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Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

274 points by Clewza313 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_pdp_ 5y ago
What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?
- spydum 5y ago
  Public relations, mostly.
- rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
  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 https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain
  - eterm 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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/ https://www.proofofexistence.com/
      - tectec 5y ago
        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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
    - wizeman 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        RFC 3161 does the same, without a blockchain (public or private).
        jsutton 5y ago
        And how would you use RFC 3161 as a company that wants that use case?
- tootahe45 5y ago
  Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Link to the said paper, please?
      - 3pt14159 5y ago
        Probably means this one from 2018: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf 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.
- ignoramous 5y ago
  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/ https://www.hyperledger.org/
  - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
    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.
    - nindalf 5y ago
      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.
      - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
        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 5y ago
- picardo 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        > 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.
- purple_ferret 5y ago
  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-launch-excelsior-pass-help-fast-track-reopening-businesses-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-la...
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    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.
  - weasel_words 5y ago
    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.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  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.
  - slver 5y ago
    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.
    - tnzm 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        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.
        tnzm 5y ago
        The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves. 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".
        slver 5y ago
        Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying. 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.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and video streaming, respectively.
dan1234 5y ago
I'm guessing hardly anyone ever used this, considering the relatively short 4 month notice period.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Or every company that did use it realized it’s full of bs and stopped.
kierenj 5y ago
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.
peterkelly 5y ago
> Microsoft's documentation suggests users start migrating to an alternative now So, a database?
- nomoreplease 5y ago
  This brings up a good question. How do you migrate a blockchain from Azure to somewhere else?
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    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.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      Or use AWS where services aren't switched off, they just no longer get promoted, and then eventually you cannot start new things on them, but can still run your existing stuff for the next 10 years.
- google234123 5y ago
  But can a database handle more than 5 transactions per second?
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    If you think modern block chain is still stuck at 5 tps, then you have not been paying attention.
    - atanasovskib 5y ago
      So 7?
      - 5y ago
ForHackernews 5y ago
Has Microsoft noticed that blockchains are just crappy databases, or did their customers?
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Microsoft certainly knew that since the beginning.
lars 5y ago
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.
- davewritescode 5y ago
  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.
  - simias 5y ago
    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.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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.
sexy_seedbox 5y ago
If you're familiar with Typescript, try Lisk[0], it's pretty easy to get started. [0] https://lisk.com https://lisk.com
marcinzm 5y ago
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.
- humanlion87 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- BrentOzar 5y ago
  > 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 https://twitter.com/azureendoflife
- moksly 5y ago
  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.
eplanit 5y ago
Blockchain is the computer industry's string theory. Bold on the promises and hype, but meek on the returns.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  That very much depends which returns you’re talking about. It’s been pretty good on those of the financial variety.
  - merth 5y ago
    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.
_cs2017_ 5y ago
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 https://ytthn.com/blank-page instead of the expected URL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/migration-guide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...?
Havoc 5y ago
Good. The concept of a centrally supplied & managed blockchain was ridiculous from the start
motohagiography 5y ago
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.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
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.
ostenning 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeisc 5y ago
Blockchain would be a good idea if computers ran without consuming electricity. Could there not be a way for a computer to be designed as a biological plant that integrates perfectly with our environment and would produce no harmful effects.

274 points by Clewza313 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_pdp_ 5y ago

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

spydum 5y ago
Public relations, mostly.
rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
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 https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain
- eterm 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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/ https://www.proofofexistence.com/
    - tectec 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Or cryptographically sign a statement with a timestamp.
  - wizeman 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      RFC 3161 does the same, without a blockchain (public or private).
      - jsutton 5y ago
        And how would you use RFC 3161 as a company that wants that use case?
tootahe45 5y ago
Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.
- hn8788 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Link to the said paper, please?
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      Probably means this one from 2018: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf 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.
ignoramous 5y ago
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/ https://www.hyperledger.org/
- 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
  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.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    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.
    - 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
      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 5y ago
picardo 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
purple_ferret 5y ago
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-launch-excelsior-pass-help-fast-track-reopening-businesses-and https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-la...
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  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.
- weasel_words 5y ago
  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.
tinus_hn 5y ago
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.
- slver 5y ago
  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.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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.
      - tnzm 5y ago
        The big problem, in my opinion, is that a lot of people think we'd inevitably be beating each other up like animals, if it wasn't for the powers that be, who kindly protect us from ourselves. 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".
        slver 5y ago
        Do you know this saying "those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it". You're that saying. 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.
alkonaut 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and video streaming, respectively.

dan1234 5y ago

I'm guessing hardly anyone ever used this, considering the relatively short 4 month notice period.

ramraj07 5y ago
Or every company that did use it realized it’s full of bs and stopped.

kierenj 5y ago

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.

peterkelly 5y ago

> Microsoft's documentation suggests users start migrating to an alternative now So, a database?

nomoreplease 5y ago
This brings up a good question. How do you migrate a blockchain from Azure to somewhere else?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  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.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    Or use AWS where services aren't switched off, they just no longer get promoted, and then eventually you cannot start new things on them, but can still run your existing stuff for the next 10 years.
google234123 5y ago
But can a database handle more than 5 transactions per second?
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  If you think modern block chain is still stuck at 5 tps, then you have not been paying attention.
  - atanasovskib 5y ago
    So 7?
    - 5y ago

ForHackernews 5y ago

Has Microsoft noticed that blockchains are just crappy databases, or did their customers?

marcosdumay 5y ago
Microsoft certainly knew that since the beginning.

lars 5y ago

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.

davewritescode 5y ago
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.
- simias 5y ago
  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.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.

sexy_seedbox 5y ago

If you're familiar with Typescript, try Lisk[0], it's pretty easy to get started. [0] https://lisk.com https://lisk.com

marcinzm 5y ago

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.

humanlion87 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
BrentOzar 5y ago
> 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 https://twitter.com/azureendoflife
moksly 5y ago
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.

eplanit 5y ago

Blockchain is the computer industry's string theory. Bold on the promises and hype, but meek on the returns.

TechBro8615 5y ago
That very much depends which returns you’re talking about. It’s been pretty good on those of the financial variety.
- merth 5y ago
  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.

_cs2017_ 5y ago

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 https://ytthn.com/blank-page instead of the expected URL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/migration-guide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...?

Havoc 5y ago

Good. The concept of a centrally supplied & managed blockchain was ridiculous from the start

motohagiography 5y ago

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.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

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.

ostenning 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

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jeisc 5y ago

Blockchain would be a good idea if computers ran without consuming electricity. Could there not be a way for a computer to be designed as a biological plant that integrates perfectly with our environment and would produce no harmful effects.