[deleted]
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
41–50 of 378 posts
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#42I 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…
Plus there's the problem that smart contracts cannot be easily modified if they are found to be buggy and that one can always reverse engineer them, because they're distributed to everyone.
These two together have already caused lots of damage https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-deleted-150-... and they make most real-world uses impossible.
It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart contracts, because due to the source code being accessible to everyone you can always figure out the password, key, or secret URL to whatever is being sold. Without paying for it.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#43Some 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…
This is what I really dislike about owning crypto long term as a store of value. It's a cat-and-mouse game with hardware and software development, and there's a lot of faith in maintainers to stay ahead of the threats.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#44It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.
I'm disappointed that PrimeCoin didn't really catch on. It's mathematically sound, relatively quantum safe, and produces useful output. Any improvements to factoring or finding prime chains would be genuine advances in the field, whether algorithm or hardware (ASIC) based.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#45In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is legit. Good read.
Except let's not forget the DAO hack, where everything was forked because too many rich people lost their money.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#46Your site's SSL cert has just expired at November 24, 2019 at 1:00:59 AM Eastern Standard Time
Safari, Chrome give errors now.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#47Whether 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 o…
Afraid of a little competition? This is the paradox of the bitcoin maximalist: The 'free market' is good but don't try to compete with my 'one true asset'!
I heard about Bitcoin in 2010 a few days before MagicalTux announced Mt. Gox on the Bitcoin forums. Once graphic card mining became a thing I quickly started a small farm while in school.
When I first understood PoW I immediately knew PoW must die for cryptocurrency to become sustainable. It is the single largest flaw with contemporary cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has become stale and unwilling to progress, instead choosing to retreat in maximalist dogma. This prevents bitcoin from solving some of these obvious technical issues. The block size debates is far more than enough to turn me away.
For me the ethereum community has been a breath of fresh air and is far more progressive than those left in the bitcoin world. After seeing the ethereum community gracefully handle the 2016 DOA hack with a hard fork, I was sold. Ethereum's community understood technology serves us, not the other way around while acknowledging and actively working toward solving problems bitcoiners often simply ignore.
I believe in the human spirit of solving problems through technology. Ethereum is not a panacea, but the ethereum project tries to remember that progressive spirit.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#48The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to speculation and black markets. The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are: -lack of trust/ease of use for the layman -volatility These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.
There is an even bigger problem:
-a lack of reason to use cryptocurrencies when centralized alternatives perform much better for non-illegal usecases
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#49Funny. Article discussing hard problems of crypto and ignoring the elephants in the room. There is still no actual and relevant use case for crypto outside illegal transactions and gambli^H^H^H^H^Hinvestment purposes. The second elephant is that it brings monetary policy back to medieval times. Third is that in practice the whole concept of credit and ots role in money creation is ignored.
Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
#50I 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…
Plus there's the problem that smart contracts cannot be easily modified if they are found to be buggy and that one can always reverse engineer them, because they're distributed to everyone. These two together have already caused lots of damage https://hackernoon.com/yes-this-kid-really-just-deleted-150-... and they make most real-world uses impossible. It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart…
> It is pretty much impossible to sell anything digital with smart contracts, because due to the source code being accessible to everyone you can always figure out the password, key, or secret URL to whatever is being sold. Without paying for it.
Pirating most software/movies/music is pretty easy, but people still sell it. I'm not sure this is as big a problem as you think it is.