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Miners Aren’t Friends

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#171

Post by giaour »

nradov wrote: post #157
giaour wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of reasons a court might throw out a contract, but one party having made an expensive mistake is not one of them. Edit: turns out this isn't true. TIL that a contract to which no reasonable or informed person would have agreed can be thrown out as "unconscionable." And even if it were, why roll back the block chain to rectify the situation? In traditional accounting, wouldn't you need a ledger reco…

That's not necessarily how the US civil court system works. Courts will sometimes throw out or alter contracts if a good-faith mistake by one party produces a result that would violate the fundamental principle of equity. This is more likely if the result appears to violate the original intent of the contract.

That's very true; I should have looked this up before stating it. Edited my original comment

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#172

Post by jobigoud »

Jasper_ wrote: post #116
ve55 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solidity has a lot of potential pitfalls that need to be avoided, just like similar languages. Some of these are due to poor or unintuitive language design, although a lot of improvements have been made over time. The wallet bug involving Parity's multisig wallets was due to an error that Parity made, even if it's an error that may have been easy to make, it should have been caught in testing or code reviews due to h…

> Most of the largest headlines involving loss of funds in the Ethereum network have been due to programmer or user error. What other classes of errors are there that Ethereum is successfully avoiding?

Errors in the protocol and the cryptography underlying the platform.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#173

Post by HarryHirsch »

dcow wrote: post #167
HarryHirsch wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In crypto-anarchist mythos, hackers interact via deterministic, mechanical intermediary. What a completely idiotic notion that is. Language can be used to deceive, and if the neverending freakshow of "smart contract" bugs shows anything it is that computer languages are not exempt. Removing human judgement is exactly the point. The Underhanded C Contest is not about human judgement.

This thread has effectively devolved to "humans will be humans" vs "we can build systems that make us better humans". I don't disagree with your jaded stance that humans will be humans. But I don't think it's idiotic to try and continually improve the systems we imagine in pursuit of higher standards for society.

My argument is that it is absolutely barmy to think that a piece of Solidity code is something like an impartial arbiter that is completely independent of the human who wrote it.

We have processes that deal with human reality. We build political parties to extend power, we have judges and parliaments, where laws are written, people enter contracts every day - the system works mostly well. Ethereum is an improvement on exactly what?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#174

Post by michaelchisari »

infogulch wrote: post #16
runeks wrote: post #11

> Again, let’s design a simple smart contract. This time Alice wants to play a guessing game. Alice puts 5 Ether in her contract. That ETH goes to the person that guesses closest to the number she’s thinking of. Alice calls commit with the hash of the number, so she can’t change her mind. Anyone else can call guess to submit a guess. After 2 blocks Alice calls reveal to tell everyone what the number is. This scheme i…

In other words, blockchain programming isn't trivial, and you have to translate your intentions into the contract with blockchain concepts in mind.

blockchain programming isn't trivial

This is an understatement, and belies the more appropriate: blockchain programming is dangerous.

Proceed with extreme caution.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#175

Post by caf »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #41
barbegal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof of stake doesn't work in practice unless we can find a source of randomness that is globally available, non-influencable and everyone can agree on [1]. At the moment, that source of randomness is completely elusive. It might be possible to create a random source from some form of binary astronomical event which can be widely verified but it would have an incredibly low bit rate of new randomness. One possible c…

Can imagine a protocol for generating randomness to some arbitrary security level (at the expense of locking up security deposits): (1) Anyone can decide to become a 'randomness provider' by putting up a large security depsoit (2) Every epoch (some number of blocks), each provider chooses a private random number and commits to it by publishing its hash (3) During the next epoch but, each provider publishes the random…

I don't see any incentive to actually publish random values - wouldn't it be easier to just commit to and publish zero every time?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#176

Post by Mbioguy »

MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Sounds like 2 things are getting confused.

Think of Ethereum as a very slow decentralized computer. People make mistakes building applications all the time, but this doesn't necessarily mean the underlying language, or for a better comparison, the compiler is at fault. Problems with the underlying language can cause problems with applications, obviously. Programmer error =/= language/compiler error, while both can occur.

People have been talking about the Parity hack like it's Ethereum's fault. Imo that's as absurd as blaming C for your program crashing to your coding error.

Your post, while you are confusing two types of errors, isn't completely off. Solidity does need improving. Any language has to pick tradeoffs, and evolves over time as it becomes apparent what the system's needs are. But Ethereum and Solidity aren't to blame for most of the ETH-based apps that rushed to market without an appropriate level of QA and review, cut corners, made mistakes, and caused catastrophic problems for their users like the Parity bug... this should be ringing bells, folks.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#177

Post by protomok »

corford wrote: post #29
fla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its simple: The risk taken is completely different! Mining is a much lower risk that yields less benefits.

I'm not sure I agree. Depending on what you're mining and when you start, you may never make your costs back. If anything, at this point (especially with more and more new coins adopting PoS rather than PoW) I'd say it's more risky than just buying a stable coin (ETH, BTC, LTC etc) and sitting on it for a year (and that's before factoring in the risk of lost potential earnings had you simply bought rather than mined…

I would argue mining is much lower risk but has much lower potential for reward.

After paying off the card (I completely agree that just owning coins has way more upside and I suspect you'll do very well! But I prefer the asymetrical mining returns - I have lots of upside and almost zero downside versus extreme upside and extreme downside (crash in coin prices, hacks, regulation, etc.) from owning coins. But to each their own!

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#178

Post by keymone »

epistasis wrote: post #139
spookthesunset wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the language when the very premise of the project "code is law" was proven wrong. When the DAO was "hacked" by a "thief", rather than tell people "whelp, code is law and the code executed perfect" the mob (more accurately, those at the top of the etherium pyramid) decided to change history and roll back the blockchain. Even the language designed to describe the "hack" was garbage. It wasn't a "hack",…

IMHO, "code is law" is a silly thing to aim for, and by ignoring that saying for the DAO incident proves that Ethereum is more valuable than it would be otherwise. The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system…

> The reversibility of bugs is a good thing.

So can I make a purchase, receive the goods and then claim a bug?

Reversibility of platform bugs is a good thing, reversibility of contract bugs is basically reversibility of plain transactions, which makes the whole idea of cryptocurrency useless.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#179

Post by Iv »

MrBingley wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me how on earth Ethereum is still a thing? People have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem, many due to basic flaws in the "Solidity" language. For example, last November $280 million was frozen in Parity wallets because function visibility defaults to external rather than internal (see the previous HN discussion here[0]). Just for fun, I was looking through the Secur…

Maybe because that is so fat the largest functioning cryptocurrency based on proof of stake instead of proof of work, and that bitcoin proved that energywise, a global cryptocurrency would not be sustainable?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#180

Post by Iv »

keymone wrote: post #178
epistasis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, "code is law" is a silly thing to aim for, and by ignoring that saying for the DAO incident proves that Ethereum is more valuable than it would be otherwise. The "code is law" is just hype about how amazing and new and unprecedented this thing is, but it's a truly bad idea. The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. In human law, there are exceptions, and appeals, etc. Aiming for a completely mechanical system…

> The reversibility of bugs is a good thing. So can I make a purchase, receive the goods and then claim a bug? Reversibility of platform bugs is a good thing, reversibility of contract bugs is basically reversibility of plain transactions, which makes the whole idea of cryptocurrency useless.

If you can convince 51% of the network, then yes.
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