answer wins.
|
| Not trusting your peers is the future.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| > classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.
|
| Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?
| bob33212 wrote:
| If you didn't trust the teacher. The distributed ledger
| would prevent them from editing the database of timestamps.
| But then the question is, if you don't trust the teacher
| why are you in their class?
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| A useful exercise in determining whether you need a
| blockchain is asking yourself "why would a Google sheet
| with track changes not work here".
| ipaddr wrote:
| This is more about trust between peer groups like
| students vs students or larger groups like departments vs
| departments.
|
| Imagine a schoolwide project like a fundraiser. Everyone
| is selling chocolate bars to fund new uniforms. Whoever
| donates the most gets to decide which team gets a bonus
| amount. The proof is money received. The coins are
| distributed.
|
| Why do you need a teacher to manage this?
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| In a classroom you only need a proof of something happening.
| A separate answer-checking (or even just timestamping)
| service is a few times easier to create and operate.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > A separate [...] service is a few times easier to create
| and operate
|
| Because it relies on trust in the service. Blockchains
| don't. You can run a validation regime for anything you
| want on a blockchain: legal, illegal, anonymous, public,
| anything. Store any data you want and you can verify for
| all of posterity that it was stored before the block
| timestamp.
|
| That's the feature, anyway. But you're right, _in practice_
| (1) it 's generally trivial to find a trusted service for
| what you want to do (trust is cheap for almost everything)
| and (2) actually implementing this kind of thing on a
| blockchain is a huge mess (bitcoin et. al. are _EXTREMELY_
| expensive vs. just trusting someone).
|
| Maybe (2) will be addressed at some point by improved
| technology. But really (1) is the thing that makes this a
| failing proposition. Libertarian fantasy-spinning
| notwithstanding, the only people who _really need_ the
| blockchain are doing shit the rest of us don 't want them
| to do.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Except they do. Blockchains rely on a majority of actors
| not getting together to commit fraud. This is somewhat
| reasonable but still a real concern at the kind of scale
| Bitcoin has; getting 51% of the children in a class to
| gang up on someone for the lolz is trivial.
|
| They rely on the mechanism which converts from physical
| to digital being reliable and trusted. Vaccine passports
| on a blockchain provide exactly 0 assurance that the
| pharmacist wasn't bribed.
|
| They rely on the blockchain software being free from bugs
| and no-one-but-us trapdoors. Ask the OpenSSL community
| how easy verifying crypto code is.
|
| Blockchains are not a magic solution to all trust
| problems.
| newdude116 wrote:
| I don't see many applications for blockchain. The only
| application is where you don't want to have a trusted central
| party, be it a company or a government.
|
| I see many start-ups advertising and betting on a blockchain
| technology by something that could be easier solved with a
| regular, central database. Are they just bullshitting?
|
| Digital vaccination passports it an example. Why do you need
| the blockchain? A central government signature/database
| solves this problem.
| srmarm wrote:
| That's the bit that gets me confused, with cryptocurrencies
| there is a clear link between the computer processing and
| the 'thing' you're representing (i.e crypto hashes).
|
| With say a digital vaccination passport the 'thing' you're
| wanting to prove is that someone is vaccinated and the
| interface between the blockchain and the real world still
| requires a trusted central party(s) - whoever certifies the
| efficacy and safety of the vaccine, that the batch is legit
| and that it was actually administered competently and to
| the person in this case.
|
| As with many of these applications there doesn't seem to be
| an existing problem with a trusted central party or
| immutability to solve
| dcolkitt wrote:
| For vaccination passports, I don't think you even need a
| database. Public key signatures work fine. "John Smith is
| officially vaccinated. Love, Cook County Health
| Department". No persistent service even necessary. John can
| just keep that QR code on his phone.
|
| Blockchain or trusted database authority is only necessary
| when there's the risk of double spend. Like I try to sell
| my house to two different people at the same time. With
| vaccine passports there's no risk. Either you're vaccinated
| or not.
| yrro wrote:
| You need a service that verifiers can query to determine
| if the signature has been revoked too...
| bydlocoder wrote:
| As far as I remember, Web 2.0 was about platforms enabling
| P2P interaction between users and we have tons of this stuff
| - social networks, marketplaces, gig apps...
| rchaud wrote:
| Can you provide an example of Web 2.0 snake oil? I remember
| the shift from 1.0 to a more JS/AJAX based web. It was still
| the web, something hundreds of millions used.
|
| >No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a
| classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.
|
| What?
| srmarm wrote:
| I thought web 2.0 was more about communication flow, i.e
| rather than a bunch of people publishing a website for
| others to consume we have more of a two way communication
| (i.e social media). There was a bunch of tech that enabled
| it and came along at the same time and a very clear style
| that accompanied it though.
| rchaud wrote:
| There are good articles that talk about what the
| difference between 1.0 and 2.0 were. The transition was
| definitely more fluid than what numbers like "1.0" might
| indicate.
|
| Web 2.0 for me was dynamic web apps like Google Docs that
| refreshed in real-time. Streaming video and web games
| were also a big part of this. The early Youtube and
| Dailymotion sites used Flash until HTML5 support was
| widespread enough to deprecate it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Here is an article written on techcrunch years ago. The
| snakeoil is still alive in many services we all use:
| facebook, youtube, tiktok, instagram..
|
| It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for
| the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it
| was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted. This
| was the central thesis brought forward in the late 1990s
| and prophesied by thinkers like Bill Gates - who expected a
| beautiful, customized "road ahead" - and Clifford Stoll who
| saw only snake oil. At the time, it was the most compelling
| use of the Internet those thinkers thought possible. This
| concept - that we were to be coddled by a hive brain
| designed to show us exactly what we needed to know when we
| needed to know it - continued apace until it was supplanted
| by the concept of User Generated Content - UGC - a related
| movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed
| propriety in the online world.
|
| That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one
| conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global
| newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many
| conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans,
| supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us
| what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity
| into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that
| once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock
| star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that
| forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached
| audiences. After all, on a UGC site it's not a lot of fun
| for Procter & Gamble to have Downy Fabric Softener
| advertised next to someone's racist rant against Muslims in
| a Starbucks.
|
| Still the Valley took these concepts and built monetized
| cesspools of self-expression. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
| and Twitter are the biggest beneficiaries of outrage
| culture and the eyeballs brought in by its continuous
| refreshment feed their further growth. These sites are Web
| 2.0 at its darkest epitome, a quiver of arrows that strikes
| at our deepest, most cherished institutions and bleeds us
| of kindness and forethought.
| Clubber wrote:
| I remember making a website for someone back in 2008 or so.
| He asked if it would be Web 2.0 compatible.
| reificator wrote:
| A classroom has a trusted central authority. Even assuming
| some kind of educational benefit from students racing to be
| first, how on earth does blockchain accomplish anything
| there?
|
| I really really hope that all the blockchain hype is from
| people who got in early and want to pump up the value before
| they get out. Because otherwise the invented solutions and
| worse invented problems are too absurd for me to handle.
| ipaddr wrote:
| We see examples already where a central authority is not
| necessary like peer grading.
