Google Cloud Launches Blockchain Toolkit for App Developers | Hacker News Reader

Google Cloud Launches Blockchain Toolkit for App Developers

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70 pointsjohn5817 comments

This is a little bit confusingly worded, here is the full press release: http://hub.digitalasset.com/hubfs/Press%20Releases/DA_Google...

As best as I can tell, all that has happened is that Digital Asset (a company) is offering their software through the GCP Marketplace:

> "The DAML PaaS is a fully-managed solution that developers can use to test and deploy DLT applications, accessible through Google Cloud’s Orbitera application marketplace technologies."

This article http://fortune.com/2018/07/23/google-cloud-digital-asset/ makes it sound like it is a big deal, but I'm not seeing anything on Google's side about this. I don't think Google Cloud is actually offering anything here?

What's the point of having a centralised blockchain? As far as I understand the thing that sets blockchain apart from the traditional data systems is that each participant maintains, calculates and updates new entries into the data system. All nodes work together to ensure they are all coming to the same conclusions. But in this case Google cloud will serve as the master whilst everyone else is a client which is just the same thing as a traditional data system. Correct me if I'm wrong

If blockchain is truly useful as a component in building new tech then it makes sense the big providers would productize it. Doing so doesnt prevent any distribution from occurring but managing loads of your own infra is literally what these teams are trying to help you do.

> What's the point of having a centralised blockchain?

It allows execs to do something other than stammer when investors ask them what their "blockchain strategy" is. It also allows them to be "AI-first, Mobile-first, and blockchain-first" all at the same time.

Another question that seems to be avoided whenever I ask professionals is the usage of the blockchain. I personally do not see it's practical application beyond its use in crypto currency or other financial related use cases such as validation of user purchase histories. But what else is there for the tech? Looking for some insight.

It can be used anywhere there's a middleman/ intermediary or where trust is required.

I guess I'm just not creative enough to think of what that might be, if not money.

There are plenty of solutions to middlemen. Usually they exist not because of technical limitations but because of other reasons (see car dealerships).

> where trust is required.

Blockchains don't solve the trust problem at all. Except if none of the trust problems you have interact somehow with the material world

That's the only thing blockchains solve is the decentralization of trust. Oracles provide a bridge, and it is possible to make trusted decentralized oracles.

Look into Golem and Brave/BAT, they are great examples of other use cases than crypto currencies.

> What's the point of having a centralised blockchain?

Extracting money from VCs

Google Cloud

Amazon Cloud

Didn’t those sound like they’re nebulous like “the internet”? No one owns the internet!

But those clouds were proprietary.

A real cloud would be made up of thousands of computers all joining together to store info.

Same here. What good is a blockchain that Google owns? About as good as file storage by Amazon or email by google.

Blockchain after a decade still doesn't have any use case. Nothing new with Google's box-checking here.

I can't tell if you're being intentionally facetious, but I'd say the market indicates file storage by Amazon and email by Google are quite valuable.

I would say, like Dijkstra, they are recording the value on the wrong side of the ledger!

Give it time and they'll give you a two month heads up that they'll be astronomically raising the API costs. Whether something you were paying $50-70 a month for would now cost you closer to $15,000 a month for the exact same thing.

Because that's what they just did to Google Maps API.

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