111–120 of 463 posts
Well, all this exploits should make the system more resilient in the long run (as they are fixed) no?
There’re front running resistant decentralized exchange PoCs on Ethereum. It’s only a matter of time (and governance) before we could have this technology on Ethereum.
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…
It's a logic trap: an intellectually complex toy with the promise of access to untold riches to those "smart enough". It's a trap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, there weren't enough words to actually make any sense of it. What I got is approximately "if you try to do ethereum stuff, bots will somehow do the same thing but earlier, and you'll lose your money".
Agreed, somehow bots are able to jump the queue but there’s no description of how or why that’s possible. Why would the bot transaction be given higher priority than the submitted transaction?
Viable model checkers for basic software contracts existed since the 80's, and the modern incarnations are insanely powerful (Z3, ...) + quite approachable (Rosette, ...). They're used to tackle software verification problems magnitudes harder than "money can only go from here to there in this tiny software contract": race detection in distributed file systems, bugs in hardware circuits, security holes in big javascript libraries, etc. I think of these same not-very-secret tools every time I see one of these articles, and yet the engineering fails keep happening.
A few teams deploy tech here, including built on the above, but it seems like most do not. I'd say mind-blowing, but at this point... mind-numbing?
I do appreciate the author being frank about how bad the status quo is.
EDIT: To give a sense of this -- the same people will talk about meticulous cold storage key exchanges with someone always being there to watch, driving into the desert for bootstrapping secrets, and then for their actual operations, deploy unverified contracts.
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…
Maybe it's something about blockchain tech, but I have the nagging feeling that HN is just getting old and complacent. If this community had existed, in 1995, on a BBS, it probably would have found nothing but fault with the emerging web.
I can't understand why a tech-minded person would find blockchain repulsive. It's (in the case of Ethereum) the biggest and most powerful distributed computing environment. BTC has a history of no major losses or exploits in 10y of existing in the most adversarial environment I could think of.
HN meanwhile: let's get totally over-excited by a new ePaper reader with drawing functionality.
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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.
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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, quadr…
This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it.
Ultimately, Blockchain seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. There are a lot of issues with the current implementations, and a lot of words about how to solve them, but these are hard problems, and there's no guarantees they're going to be solved, and they are often problems that our current financial tech industry just doesn't have.
I have rarely seen so much effort and intellect expended for something so wildly pointless... conspicuously missing from these whole shenanigans: anyone doing anything that a normal person could recognise as being of practical use.
I have rarely seen so much effort and intellect expended for something so wildly pointless... conspicuously missing from these whole shenanigans: anyone doing anything that a normal person could recognise as being of practical use.
Also, I have never seen a project simultaneously so intelligent and so devoid of wisdom (or vision) as Ethereum. Its complexity is going to turn people insane. It's a case of the blind leading the blind; making things up as they go.
Did the author get permission for this attempted Good Samaritan deed? Or did he go out on his own and screw up the implementation without the contract owner's knowledge? If it's the latter, that's kind of a shit move.