|
| The race condition could work in a bonus question where the
| first person to answer correctly takes the bonus marks.
| Students would have the opportunity to submit answers, get
| confirmed correct without the teacher needing to manage
| this.
|
| That central authority is a bottleneck and at times
| corrupt. We don't trust central authority in government so
| three different levels of government have to reach an
| alignment for a law to be passed. Police powers are
| separate from judigical powers for a reason.
| Decentralization balances interests.
| reificator wrote:
| > _That central authority is a bottleneck and at times
| corrupt. We don 't trust central authority in government
| so three different levels of government have to reach an
| alignment for a law to be passed. Police powers are
| separate from judigical powers for a reason.
| Decentralization balances interests._
|
| That is a hell of a lot to write about checks and
| balances to try to defend the absurd concept of a
| blockchain classroom quiz. This is exactly what I mean
| when I say I hope people are just trying to pump up the
| value and don't actually think this is a solution that
| provides any value.
|
| If you have a corrupt teacher that can't be
| trusted/abuses their power somehow, the blockchain is not
| going to magically improve your education. The concept is
| absurd.
|
| If you're writing a classroom quiz where students race to
| finish, a server to handle grading and track scores is
| the way to go. Or if the device is locked down do the
| grading there and just take a timestamp.
|
| Hello dystopian future where I get quoted like the famous
| Dropbox post. I hope I'm not still there amongst you.
| cryptica wrote:
| >> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare
| problem
|
| It's not a rare problem. Fiat currencies don't work for the
| majority of people. The problem is ubiquitous. We need to
| separate money from state and blockchain provides a mechanism
| to do that.
|
| Just because fiat works for a handful of rich people, doesn't
| mean that it works for everyone. Everyone can see that the
| current system is unfair.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Sure, 1 random guy tweeting is way better than a state actor.
| whateveracct wrote:
| rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist
| currency only works for "a handful of rich people."
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Technically, there are multiple tracking applications, but
| they're more easily and cheaply handled with in place
| technologies, is the issue. If you were designing and building
| tracking ultra secure shipping infrastructure from the ground
| up, where everyone had to be held absolutely responsible, then
| there's an edge case for it, maybe.... But the use cases for
| blockchain are pretty small. Like small batch digital art
| assets and the like.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| >contributing compute power is economically incentivized
|
| I think this is the aspect in blockchain that has really been
| stretched. Most problems are within closed networks and solved
| with digital signatures -- is the act of signing a record proof
| of work? If you squint hard enough and razzle-dazzle it enough
| I could see how you could call it that -- or simply call it a
| database with a signature column :)
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm always saddened that the energy that goes into those
| blockchain signatures is basically wasted.
|
| Why couldn't bitcoin work by having the miners fold proteins
| or something? Proof of work comes from advancing the state of
| the art just a hair each time. Imagine if all of the
| computation power being used to prop up bitcoin were also
| doing something productive?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Proof of Stake is taking over, in Ethereal, Polygon, and
| other alt coins.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Arguably, it's doing something very desirable. Maybe invent
| a protein coin?
| jandrese wrote:
| Even if you think the Blockchain itself is valuable, the
| "proof of work" is almost entirely wasted in the end.
| Some trillions of hash computations are thrown away for
| each one that is used.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Even as a blockchain non-fan, those computations are
| necessary to produce the desirable thing, and the same
| could be said for protein folding. There are a lot of
| great and devastating criticisms of blockchains, but the
| environmental concern is more of a proxy or even
| dogwhistle for a general political objection to
| cryptocurrencies - even reasonable objections in the
| context of their worldview. Greenwashing those objections
| seems like a canard.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I think you two are disagreeing on what "the desirable
| thing" means. You're saying it's creating the
| bitcoin/blockchain which is the desirable result. But
| they're saying that "desirable result" here is actually
| just computing a SHA-256 below a certain threshold. Sure
| you get the blockchain as a result, but does it really
| need to be SHA-256? As long as you have a "hash" function
| with a statistically predictable amount of CPU usage to
| generate a "successful" result, that function could maybe
| be something more meaningful. I have no idea if you could
| quantify protein folding into some sort of statistically
| predictable successful/unsuccessful CPU process.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| These already exist, e.g. foldingcoin. One problem is
| that they require a centralized authority to approve and
| distribute workloads, and so this entity has undesirable
| power over the network. I do believe there are some
| cryptocurrencies where you can submit arbitrary workloads
| and you pay for it with the currency of the network. But
| they never took off, probably because they don't match
| the efficiency and/or data privacy of AWS.
| shawnz wrote:
| > is the act of signing a record proof of work?
|
| The idea behind proof-of-work is to add a cost to inserts, so
| that inserting wrong information is too costly to be
| profitable. Whereas inserting correct information makes you
| eligible for rewards that negate the cost of having inserted
| it.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| That one's always struck me. At least if you squint, that
| would imply that blockchain's fraud-prevention strategy
| hinges on nobody ever using the blockchain to handle
| anything too valuable or important.
| shawnz wrote:
| Yes, there is a limit to the security that a
| cryptocurrency can provide (like with anything else). The
| level of security provided is based on the market price:
| The higher the price, the higher the rewards, which
| increases the profitability of mining, thus leading to
| more miners, which then increases the amount of
| competition you'll have if you want to post wrong
| information. Since there is a fixed rate of new data
| which can be added, that's what defines the cost of
| inserting data to the blockchain.
|
| An attacker with a lot of resources (>50% of current
| mining power consumption) could use their resources to
| post wrong information, but it would need to be
| profitable enough to make up for the immense costs. It's
| unlikely there would be such a situation where an
| attacker could recover the costs for such an attack. At
| best they would be spending a lot of money to cause a
| temporary network disruption as the "fair players" move
| to a forked coin or similar.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| So, I can see that argument following for something like
| Bitcoin. Though I think that part of that is because
| cryptocurrency doesn't actually have any intrinsic value.
| So an attack on, say, the Bitcoin network would also have
| the effect of devaluing the very thing you're trying to
| compromise.
|
| But it does seem to be something you need to contend with
| when looking for new uses. Most new ideas people are
| thinking up have to do with something that exists outside
| the blockchain itself. And that, not Bitcoin, is what
| Azure Blockchain Service was really about. The merits of
| cryptocurrency as an application of blockchain are
| largely irrelevant to this discussion.
|
| My sense is that the general pattern for most other uses
| is that the number of potential legitimate participants
| in the blockchain system is likely be inversely
| proportional to the overall importance of the thing the
| blockchain is trying to manage. Everyone can get in on
| something like CryptoKitties, but there are probably very
| few natural participants in a blockchain network for
| managing nuclear fuel resources.
| thebean11 wrote:
| You can use it to handle anything whose value to an
| attacker is less than the cost of attacking the network
| as a whole right? May not be following though.
| this_user wrote:
| That is true, but it's also useless for almost all
| applications. Because in the real world agreements,
| contracts, and laws exist to create trusted relationships
| between parties. Relying on an inefficient technical
| solution instead is neither necessary nor desirable.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Millions? Billions.
