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On November 28th, the giant of e-commerce Amazon announced two products related to the blockchain: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain. The company then marked its further expansion in the field of blockchain technology, which began with the patents and collaborations related to the blockchain that Amazon apparently chose to work with cryptocurrencies, per se.
So, what are these new projects and will they change the cryptography industry?
QLDB: cryptographic but centralized database
As for the Amazon website, QLDB is a registry database designed to provide "a transparent, immutable and cryptographically verifiable transaction log", which is supervised by "a central trusted authority".
Therefore, all changes are recorded on the chain, while the new product is also able to automatically scale to "execute 2-3 times more transactions than the master books in common blockchain structures". In fact, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), said that the QLDB "will be really scalable, you'll have a much more flexible and robust API set [application program interfaces] to be able to make any kind of modification or adjustment to the general accounting database. "
In addition, the QLDB presumably uses a cryptographic hash function (SHA-256) to generate a secure output file of the history of data changes, which serves as evidence that it "validates the integrity of data changes".
"With QLDB, the history of changes to your data is immutable – can not be changed or deleted – and using encryption, you can easily verify that there were no unintended changes to your application data", according to the description on the website from Amazon.
Walter Montes, co-founder of the Community of Costa Rican Blockchain, told Cointelegraph that – being a centralized product – the QLDB can not be compared to decentralized solutions, although it tries to do so in its roadmap:
"It makes no sense to compare things like transactions per second from a centralized to a decentralized service.There are reasons why these things are decentralized and these are not just technical, Amazon seems to miss the point comparing QLDB with a blockchain."
Even if you try to compare QLDB with authorized blockchains, which are common among industry-wide companies because of their security, there are big distinctions between the two, says Montes:
"The authorized blockchains manage cryptography in a decentralized manner, which provides properties as historical evidence […] Another important point is the value of smart or chacoded contracts, which work as agreed and signed rules on how to change data. At least in public information, they only deal with the promise of immutability, but what about the data management rules? Without that, they only record what happens, without real proactive control. "
This technically makes the QLDB database, says Eyal Shani, a blockchain researcher and former software engineer, as well as Aykesubir consultant:
"QLDB is a normal database from that sense, [while] a blockchain database is also an immutable ledger […] QLDB technology is another layer of software that facilitates software development similar to a registry. "
Montes also agrees that the QLDB resembles a conventional database, adding that its cryptographic functionality makes it even lower than blockchains in terms of security.
"Encryption can calm some users but does not provide the security and robustness of a blockchain. [It is more] as a marketing tool. "
Furthermore, the fact that there is a central authority that oversees the whole process could make it less reliable among competing companies:
"Imagine six banks of the same size that trust one of them (a competitor) to hold a" linked cryptographic list "they can check in. They simply will not trust it. [Instead], end up creating your own data store and then checking the data versions on a daily basis. Cryptography is there to check things out, but when you can not even do that, it's not enough. "
Why does QLDB avoid decentralization?
So, who are the potential users of Amazon's QLDB solution? Perhaps those who have become skeptical about the keyword blockchain, now that the hype has begun to settle, suggests Shani:
"Some believe it as much as Satoshi and some do not want to hear about decentralization, probably because of the bad reputation it had and the excessive amount of speculators in the cryptosphere.
"It's marketing, we see it with artificial intelligence and [the] Internet of Things, too. This could continue to occur until creating a true decentralized blockchain is as easy as creating a database today. "
Therefore, with the further development of blockchain, greater adoption comes. It may take more time for decentralization to become a more reliable solution among companies trying to protect their data from tampering:
"Decentralization of trust as a concept is something that could fundamentally destroy some industries, but it will take some time before we get in. The public and regulators should change their minds to make this happen completely. […] In the meantime, the use of blockchain-like applications and the tokenisation of resources is already a big leap for many industries and will facilitate blockchain change in the long run ".
Amazon Managed Blockchain: QLDB add-on or independent blockchain solution?
Amazon Managed Blockchain, which was announced together with QLDB, "simplifies the creation and management of scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum", but also works with QLDB itself, according to the company's website.
In addition, the product automatically resizes itself based on the needs of specific applications and is deployed in certificate management, inviting new users to the network and tracing metrics, such as memory and storage resources and the use of computers, supports Amazon . AWS CEO Andy Jassy says this service will make it much easier to use the two most popular blockchain frameworks [Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric]".
Shani calls this argument into question by stating that the blockages of Ethereum and Hyperledger are already "easily" configurable in the current circumstances of the industry. The blockchain researcher also underlines the vagueness of the Amazon press release:
"Governance in distributed protocol is an important aspect, but it is not clear how Amazon achieves this goal, if they implemented it centrally, how different is it from the QLDB?"
Montes, in turn, does not believe that an offer of managed blockchain can last long because "it limits open scalability (in a technology based on network effects) and blocks it in a single cloud provider". However, such solutions could be useful for testing and proof-of-concept operations (PoC), he adds.
However, the fact that a company as big as Amazon has announced new products related to blockchain might seem like a healthy sign for the industry.
"From a macro point of view, more research and development is done on Ethereum, the more the protocol is strengthened and becomes a global adoption as a standard," concludes Shani.
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