Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism • Hacker News Board

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#71

Post by simias » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #22

idiotsecant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even the most fundamental issue with LN though, it's not a fully thought out system. As LN node count increases the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has. The internet solves this with some degree of human intervention to tip the scales to particular routes, which is something that the LN inherent…

Most end-users won't be acting as payment gateways, they'll all have private channels, so they won't appear in the routing graphs. The number of routing nodes would be many magnitude smaller than total number of LN users. It's working fine for now with growing adoption (1ml.com) and I believe it'll only get better with time.

Unless things have changed recently the big issue with LN is that it's fundamentally a centralizing force. The idea that everybody is going to open a million channels with every single counterparty (locking coins in the process) is ridiculous. Instead people would just open a couple of channels with big, centralized nodes but that's just Visa with cryptobabble on top.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#72

Post by iskander » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

sophrocyne wrote: post #50

teempai wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum actually has almost no client diversity. The vast majority of nodes run the geth client (go). Regarding the security aspects of L2s: they will of course not be anywhere near as robust as ethereum itself, but over time they’ll get better. However, they also don’t need to be as robust as ethereum given they effectively benchmark against the ethereum chain so while things could go wrong, the amount of damage wi…

For those interested in data supporting diversity comment (~82% geth) - https://www.ethernodes.org/ Re: GP comment - From a "trust" perspective, there is a distinct difference to call out between the integrity of data on the platform, and the trustworthiness of the platform itself (i.e., the ability for centralized control of all data) In an instance where an L2 is compromised, the potential impact is limited to the…

>In an instance where an L2 is compromised, the potential impact is limited to the integrity of data that individual L2 was contributing to the overall platform.

I think distinction is only meaningful as long as L2s remain a niche curiosity while the majority of transaction volume resides on L1. If the L2 plan succeeds and almost all volume passes through an L2 and one of the major L2s has a bug like in this post, then a large fraction of all ETH could end in the hands of hackers.

The ledger would accurately reflect the moment that a bad actor lifted e.g. 5-10% of the ETH supply off an Arbitrum or StarkNet bridge. Technically the L1 is uncompromised but a lot of money would be "redistributed".

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#73

Post by BoorishBears » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

rawtxapp wrote: post #57

kristofferR wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion here used to be way more thoughtful, it's only been bad the last year or so. I think the degradation of crypto discourse here was mostly a knee-jerk reaction to NFTs. "NFTs are stupid, so all crypto is stupid, because NFTs are crypto" - that was likely the thought process behind all the toxicity seen here.

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1]. Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand sch…

Hasn't time already proven the skeptics right?

The biggest sources of skeptism were around logistics and value as a currency:

Is there a cryptocoin that has successfully solved logistics without disastrously failing as a currency?

Even if you ignore the environmental aspect... has any coin that has achieved scale not experienced deflation that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup?

To me the skepticism has always been "you can't have a functional decentralized currency". Some people take that at face value and proudly proclaim "people will accept your BTC/ETH/etc."

But most people mean it in the sense we think of currencies belonging to non-failed states: aka being a somewhat stable store of value. More widely used for payment of productive economic output than fraud and speculation...

-

I see crypto as I see Tesla, maybe there way a point but it's long buried under the mania.

Disclaimer: Due to that mania I keep some as hedge, but again, imagine saying I keep dollars under my pillow as a hedge that next year they might have 10x'd in value...

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#74

Post by iskander » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #68

rawtxapp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1]. Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand sch…

Yeah I'm an opponent and I feel the same. The talking points have been exhausted half a decade ago. On top of that as cryptocurrencies get more and more mainstream we have to deal with less sophisticated people who make it very hard to have a decent discussion in the first place, because you basically have to start by taking 20 minutes to explain to them what the basics even are. NFTs are really pushing this situatio…

I'll try to engage without pulling us into familiar debates.

I have found, in a year of intensive use and research around the Ethereum ecosystem, here are a few things I like that wouldn't really work without an underlying immutable distributed ledger:

1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

Also, the more I learn about the zk-rollup space (STARKs and SNARKs) the more curious I get about the possibilities there. You can, for example, have digital treasure hunts where whoever finds the treasure can generate a proof without revealing the location. So far this is just cool without having an obvious killer app, but more than anything else in the crypto space I think there will be killer apps emerging from this technology.