| davewritescode wrote:
| There's also the fact that small blockchain networks become
| less useful the smaller they become because while it's
| impossible to change history, 51% attacks can make a blockchain
| not function in optimal ways. When you have a massive network
| of nodes and the incentives not devalue the thing you're trying
| to earn it works.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That. It's yet to be seen how a blockchain that required
| specialized hardware reacts to a shrinking user base.
|
| If there exists more hardware than what's active mining, and
| it can not be used for anything else, will there be enough
| incentives not to use it in a harmful way?
| simias wrote:
| Meanwhile larger networks become increasingly inefficient
| because without trust all transactions have to be checked and
| rechecked and rechecked and rechecked. But fear not,
| $magical_solution is around the corner and will resolve all
| of this! It's been coming for 5 years now, so you know it's
| due any minute now.
| simias wrote:
| Some of it is that, some of it is just simple greed. Many
| people think they're too good to fall for pyramid schemes and
| MLM, yet they'll dump money into cryptocurrencies or some meme
| stock because they think it'll make them millionaires.
|
| I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of
| buying drugs online, yet I don't think cryptocurrencies are
| going anywhere any time soon. It's effectively become a casino
| for millenials and zoomers where everybody hopes to become a
| millionaire overnight. Some even succeeded.
|
| No amount of technical argumentation is going to change that.
| sneak wrote:
| > _I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless
| outside of buying drugs online_
|
| Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have
| finally changed that.
| ac29 wrote:
| How? My best understanding of Uniswap is that it provides
| liquidity to exchange between cryptocurrency pairs. There
| is no evidence that it is providing liquidity for anything
| actually useful - with traditional finance, companies issue
| shares or debt to increase production lines, fund new R&D,
| etc.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers
|
| Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in
| cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age
| groups.
| tnzm wrote:
| They invest on behalf of the house.
| simias wrote:
| Please don't be obtuse, I obviously wasn't implying that
| 100% of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are in a specific age
| range, I'm just saying that culturally they probably have
| more of a following in a younger crowd.
| enumjorge wrote:
| I wasn't being obtuse, but I can see why it came across
| that way. Crypto definitely got started among the younger
| more indie crowd, but I think that has slowly changed
| over time and will continue to do so. Bitcoin was
| introduced almost as a way for the little guy to fight
| "the system", but I think people underestimate how much
| influence the old players like Wall Street, billionaires
| (hence my previous comment) and governments are starting
| to have on it.
| grey-area wrote:
| Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the
| explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes.
| They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and
| benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they
| do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology,
| a new paradigm etc, etc.
| simias wrote:
| Weaponized FOMO in realtime at a worldwide scale. It's a
| tough societal problem to solve.
|
| With good old pyramid schemes it took a lot more work to it
| off the ground. Now you can just astroturf on Reddit,
| Discord and the big social networks with your fancy new
| "revolutionary" cryptothingy and you're making millions.
|
| I've been following the DogeCoin pump on reddit over the
| past couple of months, it's absolutely transparent that
| it's a pure pump with no fundamentals but people buy into
| it because they think they're early enough not to be left
| holding the bags. IMO the Gamestop thing is mostly exactly
| the same, but obviously the situation is more complex
| there.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Casinos have existed for a long time and are known to be a
| place where a lot of people loses money, but that doesn't
| stop others from showing up and losing more.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's also the most profitable trading category for old
| traders who know how to ride cycles safely. Not advocating,
| just adding another bit of info
| im3w1l wrote:
| There is a difference between the knowledge of individuals and
| knowledge of institutions. Many people who seriously looked
| into these things said it was bogus. But the institutions
| didn't know it was bogus. They didn't know whether to believe
| the nay-sayers or not. So "our" (for some weird abstract sense
| of "our") knowledge increased by doing these doomed
| experiments.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Wal-Mart and Louis Vuitton both announced they were adopting
| blockchain. Walmart's was for supply chain tracking of
| lettuce. LV's was for authenticating genuineness and
| preventing sales of counterfeits. Both were to be run
| entirely by the company. Centralized. No distributed
| anything.
|
| There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except
| that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a
| stock price pop.
| mrits wrote:
| It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed
| get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false
| information such as being a shortage of use cases for
| incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have
| even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to
| blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's
| not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be
| helpful here to evaluate your statement.
| pragmar wrote:
| Here are a couple.
|
| Identity. Once you log into a website a MetaMask address, a
| lot of things begin to come into focus. Create as many as
| you want, move contents around, etc. It's a lot more
| empowered than google/fb oauth feudalism.
|
| Physical and intellectual property registries. Could be far
| more efficient, accurate, and resilient to bad actors.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| So a bad actor gets a fraudulent invention registered. In
| the current system some people think really hard and then
| consider deleting it. This has many flaws, but the flaws
| are in the human bits. Where they write down their
| decisions is an implementation derail.
|
| How will blockchain make it better? Unless you've figured
| out how to have a computer figure out what inventions
| should qualify for protection and what infringes on them,
| I don't see it.
| pragmar wrote:
| >>> How will blockchain make it better?
|
| You're focusing on patents. Countries operate copyright
| offices--clerks, submission fees, red tape, human error.
| With blockchain, I can produce and store an md5 of a
| audio file, pdf, or video for next to nothing. You now
| have cryptographic signed proof of generation at a
| particular time, and a system that stores the data
| perpetually. Yes, you still need courts and judges to
| adjudicate conflicts, I never said it was a 100%
| solution.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| But if I trust the courts they could just have
| md5s.sqlite?
| simonw wrote:
| Physical property registries: if you guess my password
| (or extort it from me with a crowbar) you get to keep my
| house.
| pragmar wrote:
| I'd prefer my deed committed to blockchain (by a
| government registrar) than held in a local instance of
| filemaker pro, or in a paper file cabinet, is where I was
| going.
| pornel wrote:
| Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for
| blockchain. If someone was going to steal your property,
| they're not going to care what some blockchain says about
| it.
|
| If you only need an informational registry for well-
| behaved cooperating parties, you don't need it to be
| completely trustless. There are many other ways to
| decentralize storage and ensure consensus when you don't
| require mexican-standoff level of distrust.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| >Property registries are one of those stupid ideas for
| blockchain.
|
| Specifically, the thing that is essential for most
| property registries is recognition and enforcement by a
| meat-space government. So, while a digital ledger _is_ a
| good idea compared to, well, lots of existing property
| registries, decentralization /trustlessness isn't
| important, adoption by a trustworthy and capable enforcer
| is.
| lstamour wrote:
| I personally agree that Blockchain or distributed ledgers
| are overhyped for use cases where simple, centralized
| approaches to trust would go a lot farther.
|
| The one example I can point to where maybe existing systems
| were improved through blockchain-like technology would be
| Certificate Transparency
| https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/ yet even
| then there's a lot of trust in browsers run by centralized
| actors to ensure the system works as expected. The system
| is further documented in https://chromium.googlesource.com/
| chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... and https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc6962.html Also,
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-certificate-
| transpar... is a good read.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What I found interesting about Blockchain were (in case of
| utilitarian projects).
