Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-shutting-down-its-azure-blockchain-service/

by Clewza313 • 5 years ago

274 251 5 years ago

zdnet.com

_pdp_• 5 years ago

What are the practical uses of private blockchains anyway?

spydum• 5 years ago

Public relations, mostly.

rm_-rf_slash• 5 years 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

eterm• 5 years 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.

tootahe45• 5 years ago

Wowing govt officials and scamming public money.

hn8788• 5 years 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.

ignoramous2• 5 years 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/

74d-fe6-2c64• 5 years 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.

haukem3• 5 years ago

What is the advantage of a private blockchain over a hash tree like used in git? A git commit is also irrevocable, except if you do a git rebase. How do you prevent something similar like a git rebase in a private blockchain?

A public blockchain with multiple agents that do not trust each other like in BitCoin make sense to me.

DebtDeflation• 5 years ago

an irrevocable proof of record (immutability with cryptographic proof)

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.

picardo5• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

carterschonwald• 5 years ago

Yup. All of this is really about having a db for known counter party multi org db for financial institutions without having to basically fund new clearing corporations for each new market. Source: I was at Jpm on some of the relevant teams for a few years.

purple_ferret• 5 years 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-la...

HideousKojima• 5 years 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• 5 years 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_hn3• 5 years 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.

slver4• 5 years 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.

mumblemumble10• 5 years ago

Parties can prove things without others needing to trust anyone.

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.

alkonaut• 5 years 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.

SubiculumCode8• 5 years ago

Ummm Vet? Theta? Real worlds solutions to supply chain and video streaming, respectively.

dan1234• 5 years ago

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

ramraj07• 5 years ago

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

kierenj• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Microsoft's documentation suggests users start migrating to an alternative now

So, a database?

nomoreplease2• 5 years ago

This brings up a good question. How do you migrate a blockchain from Azure to somewhere else?

encryptluks2• 5 years 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.

google234123• 5 years ago

But can a database handle more than 5 transactions per second?

SubiculumCode8• 5 years ago

If you think modern block chain is still stuck at 5 tps, then you have not been paying attention.

marktangotango• 5 years ago

Well done, beautifully well placed comment.

ForHackernews2• 5 years ago

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

marcosdumay2• 5 years ago

Microsoft certainly knew that since the beginning.

lars• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

simias4• 5 years 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.

marcosdumay2• 5 years 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?

simias4• 5 years 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.

grey-area• 5 years ago

Yes I think greed is the simplest explanation for the explosion of interest in bitcoin and other similar schemes. They are constructed so that early adopters benefit, and benefit most if they shill the coin to others, and so they do, using various narratives about worldchanging technology, a new paradigm etc, etc.

sneak• 5 years ago

I too believe that the blockchain is mostly useless outside of buying drugs online

Decentralized financial tools like Uniswap and its ilk have finally changed that.

enumjorge2• 5 years ago

It's effectively become a casino for millenials and zoomers

Mark Cuban and Elon Musk are also investing in cryptocurrencies and neither of them fall into those age groups.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

It's also the most profitable trading category for old traders who know how to ride cycles safely. Not advocating, just adding another bit of info

im3w1l• 5 years ago

There is a difference between the knowledge of individuals and knowledge of institutions. Many people who seriously looked into these things said it was bogus. But the institutions didn't know it was bogus. They didn't know whether to believe the nay-sayers or not. So "our" (for some weird abstract sense of "our") knowledge increased by doing these doomed experiments.

kevinmchugh• 5 years ago

Wal-Mart and Louis Vuitton both announced they were adopting blockchain. Walmart's was for supply chain tracking of lettuce. LV's was for authenticating genuineness and preventing sales of counterfeits. Both were to be run entirely by the company. Centralized. No distributed anything.

There was no reason to use blockchain in these cases, except that writing a press release about blockchain would cause a stock price pop.

Spooky233• 5 years ago

It’s a technology that’s as easy to shit on as it is to hype!

I don’t know about the Azure service, but blockchains are a useful tool for a lot of different use cases.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

Such as?

matthewaveryusa• 5 years ago

contributing compute power is economically incentivized

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 :)

shawnz2• 5 years ago

is the act of signing a record proof of work?

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.

jandrese2• 5 years ago

I'm always saddened that the energy that goes into those blockchain signatures is basically wasted.

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?

ipaddr4• 5 years ago

This is common with new technology. It was amazing what was sold under web 2.0. It was amazing what was sold before the dotcom craze.

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.

