Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have finally changed that.
Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age groups.
There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a stock price pop.
I don’t know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a useful tool for a lot of different use cases.
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.
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).
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.
What?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not "brilliant". It is _a_ solution, with shortcomings even for its stated purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost as if not every tool in search of a problem eventually finds one.
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.
Right. That's typically the ultimate goal, because...
> the high level view is still centralized
Period. Just because you don't interact with the parent node in the organizational structure for a while doesn't mean it temporarily ceases to exist.
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.
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).
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.
You can chuck blockchain out of the conversation like that. But then we'd no longer be having a conversation about 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).
Almost everybody is OK with the latter, and that's the only issue that blockchain meaningfully addresses.
Merge is a fundamental issue across all source control. Its not going away.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
You can't charge someone with perjury if you can't prove the faked evidence is faked—which is why so few people get charged with perjury. Any threat of perjury with no discriminatory proof mechanism to back it up, is toothless, and experts will treat such threats with exactly the respect they deserve. (Look at the Japanese court system if you don't believe me.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're corporate cattle and you like it, then good for you but don't tell a slave that they're sick for not wanting to be a slave.
I agree it grates on the soul. But it's a net win and only a temporary fleecing.
This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing blockchain and its problems.
- 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
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.
Blockchains solve the problem of needing a shared database among people that don't trust each other. Most of the best use cases are removing middle men.
Some examples that are being worked on right now:
Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.
Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.
Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.
There's so many cool things happening in the decentralized finance space and I think we're going to look back on this decade as the decade where software started to eat wall street. Many of these firms are merely middle men facilitating trades amongst untrusted parties, and blockchains can do that so much more efficiently than them.
Trust and fraud is extremely rare problem?! Read the Bitcoin's whitepaper again and you will be in the better understanding of Bitcoin's and Blockchain's purpose.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments."
Decentralizing trust means not depending on one entity or group of entities to handle financial transactions or transactions of any type.
"Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party." [0]
Establishing trust means eradicating fraud in a sense that blockchain is transparent and open database based on decentralized cryptographic proof which enables trust.
sincere apologies for the pedantry, but "blockchain" is a concrete countable noun... if you can replace "blockchain" with "cell phone" in a sentence and it sounds wrong, you should change it, e.g. "blockchains are a brilliant solution" or "blockchain technology is a brilliant solution".
You can build a city based on it... https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/08/18/akon-is-rea...
So, a database?
This isn't a new thing - there's an entire Twitter feed dedicated to things Azure discontinues: https://twitter.com/azureendoflife
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.
The article says that these enterprises are using it
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.
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.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...
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...
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.
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.
For example, a Bitcoin one: https://www.proofofexistence.com/
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.
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf
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.
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/
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.
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.
(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)
It’s a cute gimmick, I’ll give them that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This is also an issue with a 51% attack.
A public blockchain with multiple agents that do not trust each other like in BitCoin make sense to me.
Okay, so use mercurial or fossil.
Or how does a private blockchain manage who has write access to it (since it's supposed to be private)?
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.
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.
I'm very skeptical of these use cases.
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.
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.
The intersection of the set of "private" and "mutually distrustful parties" is essentially 0.
https://apnews.com/article/fd4113419276444eba1d2a46d5c29752
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.
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?
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.
You can do this with paper. Signed paper documents. You have invented the "treaty". It has been a thing for centuries.
The whole "blockchain-backed international treaty" example is admittedly a bit contrived though. It's kind of a "horseless carriage" thing - trying to explain to @markwkw that no "blockchain payments" would be necessary, by expanding on their mental model. (Maybe that's an unwise strategy, and I need to start just rudely dismissing people instead, but I'm not sure how that would help with comprehension)
Engineering solutions based on binary ideas of true and false just don't apply to diplomacy or politics
EDIT: I define "reneging on the deal" as "acting as if the deal never happened".
The more governance decisions are recorded on the public record, the less opportunities there would be for parties to say "the other guy started it".
Also the deal could be set up to hurt both parties if they violate a predetermined condition. Maybe burn 5% of each party's GDP. Then they would be actually incentivized to collaborate.
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).
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.
Would you say that blockchains make this faster, cheaper and less prone to fraud?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-barclays-blockchain...
>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...
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.
So in this use-case there is no distributed network in the first place. And never will be.
You can put information on the blockchain and others can be sure it can’t be removed.
There are use cases.
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.
All right.
By the way, I don't think blockchains allow you to beat up people, either.
And it is already legal to beat up and kill each other over a property dispute. It just has to be a large enough dispute for the parties involved to be able to afford rebranding it as a "war".
Also "war" is the thing that happens between parties above which no legal frame or enforcement institution exists. Countries. There's no actual "international court" (there's the UN one, but it has no powers). This is why wars happen. So in fact, mentioning wars defeats your own point - yes, people will literally kill each other like savages when no legal repercussions exist. Wars show that.
Because we have no world government, we can only apply mitigation strategies like sanctions, diplomacy, economic interdependence. These work, but only until a true scarcity occurs, where taking someone else's stuff is a solution. Then it's back to wars.
Unlike the existing system of governance, a blockchain doesn't have the mandate to beat up people.
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.
>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.
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.
In practice, this is solved by giving the contract the capability to query an external system (referred to as an oracle), which provides the results of the independent arbitration as an input to the contract.
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’.
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.
Blockchain.
Banks are genuinely threatened by DeFi and for good reason.
[0] https://lisk.com