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A comment on Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by tnzm on Thursday May 13, 2021 @09:18AM (#27141732)
Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger, which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it. Parties confirmed to be less trustworthy are subsequently afforded fewer compromises during negotiations.

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.

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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by namdnay on Thursday May 13, 2021 @10:35AM (#27142523)
What does renege on the deal really mean though? usually in those situations both sides will claim that the other is reneging on the deal

Engineering solutions based on binary ideas of true and false just don't apply to diplomacy or politics

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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by tnzm on Saturday May 15, 2021 @04:50PM (#27168888)
Speaking as an engineer, that's what's wrong with diplomacy and 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.

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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by SideburnsOfDoom on Thursday May 13, 2021 @10:11AM (#27142278)
> Governments A and B meet and discuss some deal. Their agreement is recorded on a public append-only ledger, which is hosted by participants worldwide. If any party reneges on the deal, that's remembered by the public record too, where no amount of propaganda can erase it.

You can do this with paper. Signed paper documents. You have invented the "treaty". It has been a thing for centuries.

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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by htrp on Thursday May 13, 2021 @03:26PM (#27146258)
A "signed paper document" or a "treaty" is also meaningless without robust enforcement mechanisms.... or the instant it's in either side's interest to ignore.
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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by SideburnsOfDoom on Thursday May 13, 2021 @03:34PM (#27146334)
That goes double for blockchains.
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Re:Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service by tnzm on Saturday May 15, 2021 @05:47PM (#27169326)
The keyword here is consensus. Using an append-only distributed public ledger to record your governance decisions (and be held accountable for them) is a lot like using a memory-safe language when programming. It induces non-negligible overhead, but prevents entire classes of opportunities for abuse.

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)

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