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Amazon adopting the blockchain technology

4K views 57 replies 17 participants last post by  baldricko 
#1 ·
I know there was a thread at the start of the year on the subject of Amazon versus the blockchain. The way I see it, and have from the start, is that blockchain and the cryptocurrencies that have grown on the back of it are here to stay. Indie authors, who are so often expressing their displeasure at the tactics adopted by the middlemen (like Amazon) to scrape off evermore profit, could vastly benefit from this new technology.
How? Well, that's a question of decentralised versus centralised.

How could we benefit from blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies?

Well, it is the decentralised aspect combined with the utter transparency of transactions. Think about peer-to-peer and distributed ledgers. I am not about to pretend to be an expert on this technology or cryptos, I'm not. But anyone who seriously looks into this can surely see the advantages for Indie authors. I mean, the advantages of a DEcentralised approach.

The rant aside, look at Amazon. They are taking this technology very seriously. Of course, their approach, being a corporation and all is centralised. As someone on the previous thread I mentioned above said, Amazon is a tech company and they are likely to adopt cutting edge tech like the blockchain. And so they have!

Don't believe me?

https://aws.amazon.com/partners/blockchain/

Don't think this also includes cryptos as well? Take a look at the last two partners listed on the page.

It's a brave new world. There will be Amazon with robots and blockchain, and coins. A centralised approach focused on controlling from top down for maximum profit for the corporation.

Then there will be the Indies authors who embrace a set up where readers can find their books easily by the most successful apps written. No middlemen, no necessity to run ads that return your profit to the corporation, no censoring your books where your political views do not align with the status quo. It's all only a blink away.

Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca
 
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#2 ·
Biggest problem is adoption. Consumers need an incentive to adopt a blockchain based solution.

Although that's why there are coins like TRON. I think blockchain solutions will probably end up eventually taking over, but it could be another 5 to 10 years or even more. And I'm usually very optimistic about tech.
 
#3 ·
I don't think we need to get too excited about this stuff. Maybe in another decade or so. Like AsianInspiration, you have to give consumers a reason to switch to this, and assurances that their money is safe. People have been talking about things like Bitcoin for what now? Ten years? And so far, it's not catching on anywhere I shop.
 
#5 ·
baldricko said:
Then there will be the Indies authors who embrace a set up where readers can find their books easily by the most successful apps written. No middlemen, no necessity to run ads that return your profit to the corporation, no censoring your books where your political views do not align with the status quo. It's all only a blink away.
Maybe you could elaborate - I don't understand how this is somehow going to make advertising unnecessary? (Unless you just mean that authors won't have to advertise on Amazon.. but that isn't necessary right now, either.)

I mean, readers can already find a book easily - they can just search for the author and/or title. The challenge isn't that readers can't find an author's books - it's usually that they are not looking because they've never heard of the author/books.

Any widely adopted platform for selling books, whether centralized or not, is going to result in the same outcome: hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of books competing for consumers' attention. Meaning that the chances are slim to none that any huge number of readers will just happen to come across a given book. Hence.. advertising.
 
#6 ·
Sigh and grrrr.
I understand just enough to realize that this is where we're headed, but am also just old enough to look at it like my ancestors most likely looked at motor cars, from the back of their best horse and buggy. I'm getting too old to learn new tech. I can barely post gifs from my cell phone. (And don't here, since the change in how-to made it too much of a PITA)
*grumbles off to my rocking chair to yell at all the kids to stay off my lawn*
 
#7 ·
I think it's too early to worry about any of this.

Yes, the tech exists and would be awesome, but IMO for any of this to move forward, we first have to have a giant, massive "quality control" crisis that shakes out some of the crappy and lazy practices in the depths of the IT departments of banks, insurers and indeed any company that holds personal data. I think that is going to be the main driver for systems development. It's not just Amazon, but the large IT systems of large organisations are hanging onto their 40yo databases by their fingernails and they know it. A few are going to break (badly) and then we'll have a giant catchup of laws etc and then we can move forward.
 
#8 ·
Patty Jansen said:
I think it's too early to worry about any of this.

Yes, the tech exists and would be awesome, but IMO for any of this to move forward, we first have to have a giant, massive "quality control" crisis that shakes out some of the crappy and lazy practices in the depths of the IT departments of banks, insurers and indeed any company that holds personal data. I think that is going to be the main driver for systems development. It's not just Amazon, but the large IT systems of large organisations are hanging onto their 40yo databases by their fingernails and they know it. A few are going to break (badly) and then we'll have a giant catchup of laws etc and then we can move forward.
Ah! Kinda like how the US is just now coming around to putting a chip in credit and debit cards when the rest of the world moved from the stripe long before?
 
