Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
paradigm.xyz
Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#2Note (for dang): it's "Ethereum", not "Etherium"
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#3Is the benefit of Ethereum really larger than the value these intelligent people could be creating in non-crypto industries? I see the allure. They're super hard, super high-stakes problems. Is there really no other industry that provides this level of flow and excitement for these researchers?
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#4Is the benefit of Ethereum really larger than the value these intelligent people could be creating in non-crypto industries? I see the allure. They're super hard, super high-stakes problems. Is there really no other industry that provides this level of flow and excitement for these researchers?
It's kind of the opposite.
Highly intelligent people are most productive when they are tackling problems they enjoy. You cannot just order them around and tell them to go tackle climate change or whatever.
As long as they enjoy tackling crypto shaped problems, they will keep jumping in until enough crypto shaped problems are solved that only really frustrating ones are left.
If you want to change how things work, you have to change the environment for problem solving. Make it more or less enjoyable.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#5Then why are we building it? To fleece people who are not as smart? All this just seems insane to me.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#6Then why are we building it? To fleece people who are not as smart? All this just seems insane to me.
It's a super massive stretch to imagine this invalidates Ethereum. Only some specific types of contracts are vulnerable to front-running issues and there are workarounds. The article is about the difficulty of being the first to take from a contract offering free money. This isn't an issue about regular contracts being unsafe to use.
I think the title misportrays the issue as being much more general than it is. For some reason I see the article brought up often in Twitter conversations by people who don't understand Ethereum and are trying to argue as if regular transactions are vulnerable to theft.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#7Yeah this has been posted before, and the message is always the same: If you want to trade in ethereum, just remember that you're dealing with a technology created by psychopaths. The Dark Forest wasn't somewhere you went for a walk.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#8Ethereum Layer1 should be only for storing meta data and provide trust and arbitration when necessary.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#9Then why are we building it? To fleece people who are not as smart? All this just seems insane to me.
The only reason it's popular is the low bar of entry, stealing large sums of money, and (to an extent) the promise of some utopia of truly free wealth
transfer and algorithmic mechanisms around it.
But IMO etherium is not that by a long shot. From the protocol, to all existing contracts, and the user experience resulting from those, etherium is fucking amateur hour.
Re: Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)
#10Ethereum Layer1 should be only for storing meta data and provide trust and arbitration when necessary.
I don't really understand this take, and I hear it a lot. What's the point of using a blockchain if you're going to abstract everything away to a centralized ledger? The whole "gas is expensive" shtick doesn't warrant centralizing your ledger and doing all of the important stuff off-chain. Am I missing something here, or are layer 2 protocols really that wishy-washy?