Ethereum Is a Dark Forest • Hacker News Board

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#101

Post by cdelsolar » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

emerged wrote: post #52

Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it. I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not…

I agree. I don't even understand what is happening here honestly, and why it is seemingly so popular. Could someone explain what exactly these bots are sniping, and why it's so hard to avoid?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#102

Post by ballenf » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

Have a friend who lost more than $12k in the process of buying a house. Scammers sent the wiring instructions a few hours before the legit closing attorney sent the real instructions. The email looked exactly right except for a minor change to the domain name from address.

After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto.

How the thieves knew so much about the process and timing is supposedly being investigated, but no one is holding out much hope. And the attorneys have a strong incentive to cover up any evidence of intrusion on their side, assuming it was their infrastructure infiltrated.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#103

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

dawkins wrote: post #80

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…

> Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste The more you pollute, the richer you get. I can't understand why nobody talks about this.

Exactly. And PoW systems have built-in dampening ("difficulty") that make sure you need to burn even more energy as the system gets used, just to stay where you are.

I sometimes joke that Bitcoin is the closest we've came towards defining trust as a physical quantity - with the unit being watts. You can get a good approximation of the lower bound of the energy costs of trust by just comparing it with a trustful system that is regular economy. In other words, that is how much energy is saved by not pursuing trustless systems. Trust is a very powerful optimization trick.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#104

Post by spir » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

emerged wrote: post #52

Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it. I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not…

I have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…

I spend a lot of time on Ethereum and wanted to respond to your points.

1) Yes, proof of work is terrible long-term, mainly because its cost scales with the market cap of the cryptocurrencies it secures. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue

2) There are also a lot of excellent ideas and projects. For example, Gitcoin, quadratic funding, quadratic voting https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656

3) It's true that there are many scams/crimes in crypto, and that many or most holders of cryptocurrencies are speculators. What makes crypto different from tulips is that many speculators believe that crypto will come to power large portions of the world's financial and economic infrastructure.

4) Whether a random crypto startup is likely to be a scam depends entirely on your filters and definition of "startup". If you limit your population to projects or tokens with some level of social validation, such as being top-ranked on coinmarketcap or backed by in-industry VCs, then there're hardly any scams at all. Ethereum now has hundreds of quality teams working on many different parts of the ecosystem. For example, the DEX space (decentralized exchanges, eg. https://uniswap.org/) is very different than the layer-2 scaling space (eg. https://optimism.io/)

5) [It's a wild west...] Respectfully, this is an unkind or perhaps bigoted statement. I have many friends in crypto who are thoughtful, kind people. They think deeply about the ethical implications of the systems we're building. The same is true of many leaders in the space.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#105

Post by kmeisthax » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

emerged wrote: post #52

Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it. I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not…

I can attest that I have a distrust of Brave Browser purely due to it's use of blockchain tech. I don't even have that much against Brendan Eich. I just think any use of blockchain technology for fiscal purposes is a way of financially incentivizing spam.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#106

Post by DJBunnies » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #94

kfarr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it's covered in the novel but reading this really makes me think these adversarial environments could be very cool hosts for emerging (or seeded and self replicating) intelligent agents some day.

Ethereum or some other cryptocurrency will likely be the 'glucose' of future AI organisms. I'm excited (and slightly terrified) to consider a future where autonomous agents rent compute time to host themselves, provide 'services' autonomously within the cloud to earn funds, and then periodically reproduce by splitting their wallet and moving it to a new host. Add in the ability to mutate (or even hire humans to imple…

It's internet food!

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#107

Post by svachalek » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

Analemma_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And let's be honest, the competition is still "Oops, I accidentally sent $900M to the wrong party." [1] The counterargument there is that Citibank is currently pursuing a resolution in the courts to that issue, and if they win they will get their $900M back. If you flub a DeFi transaction, you're shit outta luck.

And of course, if cryptocurrencies ever become anything more than Internet play money (and environmental disaster), the legal systems of countries worldwide will make sure the same protections apply. So yes, your newest cryptoanarchist token may have totally irreversible transactions (cross my heart, here's the math proof!), but the court can still order the thief to send back the money they stole in a separate trans…

Citibank is in an argument with other institutions that operate in broad daylight. Crypto nets allow anyone, anywhere to jump into the transaction as a feature. These guys don’t care about New York City police. I don’t think regulators will have any control without having a controlling stake in the ledgers.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#108

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #99

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…

The only thing I'll note is that Ethereum has committed to moving to Proof of Stake, albeit at a glacial pace, which * should * mostly remove the environmental destruction. The leadership does seem committed, although the rollout is slow. Not really a fan of crypto overall (although I own some eth as a hedge in case it takes off), not contesting your other points.

Is PoS actually proven to work, the way PoW is? I keep revisiting this topic every now and then, and I always see it in the stage of "we think it should work, but we kind of don't have a mathematical proof just yet". From which I conclude it will most likely be eventually proven to not work at all, and we'll still be stuck with PoW.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#109

Post by xur17 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #34

hombre_fatal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have nothing on the current financial system, like banks being able to block you because you sell adult sex toys or someone being able to pull money from your account whenever they want because you once gave them your card details to buy a $5 sandwich or having to find a merchant relationship just for people to send you money. These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today. You're…

As an outsider looking in, though, it seems that banks are getting better at this, while crypto is getting worse. There's a bajillion fintechs helping the banks sort out their UI issues and make it friendlier/better. Bitcoin is still basically unusable for everyday transactions, and the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure. As TFA says, the hazards for normal folks playing…

The fundamental problem of ownership still isn't (and won't be) solved by the existing banking system. Money that you actually own, that you can do whatever you want with (for better or worse).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#110

Post by spir » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

dawkins wrote: post #80

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…

> Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste The more you pollute, the richer you get. I can't understand why nobody talks about this.

The Ethereum community started talking about this five years ago, which spawned a multi-year effort to move to "Proof of Stake" and stop using large amounts of electricity forever.

The first phase of this effort launches later this year. It's currently undergoing a public testnet. https://medalla.launchpad.ethereum.org/

Since 99% of blockchain app activity occurs within the Ethereum ecosystem, and Ethereum is dropping proof of work, we should put to bed the idea that crypto industry insiders don't care about this issue or aren't doing anything to solve it.