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Escaping the Dark Forest

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Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#121

Post by bambataa »

AgentME wrote: post #47
itronitron wrote: post #6

seems like a very interesting story however after the third voice change I lost interest and the specialized tech jargon just makes it sound goofy

I was wondering why the article kept repeating details in re-worded ways as if they happened to other people. I didn't even realize that different parts were by different authors.

Oh! That explains how they managed to get beachy cocktails in the middle of the night. I was very confused too.

Overall, though, I do think DeFi has potential. Every attempt to anchor blockchain stuff to the real world (supply chain validation etc) seems to founder on the fact that non-blockchain solutions already exist. Providing new functionality on the blockchain seems to be more successful.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#122

Post by vvpan »

strogonoff wrote: post #119
vvpan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His friend didn't "make" the money. The token was airdropped to every account that ever used the exchange or has provided liquidity. I had two accounts with a couple of transactions each - bam a nice surprise of a few thousand USD worth of value. It's very odd and unexpected. I never make money off of crypto but perhaps it just pays to be in something new. Right time and right place as they say.

Handout instead of profit, few thousand instead of half a million USD value—we are moving into a more realistic territory.

I have no reason to believe that the commenter misrepresented anything. It is entirely plausible. If their friend was a liquidity provider then the value of friend's airdropped tokens would have been much greater than mine.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#123

Post by ecmascript »

"Smart contracts" has always seem incredible dumb to me. Code that controls how money being transferred that cannot be updated or changed even if a bug is found.

Awesome design. It is like the opposite of what I would want to control my money in any transaction.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#124

Post by vvpan »

nwah1 wrote: post #91
vvpan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And where do you see the "make you rich part"?

I literally just saw someone advising people to liquidate their 401K to buy uniswap. Whether they explicitly say it is a get rich quick scheme or not, this is the message the marks are receiving.

Wow. Did that person give an explanation why? I follow "blockchain world" fairly closely and I really fail to see much value to UNI. But I have seen people speak quiet exuberantly about it. I am wondering what their thesis is.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#125

Post by phyalow »

strogonoff wrote: post #119
vvpan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His friend didn't "make" the money. The token was airdropped to every account that ever used the exchange or has provided liquidity. I had two accounts with a couple of transactions each - bam a nice surprise of a few thousand USD worth of value. It's very odd and unexpected. I never make money off of crypto but perhaps it just pays to be in something new. Right time and right place as they say.

Handout instead of profit, few thousand instead of half a million USD value—we are moving into a more realistic territory.

I had 3 accounts and made about 5k USD of the airdrop. No reason 500k couldn't have happened if someone was providing liquidity to the protocol.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#126

Post by Paradigma11 »

gambiting wrote: post #113
pavlov wrote: post #40

Nice work, but honestly I'm not sure why they bother. The article states that the purpose of these smart contracts is: "Stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire" That's an obvious scam. Anyone who gave real money to such a cause has already lost it. So why is the author giving away his time to help the scammers?

I just don't understand the entire article - who is this guy? What is he doing? Why is he doing it? What are the dozens of different acronyms in this article and what do they mean? Who owns the 9.6M dollars and where was it at the risk of going? Maybe this is a good article for someone deep into crypto, but for myself, as a casual morning read - I have no idea what happened.

The money was in limbo due to a bug in a contract. There are contracts (monsters) that scan for such bugs and situations to profit from them. The guy tried to save the money from the monsters and failed.

The situation was worse since it happened already in the mempool where the pending transactions reside.

I am dabbling a bit in the Tezos currency and environment and find this 2 language projects interesting aimed to increase safety: https://github.com/metastatedev/juvix (alpha) and https://archetype-lang.org/ Not saying it might have helped in the concrete case.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#127

Post by Octopodes »

gambiting wrote: post #113
pavlov wrote: post #40

Nice work, but honestly I'm not sure why they bother. The article states that the purpose of these smart contracts is: "Stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire" That's an obvious scam. Anyone who gave real money to such a cause has already lost it. So why is the author giving away his time to help the scammers?

I just don't understand the entire article - who is this guy? What is he doing? Why is he doing it? What are the dozens of different acronyms in this article and what do they mean? Who owns the 9.6M dollars and where was it at the risk of going? Maybe this is a good article for someone deep into crypto, but for myself, as a casual morning read - I have no idea what happened.

Honestly I just read through it like it was a cyberpunk short story. His heart is pounding as he collaborates with super-hackers all over the world in an effort to rescue some desperate person's millions. All of the jargon was totally lost on me but gave it a certain flavor.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#128

Post by yowlingcat »

vvpan wrote: post #25
currymj wrote: post #16

i tried writing some toy Ethereum smart contracts circa 2016. at that time it was immensely difficult to write them in a secure way -- even a simple "hello world" level Solidity contract could easily have exploitable bugs if you don't code in an extremely defensive style. i'm told things have improved since then -- can anyone who's used Solidity more recently comment on this? is it true? this, plus the fact that putt…

Well, what are the fixes? Writing "smart contracts" is not meant to be for anybody but very seasoned developers. Also if you write a contract and do not get it audited by 3rd parties than nobody will (or should) take for anything other than a toy application. That's just the nature of writing immutable code that potentially transfers a value. About Solidity in particular - I think most people would say it's not the b…

People say the same thing about manual memory management, garbage collection and memory leaks, but to be honest, something about conceptually leaving out the UX of such a powerful tool (like memory allocation) always rings hollow.

If writing "smart contracts" is to remain not for "anybody but very seasoned developers" how can that not seem like anything but a giant gaping hole in the conceptual abstraction itself? Do you think people say the same thing about payment processors? What do you think would happen if Stripe approached its API the same way? Sure, one is a proprietary payments processing system and the other is an entire decentralized virtual machine for contracts. I get that.

But implying that "everybody is busy with much more pressing issues" despite admitting "most people would say it's not the best" really implies a blind spot. Successful technologies end up building layers where folks who aren't "very seasoned developers" can't hurt themselves. Pretending that these layers don't exist or emerge or deliver value is omission.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#129

Post by 3np »

askmike wrote: post #117
SilasX wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfair enough that you can articulate why?

> (which would be like, the regulators responsible for the computer) no one is responsible, that's the whole point. The thing runs by itself and game theory keeps it afloat - not a group of people. Else it's just like a company. That said, the protocol isn't finished and you have people involved in maintaining and upgrading the protocol. Which is in no way forced down upon everyone: once they have an update everyone…

To expand:

The decision-making and communities of Ethereum (this goes both for the clients, the blockchain, the foundation and the larger community) looks completely different today compared to 2015. There has been a lot of lessons learnt, debate and churn since.

If they same thing happened today, it'd play out completely differently.

See the Parity Multisig hack, for one.

Finally, it's a stretch to call the dao hack "arbitrage trade".

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#130

Post by superkuh »

zxcmx wrote: post #85
larzang wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? Forget bugs in the contract system, if you have pools writing whatever history they want in private that seems to defeat the entire point.

The transactions still have to be valid (accepted by majority) to get consensus. It's just that some subset of valid transactions are exploiting vulnerabilities in poorly written contracts. In this case, you want to make dead sure that your "good" exploit runs first. This is not usual.

>This is not usual.

I agree. Due to specialized compute taking over mining and economies of scale most cryptocurrencies don't do what they say and are manipulated by their big pools (like this) consistently.

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