|
| - country agnostic scale in mind
|
| - constantly working network
|
| There's a project for supply chain tracking which wants to take
| care of .. well, tracking. But by attempting of being a
| universal solution, I'd foresee a lot of time saved for just
| about everybody on the planet.
|
| Maybe I'm misguided
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Blockchain is a brilliant solution
|
| It's not "brilliant". It is _a_ solution, with shortcomings
| even for its stated purpose.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a technology that's as easy to shit on as it is to hype!
|
| I don't know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a
| useful tool for a lot of different use cases.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Such as?
| rodiger wrote:
| There's a weird insistence (especially here on HN) that if
| blockchain isn't doing something that can't be done in
| another way then it is useless.
|
| In reality just doing normal, established processes in a
| distributed way often _is_ the value-add. See decentralized
| finance[0]. All these tools and primitives exist in
| traditional finance, but when it 's decentralized all
| market participants can get a cut of the rewards instead of
| just the big banks.
|
| A more recent AWS-like example is Internet Computer[1]. A
| more open way to on-board data centers and build
| distributed apps. Could it be done in a centralized way?
| Yes, of course. Is it more fair and open if it's
| decentralized? Also yes.
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08778
|
| [1] https://dfinity.org/data-centers
| rajin444 wrote:
| The only interesting aspect of blockchain is
| decentralized trust - trust being the key part. If you
| don't need decentralized trust you don't need blockchain.
| And outside of a global currency, there isn't much that
| needs that.
|
| DeFi is just unregulated speculation / ponzi schemes.
| People came up with new systems (supposedly faster than
| bitcoin) to send currency back and forth. People are
| flocking to it hoping to get rich quick, but it doesn't
| actually deliver anything novel outside of not being
| regulated.
|
| Internet Computer would be cool if it was actually
| decentralized. But it's not:
|
| > The Internet Computer hosts its own governance system,
| called the "Network Nervous System" (NNS). In order for a
| data center to provide compute capacity to the Internet
| Computer network, it must acquire a DcID (Data Center ID)
| by making an application to the governance system
|
| And unfortunately making a decentralized version of what
| Internet Computer wants to do is _very_ hard (maybe
| impossible).
|
| So many of the newer "blockchain" tech is considered
| useless is because, like Internet Computer, they cheat
| and introduce centralization because of the technical
| limitations of being decentralized. BNB/BSC is a huge
| example of this (one of the major new "defi" networks).
| remeq wrote:
| I agree with you that the only interesting aspect of
| blockchain is decentralized trust. But decentralized
| trust is a big thing. It is actually such a massive thing
| and people will sooner or later realize that. The
| magnitude of this thing is actually on a level of
| invention of democracy in social systems. It will change
| everything. And the application of decentralized trust
| (read - institution-less systems) goes far beyond
| decentralized finance.
|
| If we look at the tendency of every single centralized
| system or organization to end up being either sub-optimal
| or evil or screwing individual we really have to ask
| whether there isn't a better way. Consider evolution of
| centralized political powers, dictatorships etc.,
| consider evolution of big tech companies like google or
| facebook, consider evolution of big products.
|
| If blockchain provides decentralized trust this can be
| used for almost evertyhing. And it doesn't really mean
| that you will run your trustless version of AWS directly
| on blockchain. For many applications the blockchain is
| there for trust and system of economy incentives for the
| actors in the systems (as these two things go hand by
| hand). The blockchain is not there to do the "business
| logic"
| rodiger wrote:
| I can be a market maker for an exchange with just $100...
| not sure how that isn't anything new. I can get a flash
| loan for $10,000,000 with zero credit to profit off of
| arbitrage opportunities. Yes, this is all focused on
| money but nothing to do with speculation or ponzi
| schemes.
|
| DeFi is sort of billed as an "internet of money," so it
| makes sense that it's focused on financial systems.
| Unfortunately many do just dump their life savings and
| hope to get rich quick. A similar thing happened during
| the dot com boom in the traditional markets. I imagine a
| lot of this will settle over time (and there will still
| be scams and pump and dumps, just as there are in penny
| stocks / the wider internet in general).
|
| As for Internet Computer, the application to the
| governance system is decentralized and votes are made by
| token holders on-chain. It's decentralized in that the
| votes are open and auditable.
|
| BSC sucks, agree with you there but they're far from the
| norm. I'm really just shocked that there's so little
| interest in the tech behind all the protocols here given
| the wider hacker ethos.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The pump and dump hype around cryptocurrency turns a lot
| of people off.
| rodiger wrote:
| Yeah it does. It's a shame and hopefully the risks are
| made clearer over time.
| whateveracct wrote:
| dfinity is pretty centralized. they cut corners and
| basically hand-pick their mining data centers. they only
| qualify as "decentralized" because they work with
| multiple unrelated data centers. i am pretty sure
| multiple hard problems that they need to solve to reach
| true decentralization have been punted because they hand
| pick their miners.
|
| also, more than decentralization, they mostly sell their
| dev-friendly programming model (Motoko, wasm) but a
| centralized version hosted by AWS would be cheaper faster
| better. Lunch waiting to be eaten.
|
| most people making cloud software don't need the
| decentralization. Dfinity papers over this by having
| their president go pontificate to make it seem like the
| fate of the world depends on it.
| rodiger wrote:
| They don't hand-pick miners at the end of the day- it's
| an on-chain vote (by token-holders and I'm sure they own
| a large sum so point taken).
|
| Maybe not the best example- I'm not too familiar with the
| structure and they definitely over-hype everything about
| the project. Still the parallel is there of making a
| centralized thing more accessible / open to more market
| participants.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly. Think about the downsides of online connectivity
| with things like say pipelines or IoT. The answer to
| every problem in the last 30 years has been to plug an
| Ethernet cable to it, and the consequences of that are
| coming home to roost!
|
| The ability to have a trusted source of data to validate
| instructions or other content alone is very useful.
| Blockchain is no more "stupid" than PGP or PKI.
| ostenning wrote:
| The entire space is filled with hype, but that doesn't mean there
| aren't any good projects amongst them. It's important to be open
| minded whilst seeing through the scams.
|
| Banks are genuinely threatened by DeFi and for good reason.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Beauty of this is that there are two clear reasons to shut down
| that service. 1. because it didn't work, or 2. because it did
| work because blockchains don't need a blockchain service because
| blockchains run on decentralized blockchains.
|
| Blockchain.
| sexy_seedbox wrote:
| If you're familiar with Typescript, try Lisk[0], it's pretty easy
| to get started.
|
| [0] https://lisk.com
| marcinzm wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a good PR move for Azure in terms of
| enterprise sales. One of the big selling points of AWS is that
| they support everything pretty much forever. Azure has now made
| it clear that they can and will shutdown services with relatively
| short notice.
| dharmab wrote:
| This was a Preview service. It was not being marketed as a
| production ready product.
| BrentOzar wrote:
| > Azure has now made it clear that they can and will shutdown
| services with relatively short notice.
|
| This isn't a new thing - there's an entire Twitter feed
| dedicated to things Azure discontinues:
| https://twitter.com/azureendoflife
| moksly wrote:
| Enterprise doesn't worry too much about changes or shutdowns.
