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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

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Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#221

Post by jstanley »

Nursie wrote: post #208
jstanley wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Points 2, 3, and 5 are essentially "how do we give the government the authority to block or reverse payments even when the sender possesses the relevant private key, or send payments even without the relevant private key". I'm not saying that's not a fine thing to want, but if that is what you want, then you don't want cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is purposefully antithetical to that goal.

And as a result will stay irrelevant :/

That's like arguing that TLS will stay irrelevant unless it comes with government backdoors.

The fact that authority figures can't break it is a feature, for the kind of people who would want to use it in the first place (which should be all of us, but sadly is not yet).

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#222

Post by dorgo »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #48
hodder wrote: post #8

The 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

Centralized alternatives work perfectly well until they fail (corruption, mismanagement, war, police state .. ). And when this happens there will be decentralized alternatives ready.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#223

Post by acdha »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #219
acdha wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously I think these kinds of questions need un-asking rather than answering. That’s equivalent to conceding that the concept cannot work and giving up. No matter your personal views on a particular issue, this is really just asking how to comply with legal obligations: governments don’t care if your system is broken by design and makes compliance hard, and that’ll deter most legitimate users.

These are problems that aren't fixed in traditional money either. Money still gets to terrorists and still gets laundered through our biggest banks.

Yes, but note that there are laws and policies around it rather than people saying the question should be unasked.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#224

Post by fwxwi »

dcsan wrote: post #79
busymom0 wrote: post #46

Your site's SSL cert has just expired at November 24, 2019 at 1:00:59 AM Eastern Standard Time Safari, Chrome give errors now.

is there a mirror somewhere? article seems interesting.

State of browsers in 2019: asking your browser to bypass an SSL error is so hard that it's easier to ask for a mirror.

btw, if you use Chrome and you see an SSL error, just type "thisisunsafe" and it will load the webpage. Try it here: https://expired.badssl.com/

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#225

Post by acdha »

rmtech wrote: post #209
acdha wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously I think these kinds of questions need un-asking rather than answering. That’s equivalent to conceding that the concept cannot work and giving up. No matter your personal views on a particular issue, this is really just asking how to comply with legal obligations: governments don’t care if your system is broken by design and makes compliance hard, and that’ll deter most legitimate users.

By pretty much the same argument strong encryption cannot work because governments would prefer it not to exist; terrorists and rogue states can use encryption, and it is not technically possible to build encryption that "only works for the good guys". In reality there is an ongoing battle over encryption where various governments try to ban it, people fight back, etc. I suspect that we will see the same thing play o…

Encryption isn’t quite the right comparison because it’s not a running network. Anyone doing merchant/banking activities with a cryptocurrency isn’t just using the same software but also risking being involved in a transaction chain involving someone trying to launder money. Imagine how the crypto wars would have gone if GPG users had to take active measures to prevent forwarding messages from untrusted strangers.

Tor is a better comparison, especially with the reason why most people consider it highly risky to run an exit node.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#226

Post by nootropicat »

snitko wrote: post #10
sincerely wrote: post #7

In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is legit. Good read.

Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicat…

>He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms.

What? Nothing could be more unfair. His articles on zk-snarks and starks are probably the most approachable explanations available.

https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/quadratic-arithmetic-prog...

https://vitalik.ca/general/2017/11/09/starks_part_1.html

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#227

Post by knocte »

Nursie wrote: post #120
seibelj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners in Proof of Work currencies that find a block can choose what transactions in what order get mined. Through which they can change the order of operations, but they can’t invent transactions or manipulate them directly. I have found the issue of miners and transaction manipulating to be overblown.

They could block, and may find themselves required to block transactions from unknown sources if this space becomes more regulated.

Solution to this is privacy-based wallets and/or second layer payments (e.g. lightning network).

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#228

Post by semiotagonal »

jotakami wrote: post #168
hanniabu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using a poor implementation of an app as a reason why smart contracts are bad. I hope you realize this is the same thing as saying databases are bad because of the Equifax hack.

I don’t think you understand. The arbitrage bots aren’t exploiting poorly written contracts, they are capturing free value that users of a dApp have opened up. This free value is available to miners as well, and could be used to subsidize an otherwise-unprofitable double spend attack. But more to the point: allowing smart contracts in a blockchain introduces all of the complexity of trying to make any other piece of…

I did about 0.1% of the amount of research you did a few years ago and was really struck by the irreversibility of mistakes. Other engineering domains can have irreversible (e.g. fatal) mistakes as well, but they don't have as many enthusiasts jumping in to the field.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#229

Post by dorgo »

sireat wrote: post #128
lawn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's actually funny is how people still believe that no use cases exist. Here are just some examples: * Uncensorable donations * No way for a third party to freeze your payments (internet is full of horror stories of PayPal) * Not all businesses can accept digital payments (marijuana stores or porn have trouble) * Credit cards and payment processors take a 2-4% cut, of all transactions. * You can use cryptocurrenci…

Those are real use cases. However the adoption is severely lacking. The problem is that it has gotten worse not better. There has not been a good use case for a Joe NormalCitizen for crypto in a while. Anecdata: I first mined BTC in 2011 and used BTC quite a bit in 2013 to buy bunch of online and offline services. It was relatively painless since I had my own BTC. (Also it was really pseudo-anonymous since I was only…

>If I want do something shady, I'd have the problem of onramp KYC etc.

Is it still possible to circumwent KYC by mining? Or is it too expensive?

Sounds like an advantage of PoW over PoS

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#230

Post by rmtech »

acdha wrote: post #225
rmtech wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By pretty much the same argument strong encryption cannot work because governments would prefer it not to exist; terrorists and rogue states can use encryption, and it is not technically possible to build encryption that "only works for the good guys". In reality there is an ongoing battle over encryption where various governments try to ban it, people fight back, etc. I suspect that we will see the same thing play o…

Encryption isn’t quite the right comparison because it’s not a running network. Anyone doing merchant/banking activities with a cryptocurrency isn’t just using the same software but also risking being involved in a transaction chain involving someone trying to launder money. Imagine how the crypto wars would have gone if GPG users had to take active measures to prevent forwarding messages from untrusted strangers. To…

I don't think this is an important distinction.

In both cases there mere existence of the technology helps both good and bad parties to achieve their aims, that is all that matters.

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