By volume, I agree with critics that it's mostly bubble-chasing, gambling, and scams. It might be healthier for everyone if the tech & art experimentation were walled off from investments. At the very least, we probably shouldn't have crypto exchanges advertising -- really nothing interesting comes from luring Main Street to buy and store Doge on a centralized exchange.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#75

Post by iskander » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

HashBasher wrote: post #62

iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

> extremely decentralized network Can you provide source for this claim? I thought that infura was the dominant infrastructure provider for eth and if it gets taken down, a majority of the apps goes down too.

Infura is a single RPC endpoint, the underlying network it talks with has 5k-6k clients: https://www.ethernodes.org/?synced=1

You can choose one of ~20 different free RPC endpoints: https://ethereumnodes.com/

This doesn't include private or paid RPCs or just running your own.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#76

Post by rawtxapp » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #73

rawtxapp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1]. Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand sch…

Hasn't time already proven the skeptics right? The biggest sources of skeptism were around logistics and value as a currency: Is there a cryptocoin that has successfully solved logistics without disastrously failing as a currency? Even if you ignore the environmental aspect... has any coin that has achieved scale not experienced deflation that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup? To me the skepticism h…

Has it?

Bitcoin is bigger than ever before. It's far more valuable, it has far more users, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions moving billions of dollars worth of value every day on-chain alone, has very healthy L2 layer growth (1ml.com), has hundreds of exchanges worldwide, it ticks every 10 minutes and will keep ticking for the foreseeable future. We have a small country that adopted it as a legal tender with more countries coming on the Bitcoin standard potentially this year.

People only see the fiat currencies and forget that we've run on gold standard for thousands of years and fiat currencies are barely 50 years old and riddled with financial crises left and right. Bitcoin is digital gold, strictly better than gold. But anyways, we'll see what happens in the future.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#77

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

mattdesl wrote: post #59

jrochkind1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of transactions do not demand absolute integrity, but still make sense to use a blockchain for? (I don't know much about these sorts of things, I'm actually asking for examples)

Security of zk rollups may be sufficient for a lot of activity - trading, DeFi, games, art, DAO/access tokens, escrow, crowdfunds, all the web3 stuff. The L1 may eventually be a primary settlement layer for protocols like zkSync and StarkNet (and any other protocols and rollups built on Ethereum L1). At some point it may not be common for users to interact with L1—ie. users of Argent and Sequence wallets may only be…

I gotta admit I don't know what 50% of the words there mean, but it surprises me to suggest that "absolute integrity" would not be required for trading, escrow, DeFi, DAO/access tokens.

Makes sense for games and art (but then I wonder what they are doing using a blockchain in the first place).

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#78

Post by SilasX » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

lihorne wrote: post #61

Hey! Optimism's head of engineering here! We're super greatful to saurik for writing up such a great analysis of what he found. If you want to hear some of our key takeaways as the maintainers of the network, you can check out our disclosure post here [1]. If you're wondering WTF Optimism is... we are building an optimistic rollup on top of ethereum. The basic idea is to de-couple blockchain computation from data ava…

I have a question: why did you make transaction data from before the Nov 11 upgrade unavailable? How hard would this have been? It's just serving the same immutable transactions that were there before, right? People were expecting these to be available for planning and tax reporting.

Even finding out about them after the fact was difficult because the cause of missing transactions wasn't made public on the user-facing site. For months the maintainers fielded questions from people on the discord that could have been satisfied by an announcement on the website. And even the announcements on discord came slowly.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#79

Post by iskander » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #53

iskander wrote: post #5

This is a concerning aspect of Ethereum's strategy to push scaling to layer-2 networks: Ethereum is a heavily audited and tested protocol that runs an extremely decentralized network of diverse clients. L2s can be...an AWS instance running arbitrary buggy code. Much of the confidence in the "base layer" that people using Ethereum currently experience will be significantly undermined if mundane transactions wend in an…

Side note: that’s the first flame war free / nuanced thread on crypto that I have seen on HN so far. Thanks for starting it!

No problem!

After a year of playing around with crypto I think I'm appropriately both skeptical and excited, which is hopefully a good starting point for non-trolling conversations.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#80

Post by cheese_it » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

lihorne wrote: post #61

Hey! Optimism's head of engineering here! We're super greatful to saurik for writing up such a great analysis of what he found. If you want to hear some of our key takeaways as the maintainers of the network, you can check out our disclosure post here [1]. If you're wondering WTF Optimism is... we are building an optimistic rollup on top of ethereum. The basic idea is to de-couple blockchain computation from data ava…

Hello,

I've been wondering what the hardware requirements for running Optimism's infrastructure are relative to just running a Mainnet node. If Optimism can process more transactions than the main chain, does that mean state growth is also much higher? How is Optimism thinking about this problem as it moves to decentralize the sequencer in the future?