Trust Models
vitalik.ca
Trust Models
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Trust Models
#2It seems odd to not discuss the more fundamental issues of trusting the infrastructure. All this virtual reality is on top of a physical reality controlled by governments and powerful interests. What happens when said powers declare cryptocurrencies illegal (app store removals, RST packets, etc.), or try to take them over with brute force?
Re: Trust Models
#3If you invert the colours in the chart, you also get the consequences of their failure modes. In designing tokenization schemes some years ago, we used a trust model like this, and the basic problem reduces to the adage, "a security system is only as strong as its recovery process."
In the case of the field of trust models Vitalik has illustrated, trust comes down to the questions of: do you have a way to tumble your root of trust, do you leave it static (like an HSM with destroyed keys), or do you federate. The answer is of course, "it depends..." In the case of the balance of consensus, proofs, and anonymity (e.g. ZK) the application defines the needs.
The issue I think is that these problems are all negatively defined and presume a threat model before a use case. They are artifacts of that threat model, in that they wouldn't exist if they weren't a reaction to it. These things (blockchains and their applications) are essentially criticisms that allow people to organize and defect to a certain extent, but they are lacking a quality of essentialness I can't seem to find a name for. It's like they aren't discovered things, but just artifacts of a constraint. Such fun to read his stuff.
Re: Trust Models
#4Whenever I read Vitalik's work, I find myself convinced that all of society and its various problems can be boiled down to incentives and their alignment or misalignment.
Re: Trust Models
#5It seems odd to not discuss the more fundamental issues of trusting the infrastructure. All this virtual reality is on top of a physical reality controlled by governments and powerful interests. What happens when said powers declare cryptocurrencies illegal (app store removals, RST packets, etc.), or try to take them over with brute force?
Assuming N isn't 1, they should be able to survive a ban by a single government. Can be extended to multiple governments
Re: Trust Models
#6Whenever I read Vitalik's work, I find myself convinced that all of society and its various problems can be boiled down to incentives and their alignment or misalignment.
Any recommendations of other work of his to read?
Re: Trust Models
#7It seems odd to not discuss the more fundamental issues of trusting the infrastructure. All this virtual reality is on top of a physical reality controlled by governments and powerful interests. What happens when said powers declare cryptocurrencies illegal (app store removals, RST packets, etc.), or try to take them over with brute force?
This tends to be a focus of the Bitcoin community a lot more than other cryptocurrency communities. Bitcoin has technologies such as ASN based sybil attack protections [1], satellite broadcasts that cover most of the land area of the earth [2], and setups that allow Bitcoin to be broadcast over Ham Radio [3].
Of course that's not to say the problem is ignored by other communities. Many people are well aware of the full set of dependencies of these crypto projects and the ways that external forces might be disruptive. And many people are working on increasingly sophisticated ways to eliminate these dependencies or ensure viable alternatives if worst comes to worst.
[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/16599
[2]: https://blockstream.com/satellite/#satellite_network-coverag...
[3]: https://www.wired.com/story/cypherpunks-bitcoin-ham-radio/
Re: Trust Models
#8It seems odd to not discuss the more fundamental issues of trusting the infrastructure. All this virtual reality is on top of a physical reality controlled by governments and powerful interests. What happens when said powers declare cryptocurrencies illegal (app store removals, RST packets, etc.), or try to take them over with brute force?
> It seems odd to not discuss the more fundamental issues of trusting the infrastructure.
It would be odd if the Blockchain / Crypto-currency market came crashing down. Like most nutritionists who do not understand the popularity of sugary drinks or fast food chains, I think, news.yc fails to understand the Crypto-currency / Blockchain market.
Re: Trust Models
#9If you invert the colours in the chart, you also get the consequences of their failure modes. In designing tokenization schemes some years ago, we used a trust model like this, and the basic problem reduces to the adage, "a security system is only as strong as its recovery process." In the case of the field of trust models Vitalik has illustrated, trust comes down to the questions of: do you have a way to tumble your…
>If you invert the colours in the chart, you also get the consequences of their failure modes.
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding what you are saying, but it sounds to me like you are suggesting that the consequences of a 1-of-N failure are inherently worse than the consequences of an N-of-N failure, which is not a fundamental truth in any way. It is entirely possible for a 1-of-N system to have better recovery modes than an N-of-N system, in fact it's often much easier to tumble / enhance / improve the root of trust in a 1-of-N system than it is to do so in an N/2-of-N system. (for example, in the case of rolling trusted setup ceremonies vs. multi-party-computation).
Re: Trust Models
#10Whenever I read Vitalik's work, I find myself convinced that all of society and its various problems can be boiled down to incentives and their alignment or misalignment.
To me that's the basic point of game theory.