| We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or
| without plans for how we move forward.
|
| I'd be pretty happy if our legacy Mainframe systems got shut
| down, with a decent plan for how our suppliers would move
| forward to other technologies. As it stands there are only two
| national companies left who can handle mainframes in my
| country, so there isn't much of a bidding war when we put
| systems into procurement processes, and it makes things really
| expensive over time.
|
| I hope most enterprises entered the cloud with a mindset not to
| get locked in. I know we did, and in that setup, Microsoft can
| move forward as they see fit as long as they give us time to
| move on.
|
| Not that I think any enterprise organisations were really using
| Azure Blockchain, I still haven't seen a single reason to use
| Blockchain. Even if you live in a corrupt country, where
| decentralised trust might make sense, you still need an
| authority to back it up. This is why Bitcoin works for crime,
| they enforce it.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| > Microsoft's product page for Azure BaaS lists GE, J.P.
| Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers.
|
| The article says that these enterprises are using it
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Uhh ... that means they did a pilot with it back when BaaS
| started out.
|
| 50 bucks says none of them actively use Azure Blockchain
| for anything meaningful in their organization.
|
| And Consensys is MSFT's preferred BaaS ISV these days.
|
| Source: work at MSFT Partner, occasionally co-discuss BaaS
| with clients.
| xemdetia wrote:
| I've become extremely jaded to the logo gallery for these
| obvious secondary/tertiary B2B SaaS products in an
| organization. The logo for a pilot or some other freebie
| is kind of overdone now. Often this pilot ends up hitting
| the real org then crashing and burning because these
| secondary/tertiary pet projects are often never given the
| chance to be mature enough for their actual customer base
| before trying to solicit customers. These services
| finally hit a security person or something else and just
| gets the axe because they are just not even close to
| ready. If I'm playing technical customer I'm reaching out
| to you because I need what you have rather than you
| soliciting me. Most businesses are not so complex that
| it's obvious if a B2B SaaS is an essential service or
| some weird add-on trendy thing they are trying on for
| size so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly
| or without plans for how we move forward.
|
| This change has a 4 month notice period and the plan to move
| forward from MS seems to be literally "you should switch to
| something else." So this change doesn't seem to tick any of
| the boxes you mentioned.
| twayallday wrote:
| AWS does it too. See the S3 path-style deprecation plans which
| saw a lot of customer pushback. [1]
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-
| deprecation-...
| meowkit wrote:
| Uh is shutting down in September short notice?
|
| Regardless I looked into the internals/source code for it (I
| work there) - and it seems to be cold storage for the workbench
| and not blockchain support as a whole.
|
| Right now it makes more sense to use ConsenSys or manage your
| own nodes on Azure not pay for a tool.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Uh is shutting down in September short notice?
|
| For a large company where it might take them 2+ months to
| just get approval for a new project or a significant project
| change, yes. I once spent 6 months in meetings to get a
| single column added to a database for a project we were doing
| and that was a semi-tech company.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| I am sure they thought about the "PR" consequences of shutting
| this service down. My guess is the number of users are
| comparatively so low that it doesn't really matter. I doubt any
| of their major enterprise customers were using it.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That's not PR impact, that's material impact. The PR impact
| is not on the current users of the service but on all future
| potential users of Azure. Like every GCP thread being filled
| with doom and gloom about Google killing services from people
| who have never used GCP.
| peterkelly wrote:
| > _Microsoft 's documentation suggests users start migrating to
| an alternative now_
|
| So, a database?
| nomoreplease wrote:
| This brings up a good question. How do you migrate a blockchain
| from Azure to somewhere else?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You rebuild it, same with any public cloud that isn't using
| an open standard. That is why people should only invest
| enough effort into a cloud to deploy an agnostic solution
| like Kubernetes.
| google234123 wrote:
| But can a database handle more than 5 transactions per second?
| marktangotango wrote:
| Well done, beautifully well placed comment.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| If you think modern block chain is still stuck at 5 tps, then
| you have not been paying attention.
| atanasovskib wrote:
| So 7?
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| Try 50k
| [deleted]
| _pdp_ wrote:
| What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?
| spydum wrote:
| Public relations, mostly.
| picardo wrote:
| Permissioned blockchains can be useful in trade finance and
| international trade. Financial transactions across borders can
| be delayed to allow for clearance and settlement between
| several institutions, which requires multiple banking systems
| to verify the integrity of transaction and collect a lot of
| paper trail. There are several competing projects solving for
| that problem right now.
| koheripbal wrote:
| I don't see why these would need a blockchain rather than
| just a centralized database.
|
| I'm very skeptical of these use cases.
| speeder wrote:
| The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when
| neither side of a transaction trust the other.
|
| For example, suppose US and Iran agreed to pay each other
| some amount as proof of their sactions deal...
|
| US doesn't trust Iran or its central bank. Iran doesn't
| trust SWIFT, since it can be easily manipulated by its
| enemies (as it has been, before). US doesn't trust the
| alternative to SWIFT, since it is run by Russia and China.
|
| EDIT: common people, that was just an example, it doesn't
| mean future transactions between US and Iran would be done
| that way. It was just an easy to understand example.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when
| neither side of a transaction trust the other.
|
| So what's the purpose of _private_ blockchains then?
| Grandparent comment was about "Permissioned blockchains
| can be useful..." not blockchain in general.
|
| How does it remain private in a trustless case?
|
| Alternatively, who keeps the blockchain private? Who
| manages access? If there is an impartial 3rd party, an
| "authority" or a "broker", a "governor" that all other
| parties can trust to do that, even if they don't trust
| each other ... can't that authority just use a database,
| with some checksums and signed rows if need be? What
| can't you get from a private github repo?
|
| Is the "private blockchain" centralised or decentralised?
|
| I feel that every time I see this discussion, the
| argument is shifted to a straw man whenever the wrong
| question is asked.
| jnwatson wrote:
| There's _no_ purpose of private blockchains, unless your
| definition of blockchain is just chained signatures
| perhaps with a Merkle tree.
|
| The intersection of the set of "private" and "mutually
| distrustful parties" is essentially 0.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| That's what I thought, but I'd like to see a proponent of
| private blockchains explain it with out resorting to
| answering a different and more general question about
| "the purpose of blockchain is..."
| bydlocoder wrote:
| That's like the worst example ever. With international
| peace talks there usually is a trusted third party, like
| US was a part of various Israeli-Palestinian talks.
| lordlimecat wrote:
| >The purpose of blockchain is to solve what happens when
| neither side of a transaction trust the other.
|
| Normally the courts solve this problem, so this is only
| an issue if one or both parties are operating outside of
| the law.
|
| Which, for normal financial enterprises trying to do
| business, creates regulatory problems: Chase can't
| exactly transact with the PLA without getting bulldozed
| by regulators, and you can't exactly hide the transaction
| on blockchain (since its immutable).
|
| In the scenario you describe, there are ways of cheating
| even in blockchain (51% attack), and there are ways of
| solving the issue outside of blockchain (military force,
| embargos).