#9 ·
Going Incognito said:
Ah! Kinda like how the US is just now coming around to putting a chip in credit and debit cards when the rest of the world moved from the stripe long before?
Irony aside, no. I am talking about stuff the consumer never sees: the quality control of giant databases and their operations. Most of them are all so cobbled-together no one knows which bit does what, and in the future, there will be various cases of OOPS! that cause consumers to trust these systems and their companies less, so they will have a lot more work to do before they'll convince consumers that their data/money is safe.
 
#10 ·
While everyone watches the farcial fad that is Bitcoin, they miss that the real 'future' for the lbockchain tech is already here and its in the form of internal crypto-tokens that are taking the place of stocks as a way of funding ventures.

It has a use, just not in pump and dump speculative markets mascarading as alternatives to actual money that has relatively stable worth and doesn't need telemarketing.
 
#11 ·
Vaalingrade said:
While everyone watches the farcial fad that is Bitcoin, they miss that the real 'future' for the lbockchain tech is already here and its in the form of internal crypto-tokens that are taking the place of stocks as a way of funding ventures.

It has a use, just not in pump and dump speculative markets mascarading as alternatives to actual money that has relatively stable worth and doesn't need telemarketing.
A lot of the fear and loathing arising out of discussions about the blockchain, and cryptocurrencies too, start with misunderstandings.

You say "the real 'future' for the lbockchain tech is already here and its in the form of internal crypto-tokens"? What do you mean by "internal crypto-tokens"?

The blockchain and cryptocurrencies are not the same thing. The first is the technology the last is based on the blockchain and includes both alt coins (alternative to bitcoin) and tokens. That's all. The blockchain has many uses outside of cryptocurrencies. It is the basis for transparent contracts. But on the question of transparency in transactions involving cryptos there are coins like Monero that are coded to be non-transparent.

Tokens exist on top of the blockchain.They are representatives of the particular blockchain i.e. the particular platforms not based on the bitcoin network. They include Ethereum, Ripple, and Waves. These are their own networks. Tokens are not the same as coins.

Coins, generally, are associated with the bitcoin network.

The scams, the pump and dump you talk of are indicative of criminal elements at work and not of any fundamental flaw with either blockchain technology or cryptocurrencies. Coins like bitcoin, and lite coin, and a few other coins with rock solid development teams have a sustained record of development behind them, including published white papers.

And all of that has very little to do with the blockchain, which as I said has many uses, is incredibly disruptive, and as you can see is being adopted by Amazon. It is also being adopted by a whole lot of corporations and organisations. We need to take note rather than bury our heads in the sand, but totally get that it is all very overwhelming. The way I see it, we are in a carriage heading down the line. It just happens to have a blockchain engine pulling it at this point. We've already left the station.

Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca
 
#12 ·
baldricko said:
::snip::
and as you can see is being adopted by Amazon.
Your vision is better than mine. All I see is that Amazon, through AWS, is selling server space for various blockchain operations.

Yes, Zon may use blockchain systems to shore up/renovate their many databases. Yes, they may use it to secure their financial operations. They may use the tech for secure payment options, etc.

What does any of that have to do with us selling books?

Flee
 
#14 ·
Flee said:
What does any of that have to do with us selling books?
Absolutely nothing.

You get bit/block prosteletization on every kind of forum online these days either from true believers who really believe in the tech and don't realize that speculators have already murdered its (slim) potential as a currency in its bed, or people already heavily invested who bought into the #hodlgang (a group and philosophy among bitcoin faithful that suggests holding on to the curren--STOCK ITS A STOCK PROXY--cy even at high points) BS and missed their chance to cash out on the last major pump and dump and now want to get the value back up again.
 
#15 ·
baldricko said:
The rant aside, look at Amazon. They are taking this technology very seriously. Of course, their approach, being a corporation and all is centralised. As someone on the previous thread I mentioned above said, Amazon is a tech company and they are likely to adopt cutting edge tech like the blockchain. And so they have!

Don't believe me?

https://aws.amazon.com/partners/blockchain/
I don't think this means what you think it means. They aren't taking this seriously in the sense of adopting it. They're taking it seriously in that a great deal of people are being parted from their money by the hype and woo and as the largest source of distributed computing power, they're perfectly willing to sell services to the punters and get a piece of the pie. Essentially, a sucker is born every minute, and Amazon sees no reason to turn down their money.
 
