Infrastructure ignorance comes at a cost. Cryptocurrency developers largely ignore the fact that the cloud exists (certainly that managed services, the most modern incarnation of the cloud, exist). This is surprising, given that the vast majority of cryptocurrency nodes run in the cloud anyway, and it almost certainly accounts for at least some of the large differential in performance. In a system like DynamoDB you can count on the fact that every line of code has been optimized to run well in the cloud. Amazon retail is also a large user of serverless approaches in general, including DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and other modern cloud services that wring performance and cost savings out of every transaction.
Lots of interesting info on DynamoDB in comparison to blockchains. One big difference that I think the author downplays is that DynamoDB is a completely controlled and optimized database from one owner (Amazon), while the most popular blockchains like Bitcoin are open projects running in a completely open enironment. If DynamoDB was running across AWS, Azure, GCP, as well as less “corporate” data centers, and had Microsoft, Google, and miscellaneous individuals running DynamoDB nodes, would DyanmoDB performance take a hit? How big of one? And how comfortable would Amazon be with trusting that type of DynamoDB deployment?
Also, DynamoDB is not even close to being censorship resistant. This may seem like a minor point, but, as the recent events in Hong Kong remind us, censorship resistance can be very important. – Josh