Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

Some hubris in this post. Claims ASIC resistant PoW is "Solved as far as we can", with Ethash being the near end-all of hashing.

Random-X is a significant step towards ASIC resistance, requiring near general purpose computation to perform efficiently (i.e. if you can build a better CPU than Intel/AMD/ARM, you've already won).

https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md

(Random-X requires code JITting, large CPU caches, compliant floating point, SIMD, hardware AES, as well as large amounts of system RAM, and other things.)

Innovation continues. If you stop having ideas, step aside.

> is coming

Yeah that was 5 years ago too if you don't remember.

It's an incredibly difficult problem and anyone claiming to have actually solved it in a decentralised way that proof-of-work did is a charlatan.

Given all the money slushing around in cryptocurrency looking for a problem to solve I'd argue it's an intractable issue that needs yet another breakthrough rather than marketing and bubble hype.

I literally spent the past week reading a couple dozen papers on cryptocurrency attacks, in service of a term paper which should hopefully turn into a master's thesis (and possibly more during my PhD campaign). I'm pretty damn pessimistic as a result. Smart contracts basically throw all of your consensus guarantees out the window because they can cause arbitrary exchanges of value in the application layer, which can be used to incentivize miners into all sorts of shenanigans.

All of this research is producing a fascinating array of solutions in search of problems. Fun stuff to think about, but I suspect that the added complexity will only create a system that is just as prone to fraud and abuse as the existing centralized order.

> Smart contracts basically throw all of your consensus guarantees out the window because they can cause arbitrary exchanges of value in the application layer, which can be used to incentivize miners into all sorts of shenanigans.

Do you have an example?

Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money that wouldn't collapse and lose value once outlawed". The proof-of-work solution cannot be replicated (for reasons I won't go into here, homework for you). And that's a good thing.

Ethereum is a scam and has always been a scam from its inception. Multiple reasons for that:

1) Overly complex, obfuscating its lack of problem to solve by having lots of features and code

2) Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing" to try and pump the price and keep the interest going.

3) No real world use case. Only promises and cryptokittes.

4) Literally controlled by one guy (see the now famous "Can you guys stop trading" quote).

5) Only produced scam ICOs with 99.99% of ICO projects practically stealing money from investors with no repercussions whatsoever.

There are many more, but the thing to remember is - Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way. That is the real pain Bitcoin solves for people: not agreeing to unjust laws peacefully and quietly exiting the system.