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Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

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Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#111

Post by 8note »

iskander wrote: post #74
simias wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know what the third one entails, or whether a distributed ledger actually enables it without also having a centralized legal entity, but the other two seem like they already exist without a distributed ledger.

The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

For 2) forever art already existed without any ledger. People store copies of pictures they like because they feel like it. Not being on a ledger doesn't mean Nyan cat will disappear. The ledger might attempt to guarantee that unpopular works stay available, but I don't think you can guarantee that any particular ledger will continue to be active "forever".

They could do a hard fork that prunes out the unpopular art to save on space, and migrate everyone to that one, leaving the old one unhosted. Long term, you're not going to force people to keep spending resources to maintain stuff that nobody cares about

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#112

Post by 8note »

scyclow wrote: post #103
simias wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1) Creating limited editions of generative art. I personally think that it's not really an interesting feature. Creating scarcity out of something that ought not to be scarce is just a way to infiltrate capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Hacker culture historically went completely against that (phreaking, breaking DRM etc...) but I concede that it's more of a philosophical/political argument than a technical o…

With respect to point 1, I'm sympathetic to your response, but I don't see things quite as bleakly for a few reasons: - NFTs create a scarcity of ownership, but they don't create a scarcity of enjoyment or experience. In fact, the entire NFT generative art community is based around the idea of viewing and enjoying pieces that you don't personally own. - I don't think scarcity of ownership is necessarily a bad thing.…

if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

im unclear that this scarcity is different from making a wordpress site with n posts, each one being a picture generated with the different parameters.

i think the website version is better, even, since you as the artist can pick out the best individual items when producing the single art work that is "n pieces generated by this algorithm"

i dont think it really unlocks anything new. Whats different is having tooling that makes it easy to do

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#113

Post by jimmydorry »

rawtxapp wrote: post #37
idiotsecant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in order to accommodate more users you need more routing nodes. Exponential scaling is a funny thing- systems work perfectly right up until they catastrophically fail. That's why it's important to understand these kinds of problems ahead of time, which LN is determined not to do.

Look at it this way, if x = number of total users, routing nodes will grow O(log x), not O(c^x). The users can grow exponentially, the routing nodes won't because the marginal cost of processing an extra transaction from an end-user is very close to 0.

I thought the routing node was putting up some amount of Bitcoin per channel. Each channel would therefore have a non-zero cost (and each user requires a channel).

I would need to go back and refresh my understand as it's been quite a while since I read the LN whitepaper, much less kept abreast of developments in that space.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#114

Post by openfuture »

SilasX wrote: post #93
lihorne wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that we could have been better communicators about this. We prioritized our concerns with applications that could break during the upgrade, and we biased our public communications towards developers as a result. For example, you're right that a notification on our homepage, in addition to our docs, would have been a good reminder to users. We'll work on getting a blog post and better documentation up tha…

>For example, you're right that a notification on our homepage, in addition to our docs I don't remember it being in the docs either, as that would have also saved me from signing up on the Discord. And this isn't an issue of prioritization. Remember, your overworked volunteers and maintainers on the Discord are still spending hours every day fielding questions in #user-support that could have been answered by a link…

But he said "sorry" (somewhat) politely and pulled the "we are fast growing startup"-card .. so you are obligated to forgive him?

It seems quite clear to me (as a third party to this) that the lack of communication w.r.t. this behavior was intentional. Trying to fix a mistake without having to admit having made it in the first place...

