Amazon QLDB, what do I need a private Catapult for?

General Discussion
#1

https://aws.amazon.com/de/qldb/

This is imho exactly what businesses will want and they’re not gonna mess around with something like a private version of Catapult, if they can simply sign-up for this.

I’m always willing to be convinved otherwise though :slight_smile:

This is why public chains are so much more important imho. Most of the benefits of blockchains can be centralized and hence made more efficient and easier to use. Transparancy is much harder to come by and that’s what public ledgers and only public ledgers provide.

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#2

Hmm from what I have read it seems like Amazon’s system could be blockchain agnostic/ adaptable to different open source frameworks.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum*.”

So in a way this doesn’t exclude Amazon from integrating with NEM or other open source frameworks in the future? This is my understanding, correct me if I’m wrong.

#3

But yes, on public blockchains and the kind of decentralisation they provide I agree. Amazon QLDB and private chains don’t fulfill the same goals as public chains. Amazon itself says as much:

"Amazon QLDB is not a blockchain or distributed ledger technology. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies focus on solving the problem of decentralized applications involving multiple parties where there can be no single entity that owns the application, and the parties do not necessarily trust each other fully. On the other hand, QLDB is a ledger database purpose-built for customers who need to maintain a complete and verifiable history of data changes in an application that they own. Amazon QLDB offers history, immutability and verifiability combined with the familiarity, scalability and ease of use of a fully managed AWS database. If your application requires decentralization and involves multiple, untrusted parties, a blockchain solution may be appropriate. "

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#4

That’s like saying you can integrate Hyperledger into nem. With the managaged blockchain solution, they manage the whole thing for you and they currently only have Hyperledger and Frabric as options there, with Ethereum coming soon. So if anything, they would have to integrate nem and offer it as an option in their managed environments. Call me crazy but I don’t think they will.

They say QLDB doesn’t do everything a blockchain does, which is true, but my guess is that the vast majority of businesses will be able to build what they want with it despite that.

“Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority”

That basically covers just about everything a business wants out of blockchains, apart from smart contracts, which nem doesn’t even really have, and public transparancy, which I argue most businesses won’t care about.

In addition to that, it does certain things better. For example there is no bloat. You store exactly what you want and that’s it. No blocks, accounts, tokens, all that yazz. You could get rid of all that for permissioned Catapult but then you sure as sh** wouldn’t be able to share code base with nem anymore.

Obviously I don’t know every use case and I don’t know the internals of most businesses, so this just me sharing my thoughts.

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#5

Yeah I think you’re absolutely right in this regard…at least for now.

But I guess what I was trying to convey was that should NEM reach the kind of popularity/ status that ETH does someday it seems that the way it is set up does not preclude the possibility of NEM being part of it. Long way off but was just thinking out loud in terms of what is possible.

I can imagine that if businesses start working in industry groups with government oversight public transparency may be possible. For example should we move towards a regional/ global cardon trading scheme on blockchain (currently one of the biggest challenges is its opacity) it may make business sense to make it public and transparent. Likewise, I can imagine that copyrights in an industry (so say Kodak and Getty and a few photographer unions etc come together) might have transparency as a business objective/ may make them more money.

But I think you’re right in that most businesses won’t really care/ actively view their transactions as trade secrets.

I’ve been grappling with this exact issue as I talk to businesses about blockchain- obviously it would be great for them to be on public but their needs and desires often point towards private blockchain solutions. Most businessmen are very loathe with the notion of anything being “public” in my experience…Yet at the same time I don’t think NEM can afford to ignore enterprises. What are your thoughts on this?

#6

That’s of course a valid point. For that to happen though, nem will first have to prove itself like ETH did in terms of adoption and interrest (by developers and businesses alike) and that is indeed a long way to go. All the huge projects, the ones that e.g. Amazon is supporting in their managed blockchain solution, have something uniquely qualifying them. The sad fact is, nem doesn’t stand out with anything right now and I don’t see that changing very much with Catapult.

Definitely can’t ignore them but I do think that onboarding developers and getting a lot of people to just start building stuff might be a better way to go for nem. If people start building cool stuff on top of nem it can prove itself as something that works and works well. At that point, maybe businesses will start building on nem because there’s a ton of support for it and it’s the devs “blockchain of choice”.
If we keep waiting for businesses to bring that killer application to nem, I’m afraid we’ll die waiting. Developers build stuff, just to build stuff. Sometimes that stuff turns into amazing businesses, other times it just stays around as a cool project. Businesses rarely build for the sake of building and the use cases they have - in my view - they’re just not gonna use nem for.

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