Amazon Enters Blockchain Market With Cloud-Computing Services (bloomberg.com)

Amazon.com is jumping on the blockchain wave with new cloud services that help customers build the technology needed to record transactions. From a report: Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy on Wednesday announced Amazon Managed Blockchain, a new service underpinning blockchain networks that record millions of transactions. The company spent the past year studying the needs of customers interested in blockchain solutions before creating the new products, Jassy said.

The service can be used to manage peer-to-peer payments, process loans and help businesses transact with distributors and suppliers, Jassy said. AWS announced a string of other new or updated cloud offerings, seeking to maintain its lead in the market for internet-based computing. The company also announced a new service called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or QLDB, which is a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The service, which is launching into preview today, offers an append-only, immutable journal that tracks the history of all changes, Amazon said. And all the changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable.

Comments

Distributed blockchain

[PPH]

Doesn't this run contrary to one of the benefits of a blockchain? That being it's distributed, decentralized nature. The ledger isn't maintained by one entity that can fiddle with it. Or be arm-twisted by authorities to back out transactions that they don't like.

Re:Distributed blockchain

[Draconi]

Not really.

Enterprise Blockchain focuses more on business needs that don't require the decentralization but do need the "journalistic" integrity blockchain offers.

For example, take security log files on a webserver: by storing new entries in a QLDB vault you can ensure that they become tamper proof should a malicious third-party gain access to them. They won't be able to reconstruct the underlying hashes at a given historical point moving forwards.

Re:Distributed blockchain

[bangular]

Yes. The more I read about large tech corporations entering the blockchain space the more I realize they just don't get it. Their solution is to centralize and add authentication and authorization. At that point, why even use blockchain?

For anyone actually paying attention, we are in the most interesting times in blockchain's short history. We are starting to see layer 2 and sharding mechanisms speed up the networks by several orders of magnitude. Zero knowledge proofs are allowing smart contracts to interact with encrypted data. It's a very exciting time. Most of the interesting research is being done by startups and international researchers. It feels like the web in about 1995.

And large corporations just don't get it. The whole point of blockchain is to cut out the large tech middlemen. A blockchain network with centralized middlemen is just a worse system than what it attempts to replace.

Blockchain and restructuring of the Standard Model

[Anonymous Coward]

Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Physicists identify new fundamental particle

May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model

Geneva, Switzerland — August 2018

Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain

High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions.

Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers.

The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows:

“It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles.

“We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.”

There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.

Re:blockchain enterprise

[AuMatar]

No, they're the last people to need blockchain. You use blockchain because there's no central source of truth. Inside a company, the company has a central source of truth- itself. Blockchain might, possibly, make some sense in a distributed system with multiple members who can't afford or don't trust a neutral 3rd party. It makes no sense in an enterprise, and is far more difficult and expensive than other systems.

Re:Amazon's own monetary system

[chiefcrash]

Lots of companies have their own monetary system. They're called gift cards....