Civil discussion is going to collapse even further if bad actors don't stop with the dark patterns.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#115

Post by 8note »

fleddr wrote: post #105
simias wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would consider myself an informed skeptic that is selectively pro-crypto. I would first clear the air by saying this: yes, making money is an important use case of the current crypto industry, if not THE use case. I find it puzzling how people frown upon that. Making money (or at least getting paid) is the number one activity the average person spends a lifetime doing. Many in bullshit jobs that add no value. You c…

All an NFT is at heart a JSON blob like

{ Id: some unique namespaced string (aka, the part that is a non fungible token) Owner: reference to who currently owns it Payload: data that defines the content of the NFT }

You can put this in a database if you want, or use a block chain as your data storage. I expect many of those teams you mentioned are solving their NFT issues by moving their NFTs from block chains onto postgres tables, or putting them in databases from the start. The listed problems have somewhat straightforward solutions by doing so, and many companies have offered NFT marketplaces based on databases for years and years like the Steam marketplace for gaming. They work fine at scale, too. I expect that most popular digital ownership systems do not use a block chain as their back end, though I do not know what the top 10 are {apple, amazon, google, the us government?}. The most advanced team solving the listed problems is without doubt YouTube though.

What block chain NFTs have over database NFTs is hype. There's a lot of wealthy people with money tied up in crypto investments that want to be able to.

The other feature is that the audit history of changes to the Owner field is guaranteed to be public instead of optionally public, and that guarantee is what of questionable value when "crypto people don't deliver anything new" is mentioned.

----

If somebody's managed to make solve identity using a block chain that's quite interesting re: "unique physical access".

I'd expect the block chain to be uniquely incapable of guaranteeing unique access to anything, since access is based on knowing a password, and it's easy to make copies of a password. At best id expect a blockchain to guarantee limited access to people who know one at least one of a set of possible passwords, and a bouncer controls unique access by doing a separate identity checks.

Is this some facial scan? Dna +epigenetics check? Is it trivial to link all your accounts together? What kinds of attacks has it been tested against? Can your twin get in if he knows the right password and borrows your id? Can your spouse get in if you're in the hospital? Next of kin when you die?

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#116

Post by 8note »

rawtxapp wrote: post #76
BoorishBears wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tende…

Strictly better than gold is not true.

Gold can be traded without leaving an audit trail, and without a per transaction cost.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#117

Post by 8note »

jkhdigital wrote: post #100
rawtxapp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this, it's a very adversarial environment with huge stakes for those that can exploit it. Even projects that have been around for months, years can get exploited which is why I'd recommend waiting a long time before putting non-trivial amounts into any smart contract or crypto related projects. That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more…

> That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains I’ve always understood this on a basic level, but reading an entire exploit debrief with intricate technical details really hammered this point home for me.

A simple exploit is that somebody got ahold of a wealthy person's private key, isn't it?

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#118

Post by 8note »

sophrocyne wrote: post #81
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)

This turned out to be longer than I intended. Apologies. I view Ethereum as a value network, connecting disparate sets of transactional use cases around a set of core services (like Address, asset records, and transaction functions) To believe that blockchain makes sense for assets which do not require absolute integrity, you'd need to first accept that there are valuable use cases which having an asset management &…

This does a good job of answering what kinds of transactions you don't care about, but not why you want them to be on a block chain.

The usecase given agregating those assets by the wallet has two problems: 1. You can have many wallets 2. Not everything associated with the wallet has to have it's transactions tracked on a block chain

All you need is one more column in the wow database, and you can pull up your wow assets with your wallet without them being on the L1 or L2 chain

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#119

Post by mhmmmmmm »

8note wrote: post #116
rawtxapp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tende…

Strictly better than gold is not true. Gold can be traded without leaving an audit trail, and without a per transaction cost.

You still have transaction costs in the form of transport costs to get the gold to your personal location.

Re: Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism

#120

Post by 8note »

thebean11 wrote: post #98
simias wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it's not. Even if everyone had channels with the same, single central node it would have more guarantees than Visa does. The single central node could not just decide to keep everyone's money, as participants have the option to create an L1 transaction to withdraw funds if node they have a channel with misbehaves.

> participants have the option to create an L1 transaction

Theoretically they have that option, but in practice do they?

Theoretically I can sue visa to get the right outcome too, which is a good guarantee

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