#16 ·
It's A Mystery said:
I think people are underestimating the impact of this.

I can see a time where not only are all sectors disrupted by it, but I can see companies being run autonomously. No employees, no one group making the decisions. Block chain (and crypto) is going to change the world.
People tend to underestimate tech, period. I mean, in another 5-10 years, we will probably have AI that can write fiction at a level that is as good as any human writer through use of neural networks and deep learning. At that time, we can literally create 1000000000 new stories in a couple of days.

And in the somewhat farther future (I give it 20-40 years), when AI becomes smarter than humans (artificial super intelligence), we can't even begin to imagine or comprehend what will happen then, just as ants can't begin to comprehend our motives and goals.

It's a very scary time.

Vaalingrade said:
Absolutely nothing.

You get bit/block prosteletization on every kind of forum online these days either from true believers who really believe in the tech and don't realize that speculators have already murdered its (slim) potential as a currency in its bed, or people already heavily invested who bought into the #hodlgang (a group and philosophy among bitcoin faithful that suggests holding on to the curren--STOCK ITS A STOCK PROXY--cy even at high points) BS and missed their chance to cash out on the last major pump and dump and now want to get the value back up again.
This is just not true. I suggest you being more open minded about this. I don't understand why you would think you see things more clearly than tech VCs like Jim Breyer, Fred Wilson, Marc Andreesen etc, who have been in tech for decades and literally invested in or created most of the tech you use today.

Blockchains are not currencies. You can have a currency attached to it, but the two are not the same thing. Putting aside the fact that cryptocurrencies aren't even dead like you think it is, that's still completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

In the end, all blockchains are, are super secure databases that is stored across multiple locations in order to ensure authenticity, and prevent it from being hackable.

Authors can definitely benefit from it. Here is a post I made a couple of months back that explains a bit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7s6bqk/lets_talk_about_tron_objectively/dt2asjz/

Flee said:
What does any of that have to do with us selling books?

Flee
Phoenix61 said:
I can't be worried about any of this...because I have absolutely no idea what this is all about. It's like another language. :'( Anyone able to dumb this discussion down a bit so we plebs(old farts), can get a handle on it?????
Hopefully that link I linked on top explains a little bit for you guys too.
 
#17 ·
Here is how I think blockchain technology COULD impact indie booksellers in the future: it could introduce scarcity to ebook sales.

Right now, copies of our ebooks can be downloaded as many times as there's someone interested in downloading them. In other threads, this has translated into a conversation about how can we trust Amazon when they say X number of sales have happened? If each sale of a book is another link on a blockchain, each sale is a unique object that can't be resold by the vendor. it also can't be redistributed by pirates.

It would introduce verifiable accounting to your ebook inventory.

I can think of no reason Amazon would actually DO this, but that's the possibility i see.
 
#19 ·
Just a little correction though, kw3000.

The blockchain is not hosted/powered by *everyone*.

You do need people who host full nodes, and not everyone will have the ability to host hundreds of TB of data or even more. Nor will they want to.

There is an actual problem with incentivizing full nodes, and that's why there are some coins like DASH, which works as a PoS coin and gives a return to those who host a masternode and stake a certain amount of coins.
 
#20 ·
AsianInspiration said:
...
This is just not true. I suggest you being more open minded about this. I don't understand why you would think you see things more clearly than tech VCs like Jim Breyer, Fred Wilson, Marc Andreesen etc, who have been in tech for decades and literally invested in or created most of the tech you use today.

Blockchains are not currencies. You can have a currency attached to it, but the two are not the same thing. Putting aside the fact that cryptocurrencies aren't even dead like you think it is, that's still completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.

In the end, all blockchains are, are super secure databases that is stored across multiple locations in order to ensure authenticity, and prevent it from being hackable.

Authors can definitely benefit from it. Here is a post I made a couple of months back that explains a bit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7s6bqk/lets_talk_about_tron_objectively/dt2asjz/

Hopefully that link I linked on top explains a little bit for you guys too.
The poster you are replying to does not see it because their eyes are closed tight. They are intimidated by what they don't understand and prefer to hold on to an illusion of a continuum where nothing changes. It's natural. But, everything changes and all the time. You are right about technology. That changes very quickly.

For someone who never owned a fax machine the very idea of a world without their iPhone or Samsung, or without the Internet would be very difficult to conceive. They may think they imagine it, but without having lived it how would they know about the kind of protocols we had to put in place just to function back in the pre-1990s? Hell, make that pre-1995.

