SafeDollar ‘stablecoin’ drops to $0 following DeFi exploit on Polygon

This is most likely a problem with this specific smart contract, from what I understand, if the EVM on the "winning" miner were to produce a state transition that did not faithfully follow the SC, that block should be rejected.

Polygon is a little different, due to its proof of stake system, where there is no "winner" and the validators (Heimdall instances) "check" the work of the actual block producers (Bor instances). It also has a slasher-like element where only one Heimdall instance needs to prove that a block is incorrectly executed for it to be rejected, so a malicious actor would need to compromise all active Heimdall instances to be able to lie.

There is more than one "law." Each fiat ecosystem is its own system of financial law, each mutually-incompatible with any other fiat ecosystem. Cryptocurrency gives an alternative arbitrator that allows for these mutually-incompatible systems of law to be bridged.

Also, to be clear, in the example I mentioned, the government of the US does not forbid trading with Nigeria/Liberia/etc. Traditional money-transfer services (Paypal, Western Union, most savings banks, etc.) are just unwilling to do it, because of the frequency of those transactions being scams. But this prevents people who "know what they're doing" (like people employing people in those countries!) from having any means to send money there.

This is a gap in the market, in some sense, but it's one that couldn't really be filled by any other fiat "retail" solution, as that solution would then be what scammers use to bilk people. So you really need something that's "complex and finance-nerdy" in the way that crypto is, to ensure that it's hard enough for regular people to use it to transfer money, that scammers just don't bother to try talking people through it. (Such a product would then never find product-market fit, as it would have no retail customers. Only a system run "for its own sake", like cryptocurrency systems are, can really be a good base platform to enable such transfers over the long term.)

If you steal my credit card and buy things with it, I will call my bank and I won't need to pay for it when I settle my statement balance at the end of the month. The bank will follow up with the merchant and/or law enforcement and, in most cases, the bank will get its money back somehow. In the cases where it doesn't, I'm sure the bank is insured against losses. Banks and insurance companies probably have a complicated model for estimating $X/yr in theft.

If someone steals my wallet's private key (= stealing my credit card), I'm done. There is no recourse AFAIK.

I dunno, it's not about wealth concentration, be rich, that's fine. It's about whether your wealth was gathered by contributing useful work, or by parasitizing it.

I imagine a proof of work system where there's a community work queue, and "mining" is completing tasks in the queue, borderlands-style (though hopefully without the violence). The mined tokens can be resolved to nft's which stay attached to the wallet of the user who requested that the work be done.

There's also a web of trust and a UBI component (Circles-UBI style) to disinventivise sybil accounts.

If the work-originator deems the work unsatisfactory, they can invalidate the tokens that were mined from its "completion" and recoup a fraction of what they paid to have it done.

So doing business with somebody who has a reputation of doing shoddy work, or of failing to respect good work, is risky because your tokens might evaporate.

An would-be investor in this token would have to decide whose tokens to buy, which requires much more research.

You could also have some system to disinventivise hoarding, like a token half-life.

Or you know, something like that.

> I believe there is a 2-D dimensional binary. Simply using a grid (with an array of cells forming a line, and lines stacked on top of each other—a spreadsheet basically), we can drop all syntax characters. The only thing you have is your cells and your semantic words.

I fail to see how this helps.

The reason why bugs crop up all the time in software isn't because syntax is confusing. It's also not because semantics is confusing--plenty of bugs have perfectly clear, well-understood bugs. The problem is that we as programmers don't think about how our software could fail. We don't ask ourselves "could this multiplication overflow?" frequently enough. We don't look at code and ask "who made sure this pointer points to valid data?" We believe that there's no way the price of an affiliated token could ever reach exactly $0, so we assert that it can't happen.

The way you avoid these bugs is to just simply make it impossible for the system to get into certain states. It's already the case with statically-typed languages that it's impossible to pass a string to a function that expected an int. If you design your API right, you can make it impossible to get an index into an array that is out-of-range (although this is way too rarely done). But, even then, you will still find people who will confidently use the escape hatch to say "this string is clearly UTF-8, I know it is from outside experience, so don't bother checking."