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Miners Aren’t Friends

blog.keep.network

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#111

Post by andybak »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #107

>"In this way, Proof of Work forces miners to constantly re-invest revenue." (the OP) // Classic capitalist view. It's not that miners are forced to reinvest, if all miners were satisfied with the status quo then it could continue and each miner would get the same returns - depending on the structure of the system, greater demand could even drive hash value up. But miners aren't satisfied, they want more, and new min…

> Classic capitalist view

I would consider myself center-left and I think you're confusing "capitalism" with "realism".

Any political system that requires altruism towards strangers is doomed. Altruism grows out of community - and requires consequences for "bad" behaviour to some degree. Tragedy of the Commons and all that.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#112

Post by floatrock »

shadowfiend wrote: post #34
runeks wrote: post #11

> Again, let’s design a simple smart contract. This time Alice wants to play a guessing game. Alice puts 5 Ether in her contract. That ETH goes to the person that guesses closest to the number she’s thinking of. Alice calls commit with the hash of the number, so she can’t change her mind. Anyone else can call guess to submit a guess. After 2 blocks Alice calls reveal to tell everyone what the number is. This scheme i…

Full disclosure: tech lead on Keep (the project whose blog this is posted to), and the post is by one of our advisors. You're right that this particular example has other downsides. The goal was to present the simplest examples of some attacks and issues that are easy to miss when doing blockchain programming. As I mentioned in another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16144892 ), the important thing is…

So in the same way a competent web programmer understands CSRF and XSS, a competent backend programmer understands SQL injection, and a competent node programmer understands concurrency vs. parallelism, there's a whole new set of paradigms (and interview questions!) that competent blockchain programmers will need to know.

The is-blockchain-hype-or-here-to-stay debate will unambiguously be settled if OWASP ever publishes a top-10 blockchain programming list.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#113

Post by UncleEntity »

shadowfiend wrote: post #23
blunte wrote: post #7

Some of these issues do seem concerning, but most wouldn't be profitable unless every miner was doing it (because the impact on one of these malicious behaviors will be felt in a later block). Unless you're lucky enough to mine two blocks in a row, I don't see how you can gain directly from malicious transaction reordering. You'll consume the first retrieve fee, but the second retrieve will be in a later block (which…

Full disclosure: tech lead on Keep (the project whose blog this is posted to), and the post is by one of our advisors. It might not be worth the effort when volume is low, but if you have a highly-used set of contracts susceptible to this, there will be a stronger incentive to take advantage of them. With high volume, if you do it only occasionally, you can gain an edge without necessarily revealing network corruptio…

> and forced errors can be used to subsidize miner transactions

Sure, you can error out a transaction but what gain is to be had over just being a 'rational actor' and collecting the transaction fee rather than giving your rivals a potential payday?

Unless they have an extremely high probability of mining the follow-on transactions this attack seems to have a very low (or even negative) benefit.

Though I would posit that if this attack were ever consistently profitable the system would have a much bigger problem to deal with.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#114

Post by UncleMeat »

Bromskloss wrote: post #70
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Does Ethereum's existence hinge on Solidity? Isn't Solidity just a language that one can compile to the lower-level language actually built into Ethereum?

Even EVM has complex semantics surrounding critical features like time, dispatch, and exceptions. The whole ecosystem is amateur.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#115

Post by metamet »

corford wrote: post #88
kmkemp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "invest in ETH" example, you're taking the appreciation of ETH into account, but in the case of mining crypto, you're ignoring it. Still, you're right in the overall point that just investing is more profitable. If you are going to gain value from the GPU, though, mining is a great way to make some extra cash.

Sorry, I just assumed ETH was out of reach of personal mining now. Sure, you could hold "shitcoins" that are currently easier to mine but that's a lot more risky than long term holding something like ETH, LTC, XMR (at least I think it is anyway).

It takes 3 months to make all of your initial investment back on mining ETH with a 1060, after electricity.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#116

Post by Jasper_ »

ve55 wrote: post #78
MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Solidity has a lot of potential pitfalls that need to be avoided, just like similar languages. Some of these are due to poor or unintuitive language design, although a lot of improvements have been made over time. The wallet bug involving Parity's multisig wallets was due to an error that Parity made, even if it's an error that may have been easy to make, it should have been caught in testing or code reviews due to h…

> Most of the largest headlines involving loss of funds in the Ethereum network have been due to programmer or user error.

What other classes of errors are there that Ethereum is successfully avoiding?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#117

Post by metamet »

corford wrote: post #29
fla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its simple: The risk taken is completely different! Mining is a much lower risk that yields less benefits.

I'm not sure I agree. Depending on what you're mining and when you start, you may never make your costs back. If anything, at this point (especially with more and more new coins adopting PoS rather than PoW) I'd say it's more risky than just buying a stable coin (ETH, BTC, LTC etc) and sitting on it for a year (and that's before factoring in the risk of lost potential earnings had you simply bought rather than mined…

Most people mine ETH, though.

So your options there are to either buy ETH on the market, or invest in a miner that will pay itself off in 3 months with ETH, then just provide pure profit for as long as it's, well, profitable.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#118

Post by joosters »

doctoboggan wrote: post #9
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #5

Almost all miners use a mining pool so wouldn't have access to these tricks. The pools on the other hand... I used to have an Ethereum mining operation, before it became unprofitable to do so. It was one of the most fun ventures of my life. All the cards and enormous heat and fans exchanging outside air in. It felt like I was part of something futuristic and new, solving problems I had never had experience with befor…

If you have modern cards you can still mine with one of the services that find the most profitable algorithm for you. I use NiceHash and have historically made about $2/day per GTX1070. This past month though I've been making more that double that. EDIT: Use this site to find out if your cards will be profitable considering your energy costs: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator I do want to leave one im…

How much money did you lose from the NiceHash 'hack' ? And are you still trusting them?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#119

Post by joosters »

ConnorLeet wrote: post #68
corford wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it :( That's 108 days before you _start_ to make a profit and future returns are guaranteed to diminish as difficulty goes up. Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period. To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.

If the whole crypto ecosystem crashes (unlikely in my opinion) graphics cards can be resold and recoup losses.

I think people are going to be increasingly wary of second hand graphics cards. How many of them will have been trashed by running in a poorly-cooled mining rig for months on end?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#120

Post by rhaps0dy »

The title of the piece is "Miners aren't your friends", implying that the interests of miners and the reader differ. However, the title of the HN submission is "Miners aren't friends", which implies that the interests of two separate miners diverge.

We should probably change the title to match the original one.

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