A short roll call of significant advances to get an idea of what and how fast the impact of the blockchain (and cryptocurrencies) will be... Hint: it's going to be much faster than "5 to 10" years from now.

1990-1991 =>the World Wide Net began. Documents and hypertext - pretty boring stuff now, but amazing back then. Previous to this, what was to become the Internet as we know it was limited to communication between institutions, first the military and a bit later Universities. It consisted of lines of green text (think the credit roll for the movie Matrix) you read off large cathode ray tube displays.
1990 =>first Internet search engine (Archie, developed as a school project)
1992 =>first text message sent (vodafone)
1993 => AOL introduced regular Janes and Joes (us) to dial up, email, and some other stuff.
1993 => Mosaic (morphed later into Netscape Navigator), the first web browser, and arguably the development that fired up more general public interest in the Internet.
1995 => Amazon and eBay online retailers.
1998 => Google search engine.
1999 => first texting done between networks.
1999 approx => Napster, the streaming music service
2000 => distributed networking gave us peer-to-peer file sharing. (e.g. Gnutella et al)
2000 => first touchscreen smartphone was the Ericsson R380 (BTW 4.4. pound bricks had been around since the 1970s if you could afford one).
2005 => first HD video conferencing (Lifesize).
2007 => first iPhone.


Back in 1995, 1996, 1997 still, the Internet to most people seemed to be all about emailing. The idea you could watch movies, listen to music, let alone hold a video conversation on something called a smartphone was akin to science fiction.

I will add one more to that list.

2009 => Bitcoin. A mysterious hidden entity going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the world to the first cryptocurrency and henceforth the blockchain.

I firmly believe as a couple of other posters above recognize, there is great potential here for authors to benefit from the blockchain. I am talking about a decentralized setup. One without a middleman. See that link to the Reddit thread posted by AsianInspiration. But, to recognize as much you need to do a little research, open your eyes, see the changes already taking place.

Just this month there was a conference held over several days for the heavyweights. Those involved in industries related to, or with developing interest, in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. It was held in New York at the Downtown Hilton. It filled three floors from the ground up. The big industry players such as Microsoft and FedEx were there.

Edited. Drop me a PM if you have any questions. - Becca
 
#21 ·
GeneDoucette said:
Here is how I think blockchain technology COULD impact indie booksellers in the future: it could introduce scarcity to ebook sales.

Right now, copies of our ebooks can be downloaded as many times as there's someone interested in downloading them. In other threads, this has translated into a conversation about how can we trust Amazon when they say X number of sales have happened? If each sale of a book is another link on a blockchain, each sale is a unique object that can't be resold by the vendor. it also can't be redistributed by pirates.

It would introduce verifiable accounting to your ebook inventory.

I can think of no reason Amazon would actually DO this, but that's the possibility i see.
Yes. GeneDoucette. I agree.

Take note of this by. Just as an example of a problem the blockchain solves - if you see it as a problem. Are not borrows on Amazon a loss to us as an author? You might look at it as an opportunity for others to read your book who might otherwise not, I suppose. But word of mouth accomplishes the same and more effectively I would say.
 
#22 ·
I just love these pie-in-the-sky dreams that say the blockchain will be completely safe, that there will be no way to hack it and steal money from it. That's what they say about every single security system put in place on the internet and every week we get treated to another story about how some corporation was hacked and had billions of records stolen. To sit here and say that blockchains can't be hacked is disingenuous at best. I guarantee you there are hackers out there right now, individual and state sponsored, looking for ways to siphon off millions from this so called "system of the future" and to think otherwise is foolhardy.
 
#23 ·
dgcasey said:
I just love these pie-in-the-sky dreams that say the blockchain will be completely safe, that there will be no way to hack it and steal money from it. That's what they say about every single security system put in place on the internet and every week we get treated to another story about how some corporation was hacked and had billions of records stolen. To sit here and say that blockchains can't be hacked is disingenuous at best. I guarantee you there are hackers out there right now, individual and state sponsored, looking for ways to siphon off millions from this so called "system of the future" and to think otherwise is foolhardy.
Pretty much every hacker in the entire world has tried to hack Bitcoin for 8 years. No one has and it's now worth $125b so there's a lot of incentive.

It's kind of impossible to hack the block chain, that's the whole point of decentralisation. Someone would have to change hundreds of thousands of ledger records faster than the actual system which isn't possible.
 
#24 ·
I think the technology has value, and I think that's why there are corporations looking into it. I'm far more skeptical of it as a currency. I threw a few hundred into a few cryptocurrencies last year, and quadrupled my investment by the time I took the money out again ten months later, and that's great, but all that means is I managed to invest successfully in a speculative and volatile market, short-term.

