
Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications - max_
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/building-hybrid-blockchain-cloud-applications-with-ethereum-and-google-cloud
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gaogao
It's an interesting article, but also feels like peak buzzword with use-case 1
essentially being "machine learning in the cloud using blockchain and big
data"

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Barrin92
yes it's hard to read. If the goal of technology is to make things simpler and
more efficient and to remove barriers, all these blockchain solutions don't do
a very good job of conveying how they're doing that.

I also still don't understand one part the article jumped over:

>But none of this addresses a fundamental issue: where to get the variables
with which the contract is evaluated. If the data are not derived from
recently added on-chain data, a trusted source of external data is required.
Such a source is called an oracle.

I and my landlord don't live on the blockchain, if he claims that I broke the
door and need to pay the damages, how does the immutable blockchain help me?
This sounds to me like the semantic web. When people asked "well and what if
someone puts wrong data into the system?" the answer was just ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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bena
Yeah, it's the one question blockchain enthusiasts never have an answer for:
What if I lie?

The issue was never the mutability of the record. The issue is reconciling the
record with reality.

Let's say I'm ordering 5 widgets. Along the way, 3 go missing. I receive 2.
The blockchain says that all 5 made it from the warehouse to the final
destination.

Blockchain does nothing to prevent shitty record keeping.

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WalterSear
That's not the problem that blockchain is designed to solve. It is, however,
the problem that purveyors of centralized blockchains would like you think it
solves.

The problem that blockchains solve is centralization. In other words - google
cloud computing.

To revisit your example: let's say you are ordering 5 widgets.

* A lookup on the Widget Market Blockchain tells you that vendor X has completed a large number of 5-star transactions, with a verified number of clients that have all sufficient 5 star transactions with the rest of the network to be considered genuine accounts, while vendor Y has a history of shipments that are reported as not arriving. You can examine each transaction, though automated verification tools are already in place to make cheating unprofitable. You can examine the code of those tools, along with the blockchain contracts themselves, should you so choose.

Or:

* Amazon's Widget product page shows the Amazon Choice item (neither the cheapest, nor most appropriate product), followed by a list of sponsored products. Many of the reviews are clearly fake, or appear to refer to a different product, with no way to verify that an actual transaction between genuine widget trading parties took place.

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blairanderson
Amazon does show "verified purchase" but who's to say what a genuine account
is?

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WalterSear
The accounts' transaction histories, and the transaction histories of _their_
transactants is all that anyone - even Amazon - has to go on - in both toy
scenarios.

The difference here is the transparency, and the resulting web of trust that
can emerge.

You may not have done business with company X, but you can observe that many
users who successully transacted with companies Y, Z and W (with whom you have
also successfully transacted) have all left good purchase reviews for company
X.

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devy
It's hard to believe Google actually hop onto the blockchain bandwagon as
well, given the father of the Internet and their Chief Internet Evangelist
Vint Cerf[1] famously said "No" to blockchain [2].

[1]:
[https://ai.google/research/people/author32412](https://ai.google/research/people/author32412)

[2]:
[https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1019987651301081089](https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1019987651301081089)

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ipsum2
"Chief Internet Evangelist" sounds like a ceremonial position. When I was
working at Google, I had no idea who this person was or their position.

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nostrademons
It is a ceremonial position, but this guy kinda deserves it. He literally
invented the Internet - not in the Al Gore sense, but as in the "co-designed
the initial version of TCP/IP" sense.

I don't think he actually did much at Google besides being a big
hiring/advocacy/PR draw, but Google's entire market wouldn't exist without
him. His tech talks were pretty fascinating too, while I was there.