| meepmorp wrote:
| OTOH:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fd4113419276444eba1d2a46d5c297
| 52
|
| In 2016, the US paid Iran $1.7B in pallets of EUR and
| CHF. The article's not explicit, but the settlement
| network probably uses a C-130.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| We actually already do this. See this job description: ht
| tps://acpol2.army.mil/fasclass/search_fs/search_fs_output
| ....
|
| This would generally be responsible for paying parties
| that actually trust you, using Treasury checks and
| possibly small amounts of cash, but there is an
| equivalent position within the uniformed Finance Corps
| where you pay untrusted parties who also don't trust you.
| For that purpose, you deliver extremely large briefcases
| full of cash. Basically, the same idea as a drug deal
| where the buyer and seller don't trust each other.
| Everything is transacted in cash, and both parties are
| carrying a lot of guns. This is generally how we make
| payments to local warlords in theaters of combat where
| they are not by any means an internationally recognized
| legitimate authority you can make any kind of a treaty
| with, but you need to buy their cooperation anyway.
|
| As for trusting they'll actually deliver what you're
| buying, again, that's what the guns are for.
|
| Heck, as it stands right now just for normal consumers,
| buyers and sellers don't need to trust each other. They
| just need a legal authority who can prosecute each side
| and they need to trust that legal authority. Barring
| that, they need an extra legal authority they trust with
| guns.
|
| As it stands, the obvious limitation of a blockchain is
| it only helps if your transaction is solely the exchange
| of data stored on the blockchain itself. Otherwise,
| you're back to the same issue. The fact that a
| transaction is recorded on a ledger doesn't mean either
| party actually received the goods they expected, and it
| doesn't mean they have any means of remediation, legal or
| otherwise, if they don't. The fact that a ledger says you
| own something doesn't mean you're in possession of it,
| and it doesn't mean the party that is in possession of it
| has to give it to you.
| markwkw wrote:
| Could you explain this example a bit more? US and Iran
| meet and discuss some deal? And then the want to pay each
| other some amount as proof of reaching the deal? Could
| they do it in public and invite various journalists to
| witness the post-signing conference where both parties
| say they have reached the deal? (It seems to be a
| standard procedure)
|
| Or is the set of blockchain payments an guarantee of
| adherence to the deal? How would that help? Are the coins
| supposed to be returned in case of lack of adherence? If
| that is the case, how would I trust the other party to
| return the bitcoin?
| tnzm wrote:
| Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their
| agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger,
| which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party
| reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public
| record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it.
| Parties confirmed to be less trustworthy are subsequently
| afforded fewer compromises during negotiations.
|
| A NFT could also be minted, where people and institutions
| stake money on the deal and if either party breaks the
| agreement, the NFT is burned. So stakers are incentivized
| to do whatever is within their reach to make governments
| stick to the deal - otherwise they would lose their
| investments.
|
| The way to bootstrap participatory democracy in a world
| that only cares about the money is to bake it into the
| money.
| namdnay wrote:
| What does renege on the deal really mean though? usually
| in those situations both sides will claim that the other
| is reneging on the deal
|
| Engineering solutions based on binary ideas of true and
| false just don't apply to diplomacy or politics
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their
| agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger,
| which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party
| reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public
| record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it.
|
| You can do this with paper. Signed paper documents. You
| have invented the "treaty". It has been a thing for
| centuries.
| htrp wrote:
| A "signed paper document" or a "treaty" is also
| meaningless without robust enforcement mechanisms.... or
| the instant it's in either side's interest to ignore.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| That goes double for blockchains.
| picardo wrote:
| Banking systems are complex. You can't build a single
| centralized system that works for everyone, let alone get
| everyone to trust each other on the system. The solution
| needs to be decentralized, trustworthy and provide built-in
| checks for integrity.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Would you say that we have a "a single centralized system
| that works for everyone" in banking now? It seems more
| like a patchwork of a lot of systems to me.
| picardo wrote:
| No, we don't. That's why it's slow and expensive to trade
| across borders, especially if the counterparties have
| never done business before. It's an arduous process of
| proving creditworthiness through letters of credit. You
| often see document fraud where someone can tamper with a
| letter of credit, which is hard to detect.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > That's why it's slow and expensive to trade across
| borders, ... document fraud
|
| Would you say that blockchains make this faster, cheaper
| and less prone to fraud?
| picardo wrote:
| Sure. Here is a story from 4 years ago. [1] Barclays says
| blockchain cut this process from 10 days to 4 hours.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-barclays-
| blockchain...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I don't see a lot of news on that since 2016. Are they
| still using it?
| bydlocoder wrote:
| Well, I'd rather provide a letter than put all my
| transactions in public eye.
| picardo wrote:
| It's not in the public eye. The blockchain is only
| accessible to trusted parties, like banks and merchant
| representatives.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Who manages access to the blockchain, and how do you
| trust them?
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Yup. All of this is really about having a db for known
| counter party multi org db for financial institutions without
| having to basically fund new clearing corporations for each
| new market. Source: I was at Jpm on some of the relevant
| teams for a few years.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Docusign[1] has been using blockchain for a while now because
| it solves technical problems for their use cases.
|
| [1] https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain
| eterm wrote:
| Did Docusign really have a problem that couldn't be solved by
| any other means of publishing the hash?
|
| Ultimately the hash comes from Docusign, so I'm not sure I
| can think of the problem case where someone doesn't trust
| Docusign to self publish that hash but does trust a hash that
| Docusign publishes to the blockchain.
| danuker wrote:
| I'd argue a more popular blockchain than their in-house one
| would provide stronger proof.
|
| For example, a Bitcoin one:
| https://www.proofofexistence.com/
| tectec wrote:
| It looks like that is using 0.00025 BTC per transaction,
| which currently is $12 USD, that seems quite steep for a
| single document verification.
| bluesign wrote:
| it is about timestamping basically nothing else. basically
| that cannot sign something in the past. Though you can do
| the same with sequence number, and publicly publishing all
| signed hashes.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
| wizeman wrote:
| Presumably, by publishing the hash on a public blockchain
| they are creating a trusted record of _when_ the hash was
| published, which can be verified after the fact and which
| cannot be modified or removed, with planet-scale proof-of-
| work level of cryptographic assurance.
|
| If they published the hashes on, say, their webpage or some
| third party's webpage, nothing would prevent them (or the
| third party) from redacting or removing the hash after the
| fact, given sufficient motivation.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| RFC 3161 does the same, without a blockchain (public or
| private).
| tootahe45 wrote:
| Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.
| hn8788 wrote:
| Sometimes it's the government's idea in the first place. I
| work at a contracting company, and one of our government
| customers said they wanted a service that utilized blockchain
| technology. They didn't know what a blockchain was, or care
| what the blockchain powered service was, they just wanted to
| sound like they were responsible for acquiring cutting edge
| technology. Luckily that was shortly before NIST put out
| their research paper that said there is almost never a good
| reason to use a blockchain, and the government employee
| quickly lost interest.
| WasimBhai wrote:
| Link to the said paper, please?