The problem with it as I see things is that even the crypto market can't decide if what they have is a currency or an investment product. Yes, there are currency speculators in the existing (non-crypto) market, because there's money to be made in the value changes between one national currency compared to another national currency. But the fact that--unless we are talking about a collapse--those changes are small, is what makes them stable products that are useful as currency.

Bitcoin and their ilk can't promise anything like that kind of stability right now. If I buy something for $10 today, it's reasonable to assume that the $10 I no longer have won't be the equivalent of $1000 a year from now. That can't be said about any cryptocurrency.
 
#25 ·
dgcasey said:
I just love these pie-in-the-sky dreams that say the blockchain will be completely safe, that there will be no way to hack it and steal money from it. That's what they say about every single security system put in place on the internet and every week we get treated to another story about how some corporation was hacked and had billions of records stolen. To sit here and say that blockchains can't be hacked is disingenuous at best. I guarantee you there are hackers out there right now, individual and state sponsored, looking for ways to siphon off millions from this so called "system of the future" and to think otherwise is foolhardy.
Or perhaps you're just ignorant of how blockchains work and how network systems in general work? What is your background in computer science? IF you've never actually studied computer science or anything related, how can you be so confident in your own opinions in this matter, and completely disregard what experts say? I can never understand this.

They absolutely do not say this about "every single security system put in place". Actually, they do not say this about ANY OTHER system, because they know that it is not hack-proof. I mean, seriously, if you don't know anything about computer science, that's totally fine because we all have our own areas of expertise, but please, don't spew your own ignorant opinions on this as if they are facts. It will mislead other people who might want to learn about this subject but don't have enough knowledge yet.

GeneDoucette said:
I think the technology has value, and I think that's why there are corporations looking into it. I'm far more skeptical of it as a currency. I threw a few hundred into a few cryptocurrencies last year, and quadrupled my investment by the time I took the money out again ten months later, and that's great, but all that means is I managed to invest successfully in a speculative and volatile market, short-term.

The problem with it as I see things is that even the crypto market can't decide if what they have is a currency or an investment product. Yes, there are currency speculators in the existing (non-crypto) market, because there's money to be made in the value changes between one national currency compared to another national currency. But the fact that--unless we are talking about a collapse--those changes are small, is what makes them stable products that are useful as currency.

Bitcoin and their ilk can't promise anything like that kind of stability right now. If I buy something for $10 today, it's reasonable to assume that the $10 I no longer have won't be the equivalent of $1000 a year from now. That can't be said about any cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin probably won't be a "currency" but will be a store of value like gold. But I think crypto currencies will definitely work.

One big advantage that cash has over say credit card payments, is that it is completely untraceable. Well, almost. But the thing is, it's not as convenient; you can't just send it to the other side of the world in a few seconds, or use it online, and it's very inconvenient to use cash to buy items that costs tens of thousands or millions of dollars.

But with crypto, you can have all of the benefits of cash, but also completely usable online, which means you will be able to make those huge transactions, make them all the way across the world near instantly.

And you can also use it as a way to hide assets, evade taxes and money launder.

You just need a completely anonymous coin like monero.

So I think there's definitely a really good use case for crypto as a currency, just not necessary bitcoin itself. But anonymous crypto like Monero will definitely become very, very important in the future. Not sure if it will be monero exactly, but it will be some anon coin.
 
#26 ·
AsianInspiration said:
Bitcoin probably won't be a "currency" but will be a store of value like gold. But I think crypto currencies will definitely work.

One big advantage that cash has over say credit card payments, is that it is completely untraceable. Well, almost. But the thing is, it's not as convenient; you can't just send it to the other side of the world in a few seconds, or use it online, and it's very inconvenient to use cash to buy items that costs tens of thousands or millions of dollars.

But with crypto, you can have all of the benefits of cash, but also completely usable online, which means you will be able to make those huge transactions, make them all the way across the world near instantly.

And you can also use it as a way to hide assets, evade taxes and money launder.

You just need a completely anonymous coin like monero.

So I think there's definitely a really good use case for crypto as a currency, just not necessary bitcoin itself. But anonymous crypto like Monero will definitely become very, very important in the future. Not sure if it will be monero exactly, but it will be some anon coin.
For a currency to work it has to be stable, and widely adopted. I have doubts about stability and strong doubts about wide adoption. And "it will make criminal behavior easier" isn't a really fantastic argument.
 
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