51–60 of 85 posts
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Every time I see these stories I'm glad I keep all my bitcoin in my own self-custodial wallet. Not your keys not your bitcoin. You keep fiat currency in a bank? HFSP
Enough to eat for a couple of years. I keep my fiat currency in property.
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So are they? Not everybody here is an expert in smart contracts.
The purpose of Hacker News is insightful discussion; it is not a place to pipe your stream of consciousness into the comment box. Refrain from speculating about things to which we know the answer . Just look it up and post the answer, instead. This is easily accessible information. Google it or ask an LLM. Don't just spew speculation into the void. You don't need to be a "smart contract expert" to use Google.
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Because most decentralised exchanges are "fake". Realistically, a decentralised exchange can only operate within a single blockchain, only trading tokens on that blockchain. Works fine for trading between (for example) eth and its various tokens, but you can't do proper eth to bitcoin trades. [1] The single-blockchain decentralised exchanges are typically real [2], but every multi-blockchain "decentralised" exchange…
There are non-custodial bridge schemes that have been proposed (but afaik not yet proven). The idea being that the holding company you mention is replaced by an L1 escrow contract. This trust minimized approach is not trivial to implement but at least I think I see how it could work.
How does the smart contract on one blockchain know the state of the smart contract on the other blockchain.
One common workaround is to make the miners/validators of the trading blockchain cross-validate transaction on the other blockchains. But that's inherently one-way, the smart contracts on the other blockchains have no true visibility into the trading blockchain.
It's still impossible to get 100% right. You still have a massive surface area for bugs and exploits. And even if it's free of exploits, people forget that blockchains are only "eventually consistent". Just because escrow validated that the two blockchains were constant at the time of the cross-chain swap doesn't guarantee both blockchains have reached their final consistent state. This will eventually result in the two blockchains getting out of sync. I've seen smaller blockchains do re-orgs over a week worth of blocks.
Finally, many popular blockchains don't even have powerful enough smart contracts to even implement a bridge contract (bitcoin certainly doesn't).
Every time I see these stories I'm glad I keep all my cash in a regulated bank with regulator backed compensation rather than some startup powered by gargling bong water and hoping the fuck they don't get hacked.
Or some of the people operating it don't decide it's time to cash out with a fake hack.
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The purpose of Hacker News is insightful discussion; it is not a place to pipe your stream of consciousness into the comment box. Refrain from speculating about things to which we know the answer . Just look it up and post the answer, instead. This is easily accessible information. Google it or ask an LLM. Don't just spew speculation into the void. You don't need to be a "smart contract expert" to use Google.
Yet you're the one not contributing to the discussion while someone else provided a much more interesting response to my speculation.
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Only few projects (like uniswap) are truly decentralized. Most projects are not, and only claim they'll eventually become decentralized once "they finish development".
It's a spectrum, and storing credentials in a database is much closer to centralized than decentralized.
If funds can be stolen by accessing a database hosted by a cloud provider, then what’s the point of decentralizing any part of the project at all?
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Your bank account can sure ve seized by the government and even not auctioned off.
That's far less likely in most Western countries. Whether or not bitcoin is safer than a bank depends on where you live. But in the West it definitely isn't. If you live in the third world, sure.