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Probably means this one from 2018:
|
| https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pd
| f
|
| Brief quote from the conclusions:
|
| > The use of blockchain technology is still in its early
| stages, but it is built on widely understood and sound
| cryptographic principles. Currently, there is a lot of
| hype around the technology, and many proposed uses for
| it. Moving forward, it is likely that the hype will die
| down, and blockchain technology will become just another
| tool that can be used.
|
| Then there is a fairly large paragraph about limitations
| and choosing the right tool for the job rather than just
| trying to shoehorn blockchain in for its own sake.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Blockchains are an irrevocable proof of record (immutability
| with cryptographic proof) unlike traditional databases that
| need to be audited to capture all updates. Amazon QLDB, though
| private but not a Blockchain, could be used as one: For ex,
| creating and maintaining customer wallets (per customer coupons
| and discounts specific to your service).
|
| Public blockchains could be used for accounting transparency,
| for example, for tracking donations and spends of a non-profit.
| Decentralised blockchains are of course being continually
| redefined and reinvented, with an alternate financial complex
| at the forefront of it all.
|
| There are likely many more usecases, but the ones most
| interesting to me are global payments infrastructure being
| built by stellar.org, celo.org, and diem.com.
|
| See also: https://www.hyperledger.org/
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >an irrevocable proof of record (immutability with
| cryptographic proof)
|
| Which ignores and can even make worse the problem of bad data
| at the entry point. This is what effectively killed the
| entire set of use cases related to supply chain provenance.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| But how can a blockchain be actually and meaningfully
| "public" without proof of work and distributed mining
| establishing majority based consensus on what _is_.
|
| If you just store the equivalent of a blockchain somewhere
| then I don't see what benefit it provides over a database
| controlled by a consortium.
|
| It's all bullshit.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| A blockchain does not require anything beyond ensuring the
| prior entries checksums make sense.
|
| Making past entries immutable is the purpose.
|
| Proof of work and distributed mining don't need a
| blockchain.
|
| Have you heard of hashcash? It is proof-of-work concept to
| prevent email spam.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| what prevents the entity controlling the blockchain from
| recursively changing data and adjusting the checksums?
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Paraphrasing Achebe here: "that until the lions have
| their own historians, the history of the hunt will always
| glorify the hunter."
|
| This is also an issue with a 51% attack.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| See my answer above - in cases where the participants are
| all known you can use BFT algorithms to prevent attacks so
| long as less than a third of the replicas are malicious.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Proof of work is fading away, Proof of Stake is becoming
| the default method.
| nindalf wrote:
| Presumably, there's a third party that keeps a copy of the
| blockchain. If you rewrite the history of your blockchain,
| they'll detect it.
|
| It's fair to ask why this public record needs to be in a
| blockchain though. You could store the record in plain HTML
| on a public website and have the Web Archive create
| periodic immutable snapshots of it.
| DaniloDias wrote:
| A distributed ledger eliminates the risk that the third
| party hosting the record can be hacked or that the
| operator fraudulently lies in the record.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| Exacactly - you just need something equivalent to a
| certificate authority which signs states of the database
| and guarantees the correctness of the stored data.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| For more than a decade, this company has been publishing
| their hashes in the NYTimes classified ads:
| http://www.surety.com/digital-copyright-protection/prove-
| own...
|
| (some cryptokiddies have tried to claim it as "the
| world's first blockchain" https://btcmanager.com/finding-
| the-oldest-blockchain-in-the-... apparently not
| understanding how much it undermines the case for
| wasteful proof-of-work blockchains if a classified ad
| does the same job)
| diamondhandle wrote:
| Okay, and what happens when I run a phony ad next to this
| one in the New York Times? What happens when I bribe the
| guy at the Times to accidentally use my hash rather than
| theirs?
|
| It's a cute gimmick, I'll give them that.
| haukem wrote:
| They prove that the hash they publish in the NYTimes
| exists at that time. There are probably some archives
| which can give you an authorized copy of the NYTimes from
| a specific date. You can use that to prove that the hash
| existed at the date the NYTimes was published. This is
| now the hash over a hash tree, which this companies
| stores. With this single hash they can also prove that
| every document in this hash tree existed at that time.
| They can not add a extra document later, because this
| would alter the hash they published in the NYTimes.
|
| When you publish your phony ad in the NYTimes, you also
| prove that this phony ad existed at the date the NYTimes
| was published.
|
| This company probably buys one edition of the NYTimes
| with their add and check if the NYTimes published the
| correct hash, if it is wrong they will run an other add
| the next day with the correct hash the next day. Now they
| only prove that the hash existed the next day.
| mattdesl wrote:
| The NYTimes hashes idea is brilliant, but if you were to
| try to scale that concept to thousands or millions of
| different global use cases, eventually it seems like
| you'd end up with a technology platform similar to a
| public distributed ledger, i.e. a blockchain.
|
| I'm open to hearing about any other non-blockchain
| solutions to this problem, though. One seems to be IOTA
| and their "Tangle" graph, but I don't fully understand
| how that could facilitate a historical record of each
| transaction, as (unlike a blockchain) it is not an
| append-only ledger.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| That requires trusting one authority. You can do better -
| there are distributed algorithms that can prevent
| malicious behaviour from compromising the system so long
| as less than a third of the participants are malicious.
| smt88 wrote:
| A blockchain requires trusting the authority that set it
| up and/or any authority that can 51% attack it.
|
| If you are in a situation where you can't find _any_
| trustworthy authority (including yourself), you are
| probably part of a scam or a crime.
|
| Byzantine fault tolerance is an interesting concept that
| solves a problem that almost never happens in modern
| software.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| > A blockchain requires trusting the authority that set
| it up and/or any authority that can 51% attack it.
|
| So, you don't understand how blockchains work, okay.
|
| With a distributed BC you don't have to trust an
| authority. You trust that 51% of participating entities
| know what they are doing and that they checked the
| protocol implementation and agree on one.
| smt88 wrote:
| A distributed blockchain has code that you have to trust.
|
| Also you can say that everything in a blockchain is
| verifiable by third parties, but most people don't do
| that work (not unlike any open-source software).
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I don't know why the comment above was downvoted. The
| parent clearly doesn't know what they are talking about
| (e.g. in a deterministic setting at most one third can be
| malicious).
| haukem wrote:
| What is the advantage of a private blockchain over a hash
| tree like used in git? A git commit is also irrevocable,
| except if you do a git rebase. How do you prevent something
| similar like a git rebase in a private blockchain?
|
| A public blockchain with multiple agents that do not trust
| each other like in BitCoin make sense to me.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Think of an industry e.g. like banking, where the different
| participants know who each other are but don't fully trust
| each other. Presuming each participant controls one replica
| in the system, then using BFT algorithms you can ensure
| that so long as less than a third of the participants are
| malicious it is not possible to perform such an attack.
| haukem wrote:
| You can also set up a git repository and prevent history
| rewrites on the central server. Some third party could
| also offer this as a service. Each entity can check this
| by doing a pull every minute in a cron job, which fails
| when history rewrite happened. If they detect this, their
| legal department can take some actions.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Just because Encarta existed, didn't mean Wikipedia
| shouldn't; or because NFS exists, Dropbox shouldn't. They
| can be solutions to the same problem. In git's case
| though, it sounds more like a abuse of its underlying
| properties (not to mention, you'd have to block all git
| commands that can rewrite history).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > not to mention, you'd have to block all git commands
| that can rewrite history
|
| Okay, so use mercurial or fossil.
| acdha wrote:
| Don't signatures get you the same benefit? I don't need
| to trust you simply to sign something saying "user X
| showed me hash Y at time Z".
