Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyphertruck | Hacker News Reader

Instead of reading this press release, please read this seminal article from 2001 rebutting it: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/

“Amazon managed blockchain” is an amazing phrase. All three words are wrong. “Blockchain” is a distributed technology created specifically for censorship resistance. A “managed blockchain” should just be replaced with a database. Databases are faster & cheaper.

Meanwhile, Amazon is a company that has engaged in censorship many times over the years.

And that’s not even addressing the issues with ethereum.

View on HN

Or do read the press release, and see that this is not a managed blockchain. It's a full node that connects to the public Ethereum network to send transactions, but it doesn't produce blocks.

I.e. it's an easy way to connect your corporate IT to Ethereum, without having to keep up with software updates or send transactions through some third-party API.

Not your node, not your blockchain. Already Ethereum is centralized because there is no independent network of nodes that can do a full sync from scratch. It depends on a company hosting its servers on amazon (separate from this service) to sync.

This just adds to the centralization.

A node hosted by Amazon cannot fulfill the most basic promise of a blockchain. Censorship resistance.

And that’s why you should have read Nicks article.

If they're not producing blocks, then this does not give Amazon any censorship capability. The only thing they could do is refuse to send their own customer's transaction to the network, which of course would result in losing that customer.

Even if they did produce blocks, they'd be just another miner among many unless they got to 51%.

BTC maxi FUD detected...

I have a dappnode running under my desk that is running a full-node (minus mining) and didn't require anything special to sync beyond a large-ish SSD.

If Amazon goes down tomorrow and takes Infura with it, I will continue to interact with the blockchain. So, tell me exactly what you are going on about?

With all do respect, "connect corporate IT to Ethereum" is the most depressing thing I've read all day. Enjoy socialism for the rich.

You seem to be very pro bitcoin, why is ethereum depressing and "socialism for the rich" at all, let alone compared to other crypto currencies?

(also the term is 'all due respect')

The publisher censored Dr. Seuss by ceasing to publish it.

Bad habit to conflate one company's own choice as a statement on society and actual consensus.

The only way you would have done that is by having a social circle that manipulates your feelings about "cancel culture". You should clear your cookies if you are that easy of a mark.

I wasn't making a statement on society, I was pointing out that Amazon has and can censor. There are many examples, going back to banning wikileaks that resulted in them having to accept bitcoin in donations — and now they never need donations again.

Bitcoin routed around Amazon’s censorship.

But historically, when you are supporting censorship, you’re not on the right side of history.

Bitcoin is fixing this.

Ah okay, I had seen other discussions with similar writings, I stand corrected about your intended predilections

what the heck with dr seuss? get your culture war BS outta here.

I agree with most of this comment, and how "Amazon Managed Blockchain" is ridiculous. But it's not censorship, and it's certainly not Amazon doing the censorship, when Dr. Seuss's own estate decides not to publish six of his books.

OP didn’t say anything about Dr Seuss. He may have been referring to this or other direct actions by Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26262815

They edited it after I and other commenters pointed it out. It used to directly refer to Dr Seuss.

Ah, makes sense.

> “Blockchain” is a distributed technology created specifically for censorship resistance.

No it isn’t. Blockchain is a merkle chain where order is defined by a consensus process.

Your comment is the usual existential criticism that nearly every blockchain thread on HN is plagued by... you misunderstand the use case as well.

“A car is an internal combustion engine driving wheels via a gearbox” is not a refutation of the statement “cars are transportation technology”

Ironically you were part right: Empty attempts to score points like yoyrs are a bane on any discussion of bitcoin in HN.

You might want to get basic facts right if you're going to spend this much energy being angry about something.

If you run your own hardware you also have to trust that it wasn't compromised by the vendor. At some point you just have to decide which level of trust to give each vendors and for some people, trusting that Amazon will operate their clusters without invading their privacy or accessing their data is a pretty good bet. If found out, it'd be the end of AWS's reputation.

This absolutely true and a good point. In fact you gave to audit the code you run too. You have to decide who to trust. So how fo we mitigate that?

Decentralization & Cryptograhpy

Cryptography allows that the person you are trusting is the only one who could have changed it. For this we can use code signatures. And of course you tun your local copy (distribution) which you can audit, and compile yourself. That makes it much harder.

You can analyze your hardware and once its left the factory it us harder for the maker to influence.

The point isn’t that you csn economically get rid of all trust, but that choosing to trust a third party is a security hole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com