Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 463 posts

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#131

Post by adangert »

f00zz wrote: post #98
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 think it was more interesting when it looked like there would be use cases other than speculation. The first example in the O'Reilly Bitcoin book has someone buying a cup of coffee, these days most cryptocurrency proponents would laugh at it. (Someone will reply that you're supposed to use a layer 2 protocol for that, but that looks insanely complex for most people.)

I'm still a fan of, and use Bitcoin cash every day for small purchases like coffee (primarily using the bitpay debit card for this)

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#132

Post by emrehan »

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…

On the other hand, some other smart people work on such interesting things at the cutting-edge and make profit doing so.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#133

Post by DennisP »

pjc50 wrote: post #3

As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.

True, but the article was about a situation in which they were retrieving money that was inadvertently available to anyone. That's not normal.

Any well-written smart contract has protections against front-running. For about a year I audited them for a living, and front-running opportunities are definitely something we looked for.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#134

Post by nabla9 »

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…

Blockchain culture is full of Ferengi-style near-religious greed. Exploiting is fine when there is this impersonal Blockchain to follow.

(excluding people like Vitalik, who are more analytic and less dogmatic, of course)

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#135

Post by redahs »

Qworg wrote: post #65
redahs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property. The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to…

Why? This is unnecessarily encumbering the utility of money. Real and Useful: people can use the money as a store of value, medium of exchange, and a unit of account - and enough people believe in it.

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervised labor, and worsens inequality.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#136

Post by maest »

redahs wrote: post #48
pjc50 wrote: post #3

As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property. The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to…

Competing theories say that the main value of monetary tokens comes from the government's monopoly on violence. What I mean is that governments ask taxes to be paid in tokens that they issue (pounds, dollars etc) and they threaten you with jail / physical violence if you don't pay. Governments then issue these tokens and pay people in order to employ them. Under this model, money is devoid from the value of the asset backing it (in the case of fiat money, no such asset actually exists).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#137

Post by TeMPOraL »

spir wrote: post #116
TeMPOraL wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, PoS has been proven to work. The research problems are solved. A public testnet of Ethereum's proof of stake is currently live. https://medalla.launchpad.ethereum.org/

Thank you. I'll rethink my perspective in light of this. Energy use concerns were always my primary concern wrt. the entire crypto space (scams will diminish as the space gets regulated, but energy profile of PoW looked like an insurmountable problem in principle).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#138

Post by chabad360 »

redahs wrote: post #122
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…

The traditional american school of thought on money is that 1) the optimal supply of money is externally determined by the needs of commerce for liquidity, 2) new money can be created to meet the needs of commerce through public loans secured by real property pledged as collateral without any fixed artificial limits on supply 3) money may be circulated with an expiration date to discourage long term hoarding, 4) gene…

I've never heard of 3, I love the idea, but it's literally the first time I've heard of it. Are there any sources that that is indeed a common opinion?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#139

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> Because that's what real-world security ultimately boils down to: men with guns, ready to drag you where the law tells them to.

But that's assuming the judge knows who the thief is. One of the main characteristics of cryptocurrency is that you can hold it without giving anyone your social security number.

In that respect it's much the same as cash -- if you get away with it you keep the money, but if you get arrested, they can order you to return it, and seize your house/car/wages/etc. if you don't.

The issue, which creates the demand for cryptocurrency, is that we don't have a digital equivalent of cash that isn't based on proof of work. But the regulatory system could create one quite easily.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#140

Post by jamesonhodge »

StavrosK wrote: post #63
warkdarrior wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi is basically financial applications built on top of cryptocurrencies. Sometimes these financial applications (like exchanges, money markets, loan offerings, etc.) are decentralized.

Hmm, only sometimes? Doesn't the name imply otherwise?

There are varying levels of decentralization an application can take on, e.g. the back end (often Ethereum for financial applications), the front end (hosting on a peer-to-peer database like IPFS or Sia), and governance (by a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) or some voting mechanism). Many DApps are founded with certain parts being decentralized and other parts centralized, and transition to a more/fully decentralized model.
Post reply on HN