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Signatures still requires a centralized entity to manage
| the trust. A public distributed ledger, be it a
| blockchain or something else do not.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Don't a private blockchain need that anyway to manage
| access to add to the chain?
|
| Or how does a private blockchain manage who has write
| access to it (since it's supposed to be private)?
| acdha wrote:
| We don't even have a centralized authority for x509 in
| browsers, and that's the closest you come to being
| correct -- there are still many CAs and multiple groups
| coordinating which of those are trusted, and private CAs
| are common even up to millions of users.
|
| GPG has been around since the 1990s with the web of trust
| being entirely decentralized and while I'd be the first
| to say there is room for improvement there's no way
| that's anything other than decentralized.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Every company on the planet seems to be asking that. It's like
| "AI", one of those technologies that you can't risk everyone
| else using while you don't.
|
| So for some reason having a solution and look for the problem
| is suddenly acceptable. Few seem to find the problem though.
|
| If you read through typical descriptions of how blockchains can
| be applied in industry, you'll notice that they are extremely
| vague. That should tell you something.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and
| video streaming, respectively.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| NY runs its Vaccine passport on an IBM blockchain citing
| privacy benefits:
|
| >special emphasis has been placed on the protection of an
| individual's privacy. Secure technologies, like blockchain and
| encryption, are woven throughout Excelsior Pass to help protect
| the data, making it verifiable and trusted. No private health
| data is stored or tracked within the apps. Excelsior Pass can
| be used to voluntarily show a QR code as proof of COVID-19
| vaccination or negative test result via a digital smartphone
| wallet or printed credential without sharing underlying
| personal health details.
|
| https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-la...
| weasel_words wrote:
| No one, other than the city of NY, will have the full node.
|
| So in this use-case there is no distributed network in the
| first place. And never will be.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Reading through both that and IBM's site, I'm struggling to
| see how blockchain enables this in any way? Covid test and
| vaccine providers have to be trusted for any of that to work,
| and without the "trustless" element blockchain provides you
| literally zero advantages (with a huge amount of
| disadvantages).
|
| EDIT: I guess I could request the whitepaper from IBM and
| read it, I mean what's yet one more tech giant sending me
| spam and selling my info to advertisers going to hurt? But I
| don't see any way for the entire thing to work and avoid
| people making up fraudulent test results/vax records without
| trust. I mean even with trust a clinic could feasibly fake
| that stuff, but without trust pretty much anyone could do it.
|
| EDIT2: Requested the whitepaper from IBM and it's literally
| just an 11 page marketing PowerPoint. Mentions blockchain a
| few times but doesn't explain how it solves anything that a
| normal RDBMS (or even some fancy distributed one with
| immutable records etc. where all parties are _trusted_ )
| couldn't do.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Parties can prove things without others needing to trust
| anyone.
|
| You can put information on the blockchain and others can be
| sure it can't be removed.
|
| There are use cases.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > Parties can prove things without others needing to trust
| anyone.
|
| Yes, but the only things you can prove without trust are
| events that happen 100% inside the blockchain. Which, AFAICT
| the only use for a system that works that way that I've seen
| is cryptocurrency. The other one people were really hot on
| was supply chain, but, from what I understand, when you have
| supply chain trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee
| someone edited a database record", they look more like
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-
| bu...
|
| Which, ironically, that's not a great use case for
| cryptocurrency either. Traditional escrow services are a
| better fit. If the trader had bought that tanker full of
| rocks with BTC, there would have been no way to reverse the
| transaction after it had been determined to be fraudulent.
|
| So, yeah, blockchain is mathematically provable to have
| certain properties. But, like with any proof, those
| properties only hold for as long as the proof's assumptions
| hold. And it's really, really difficult for us laypeople to
| recognize when the assumptions do or do not hold when they're
| defined in terms of technical jargon that uses a familiar
| term like "trust" but assigns it a subtly but critically
| different definition from the everyday meaning.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| You're describing a number of limitations, some of them
| more valid than others.
|
| I don't think blockchain is worth the hype it got a few
| years ago, but still, with these limitations, there are use
| cases. That doesn't change because you say 'this use case
| doesn't work'.
| tnzm wrote:
| >but, from what I understand, when you have supply chain
| trust issues, they don't look like "oh gee someone edited a
| database record", they look more like
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/trader-
| bu...
|
| >Normally, in such cases of non-delivery a trading house
| could make a claim against a cargo's insurance policy. But
| Mercuria found that just one out of seven contracts used by
| the Turkish company to insure the cargo was real. The rest
| had been forged.
|
| Can't forge a smart contract.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Fair, though that would be a much more compelling
| observation if anyone had ever succeeded in implementing
| a full-fledged insurance policy in the form of a smart
| contract.
|
| I'm curious, for example, how you'd get an errors and
| omissions clause working in Etherium. Like, how would
| Ether arbitrate a claim against that policy? Assume, for
| the sake of argument, that hard AI has not been invented
| yet.
| slver wrote:
| Thing is, "without trusting anyone" isn't that relevant most
| times. The entire system of property rights is based on
| trusted notaries. Works as well as anything.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It doesn't work internationally, but we're used to that
| because there never was an alternative.
| tnzm wrote:
| > Works as well as anything.
|
| Which is to say, just barely well enough to keep going.
|
| And then there's the whole thing with how its scaling
| issues are mitigated via the platform dependency on the
| state's monopoly on violent enforcement. Emphasis on
| monopoly.
| slver wrote:
| So the big problem in your opinion, is that we're not
| allowed to legally beat each other up like animals over
| property disputes.
|
| All right.
|
| By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat
| up people, either.
| eplanit wrote:
| Blockchain is the computer industry's string theory. Bold on the
| promises and hype, but meek on the returns.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| That very much depends which returns you're talking about. It's
| been pretty good on those of the financial variety.
| merth wrote:
| that's not technology fueled, that's "get rich quick" fueled.
| you don't need blockchain to do that, It has been around for
| 1000 years.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I don't know that much about current crypto technology, but
| enough to know the majority of comments in this discussion have
| not been keeping up to date with block chain innovations, the
| surge away from proof of work to proof of stake, the massive
| increases in transactions per second through innovations in both
| Level 1 and Level 2 block chain tech. Moreover, there are real
| applications: Look to Vechain for supply chain authentication,
| and Theta, a project by a founder of YouTube, that is live now
| and enables efficient delivery of 4k+ hidef video streaming.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I'm guessing hardly anyone ever used this, considering the
| relatively short 4 month notice period.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Or every company that did use it realized it's full of bs and
| stopped.
| [deleted]
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Does anyone else have the first link ("shutting down its Azure
| Blockchain Service on September 10, 2021") somehow open a weird
| empty page https://ytthn.com/blank-page instead of the expected
| URL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...?
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