Godel_unicode3• 5 years ago

classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

Why on earth would you need a blockchain for this?

viraptor• 5 years ago

In a classroom you only need a proof of something happening. A separate answer-checking (or even just timestamping) service is a few times easier to create and operate.

newdude116• 5 years ago

I don't see many applications for blockchain. The only application is where you don't want to have a trusted central party, be it a company or a government.

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.

rchaud2• 5 years ago

Can you provide an example of Web 2.0 snake oil? I remember the shift from 1.0 to a more JS/AJAX based web. It was still the web, something hundreds of millions used.

No one has explored it in smaller non-global settings like a classroom where the first one to get the answer wins.

What?

reificator2• 5 years ago

A classroom has a trusted central authority. Even assuming some kind of educational benefit from students racing to be first, how on earth does blockchain accomplish anything there?

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.

bydlocoder3• 5 years ago

As far as I remember, Web 2.0 was about platforms enabling P2P interaction between users and we have tons of this stuff - social networks, marketplaces, gig apps...

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Blockchain is a brilliant solution

It's not "brilliant". It is _a_ solution, with shortcomings even for its stated purpose.

derefr3• 5 years ago

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

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.

mumblemumble10• 5 years ago

I am coming to think that it's precisely the "distributed" bit that nobody really wants.

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.

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

Millions? Billions.

mrits• 5 years ago

It is really sad to me to see a comment so naive and uninformed get upvoted on this site. Besides just flat out false information such as being a shortage of use cases for incentivized distributed consensus you go on to assume we have even begun to work out the areas we can now apply to blockchain. It's fine to think cryptocurrency is a hustle. It's not ok to dismiss a large future corner of tech because of it.

TomSwirly• 5 years ago

Some concrete examples which aren't cryptocurrency would be helpful here to evaluate your statement.

cryptica2• 5 years ago

> Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem

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.

whateveracct3• 5 years ago

rofl you know someone is crypto-sick when they say fist currency only works for "a handful of rich people."

NicoJuicy• 5 years ago

Sure, 1 random guy tweeting is way better than a state actor.

lordlimecat2• 5 years ago

Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

This is the most concise way I have seen of summarizing blockchain and its problems.

UnpossibleJim• 5 years ago

Technically, there are multiple tracking applications, but they're more easily and cheaply handled with in place technologies, is the issue. If you were designing and building tracking ultra secure shipping infrastructure from the ground up, where everyone had to be held absolutely responsible, then there's an edge case for it, maybe.... But the use cases for blockchain are pretty small. Like small batch digital art assets and the like.

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

What I found interesting about Blockchain were (in case of utilitarian projects).

- 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

rbanffy• 5 years ago

That applies to cryptocurrencies, but basically nothing else.

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.

TimJRobinson• 5 years ago

It's an extremely rare problem for now because it's a new technology that has barely been explored. Like all technologies once it goes more mainstream people come up with new ideas that were never thought of because they weren't possible before.

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.

mrkramer• 5 years ago

Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

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.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

beaugunderson• 5 years ago

Blockchain is a brilliant solution to an extremely rare problem.

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".

duxup• 5 years ago

It's amazing how much bullshit has been pitched under the flag of "blockchain"

You can build a city based on it... https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/08/18/akon-is-rea...

cyanydeez• 5 years ago

blockchain can provide a proof of time and existince of digital data. thats not what nfts are sold as, but thats whats going on.

sexy_seedbox• 5 years ago

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

[0] https://lisk.com

marcinzm4• 5 years 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.

BrentOzar• 5 years 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

moksly• 5 years 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.

nomoreplease2• 5 years ago

Microsoft's product page for Azure BaaS lists GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers.

The article says that these enterprises are using it

marcinzm4• 5 years ago

We worry about them when they happen quickly, surprisingly or without plans for how we move forward.

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.

humanlion87• 5 years 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.

marcinzm4• 5 years 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.

twayallday• 5 years ago

AWS does it too. See the S3 path-style deprecation plans which saw a lot of customer pushback. [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...

meowkit• 5 years ago

Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

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...

marcinzm4• 5 years ago

Uh is shutting down in September short notice?

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.

dharmab• 5 years ago

This was a Preview service. It was not being marketed as a production ready product.

eplanit• 5 years ago

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

TechBro8615• 5 years ago

That very much depends which returns you’re talking about. It’s been pretty good on those of the financial variety.

merth• 5 years 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_• 5 years 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 instead of the expected URL https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...?

Havoc• 5 years ago

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

motohagiography3• 5 years 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.

SubiculumCode8• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

jeisc• 5 years 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.

Microsoft is shutting down its Azure Blockchain Service

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