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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#211

Post by robert_davidson »

andybak wrote: post #111
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.

I phrase this as "incentive alignment". Every stable system aligns incentives with its continuation.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#212

Post by caf »

Another instance of this is if you managed to build a business around a particularly profitable contract or set of contracts, the nature of which requires you to regularly post maintenance transactions of some sort.

If you get big enough and profitable enough, the miners will have an incentive to specifically refuse to include your maintenance transactions unless you include a large transaction fee - in other words, market segmentation for transactions.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#213

Post by AroundTheBlock_ »

madeofpalk wrote: post #149
epistasis wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, or 51% of stake if Ethereum ever switches to proof of stake. Ethereum runs by capitalistic power, not democratic power. I don't know if there's any alternative to that; any such system is going to have some means of enforcing truth and power, and means of gaining or losing it. Cryptocurrencies are not a way of escaping that fundamental fact. They shift where the po…

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

Actually, 51% of miners can't cause a hard fork (which TheDAO was).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#214

Post by yorwba »

jancsika wrote: post #189
madeofpalk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not 51% of people, it's 51% of computing power, Cool, so in reality a lot less than 51% of people can screw over every else. Again, what is it that ETH provides society that's new and useful?

Here's an easy one: the ability to receive a payment for a service without relying on a third party to deliver that payment. New: state-level actor(s) cannot stop an organization from receiving payment merely by forcing your third-party payment processor to freeze funds/stop payments. Example: sci-hub. If they were receiving payments through Mastercard/Visa it would have almost certainly been frozen long ago. However…

> a state level actor cannot just stop the contract from being executed simply by putting pressure on a third party.

They just haven't gotten around to it yet. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies increases the number of entities that need to be pressured, but doesn't make state-level actors completely powerless.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#215

Post by xucheng »

zaat wrote: post #86
xucheng wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alice’s commit transaction needs to specify some block height after which further guesses are ignored, and then publish the “reveal” message some (safe) number of blocks after this. I think this is unsafe as well. Noted that since everyone can verify the real answer, there is no point for Alice to reveal it. As a result, as soon as anyone submits the correct answer, the miners can cheat and replace the answer as th…

You can solve that with additional step: 1. Alice send the challenge. 2. You submit the answered, encrypted. 3. After you verify that your answer was included in a block, you post the private key you used for the encrypted answer. 4. Profit

I think the miner can cheat in step 3. After you submit your private key as a transaction, the miner can delay it to be included in the blockchain for arbitrary time. During which, the miner can use your private key to decrypt your answer submit in step 2. And resubmit their version of the answer.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#216

Post by paulmd »

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…

> Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing?

Network effect and name recognition, the same reasons that Bitcoin hasn't been supplanted by Monero or Zcash or any of the other dozens of coins that do virtually everything better than Bitcoin.

The really interesting thing is that the original plan for Bitcoin included many of the same programmable-money features as Ethereum. The instructions are still in the bytecode but I believe they were disabled in one of the patches, except for a handful of instructions that implement the basic "send money from A to B" type functionality.

My impression is these were supposed to be enabled/used at some future date, but this is just one more thing that's gotten bogged down by the infighting and politics of the project. Much like blocksize - 1 MB was just a number picked to avoid transaction spamming blowing things up in the early days, not a divinely inspired number intended to be used for all time. But the project is so stagnant and calified that they can't handle even the smallest day-to-day tasks like this. God forbid we change one of Satoshi's sacred constants.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#217

Post by paulmd »

spookthesunset wrote: post #130
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…

Who cares about the language when the very premise of the project "code is law" was proven wrong. When the DAO was "hacked" by a "thief", rather than tell people "whelp, code is law and the code executed perfect" the mob (more accurately, those at the top of the etherium pyramid) decided to change history and roll back the blockchain. Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack",…

The problem with the "code is law" principle is that it's also the version of history where a single attacker controls 15% of all Eth in existence. I think most participants probably would agree with that principle in general, but the practicalities outweighed principle in this situation.

(the fact that the creator of Ethereum was heavily invested in the DAO doubtless played a role as well... it's different when it's your money that got stolen, and he had the power to do something about it.)

Still though, people don't understand that the legal system is a feature, not a bug. A neutral arbiter that can judge the spirit of the contract and come to a decision that resolves the matter fairly for everybody... that way you don't need to guarantee bug-free code forever.

There was a post here a while back that made the interesting point that essentially everything cryptocurrency attempts to do is anti-user and the problems they claim to solve would actually be viewed as features by most people. For example, no chargebacks! But chargebacks are a good thing, if the good turns out to be significantly not as described then you can get your money back. Or - immutable history! But it's actually quite nice when the bank can remove fraudulent charges when my wallet gets stolen, I quite like having that recourse.

3% merchant fees for Visa don't seem so bad compared to the DAO hack and Solidity and all that other shit.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#218

Post by wan23 »

kevingadd wrote: post #191
Iv wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system where it is not 0.1% of the people who are allowed to screw over 99.9% of the others? You argue for purity of a principle. Very few people actually care about such a notion. The majority has more practical concerns. The fact that a theft that would have made the whole currency seem insecure has been reversed was seen as a proof of solidity by many users.

What implicitly stops 0.1% of people from controlling 51% of the network? You realize how much of global fiat wealth is currently in the hands of the 0.1%, right? The current system at least theoretically has democratic (or otherwise) control over who the 0.1% in power are. In a system like BTC or ETH it's just 'who has the most compute?' or in proof of stake, 'who's the richest?'

If any group controlled >50% of the network and also was willing to use that power in a way that would diminish trust in that same network then they'd very quickly end up with 100% of something worthless.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#219

Post by paulmd »

Mbioguy wrote: post #176
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…

Sounds like 2 things are getting confused. Think of Ethereum as a very slow decentralized computer. People make mistakes building applications all the time, but this doesn't necessarily mean the underlying language, or for a better comparison, the compiler is at fault. Problems with the underlying language can cause problems with applications, obviously. Programmer error =/= language/compiler error, while both can oc…

The problem is that it's virtually impossible to write a "correct" program in Solidity, there are just too many pitfalls that are literally trivial to run into.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691212

It turns out that having a language designed by a 17-year-old who knows some Javascript might not be the best idea in the world, who would have thought?

The language needs to be thrown away and a more proper one implemented, plain and simple. Solidity is unfit for purpose.

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