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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#181

Post by iSnow »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #84
detaro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They (by accident) put the money in a spot where anyone can claim it. Arguably, that's where they lost it, OP just tried to recover it without someone else noticing "ohh, there's free money there" and failed. (that's not a very satisfying answer, but pretty much seems to be the logic behind those things)

Thanks for the explanation :) So not so much that they lost it from malicious activity, more by accident.

Yes the original cause was human error, and some robot just pounced once it saw the opportunity.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#182

Post by xur17 »

cortesoft wrote: post #154
panarky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> basically unusable for everyday transactions Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case? > the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?

> Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen? No, because my credit card company gives me my money back when there is fraud. Crypto promoters always paint the irreversibility of blockchains as a feature, but it always seems like a risk to me.

It's just a different approach with different tradeoffs. Credit cards push the fraud risk and fees on the merchant. Crypto can push it to the user (and in the process reduce the fees incurred).

I would be happy to have a way to pay merchants I trust online with and remove the ability to reverse the charge if I was financially incentivized to do this (with the money the merchant saves on fees).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#183

Post by dkarl »

hbosch wrote: post #169
ballenf wrote: post #102

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 sup…

When we bought our house last year, the packet came with a big, bright red page (as well as a verbal warning from our loan officer) to look out for these scams.

Same for me a year ago, and they called early in the morning on the day of closing to repeat the warning. It wasn't even mentioned when I closed on a house seven years ago.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#184

Post by xur17 »

landryraccoon wrote: post #95
vvpan wrote: post #66

Perhaps due to a certain naivete I enjoy almost all discussions on HN. There are few exceptions and discussions under blockchain-related posts are the a prime example. I will disclose right away that I wholeheartedly think that blockchains are here to stay and to solve many problems. The general sentiment on HN, and this thread so far is an example, seems to be animosity toward the idea in general lightly veiled by p…

You sound pretty well informed, so I'm genuinely curious - what's the "killer app" of smart contracts? What use case do they fulfill that the traditional financial system just falls flat on?

The GP gave one, uniswap - a trustless exchange between 2 assets.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#185

Post by nyanpasu64 »

ballenf wrote: post #102

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 sup…

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/05/homebuyers-are-falling-for-t...

> Here’s how these scams usually go down: A thief hacks into a real estate or title company’s computer system and then studies the transactions, from the language used to the format of the wiring instructions. When the scammer strikes, he or she will often pose as someone from the real estate or titling company to instruct the buyer to wire funds to them.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#186

Post by dimmke »

Taek wrote: post #172
dimmke wrote: post #145

The environment described in this article is horrifying and definitely sounds worse than our current financial system. That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all. I agree with the other comments on here. Blockchain/crypto has always made me uncomfortable. I think it's a mix of the slimy get rich quick aspect of it that draws a lot of people and the cyberpunk/dystopian rhetoric around it. I also th…

> I also think it's telling that even though Blockchain has been this hyped thing for 6+ years at this point, we haven't really seen it actually be used for anything outside of cryptocurrency, which in and of itself isn't used for much outside of speculation. On the other hand, machine learning is used in everything now and makes a lot of stuff better. Did you know that the Neural Network has been around since 1958 […

This is a reasonable response - I definitely think blockchain is interesting but like I said, it's in need of some major additional refinement before it becomes practical.

>But cryptocurrency allows us to design systems that don't require any trust at all. They _cant'_ be corrupted, because a combination of incentives and cryptography keep everyone safe.

This article definitely doesn't describe a system that lives up to that ideal at all. Which is why it's so scary - when you remove manual oversight you're essentially saying "Hey, if you can hack this, you win!"

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#187

Post by Taek »

josh2600 wrote: post #10

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures. Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land…

This DeFi stuff is playing with fire because the products being released have significantly outpaced the state of the art in building safe smart contracts.

To make an analogy, imagine that instead of DeFi, we were talking about skyscrapers. Imagine that thousands of engineers funded by millions of people who believed in them were building 25 kilometer tall towers using technology that they discovered in Isaac Arthur videos. And they were doing it today, before any of the technologies like active support structures had been properly matured. That's what's happening here. It's not that building towers is bad or unsafe, and it's not that the technology behind 25 km towers is fundamentally unworkable, but it IS the case that you shouldn't be doing it just yet given our current engineering knowledge.

Defi is insanely cool, insanely powerful, and it will dramatically change the landscape of society. But given the state of today's technology, if your product is anything fancier than Uniswap (sorry Maker, sorry Curve, sorry YAMs, sorry Augur, etc), it's not safe and it's ahead of its time. A lot of these projects are repeats of things like pets.com. Great idea, but it was too early (Amazon eventually fulfilled the vision though).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#188

Post by FridgeSeal »

iSnow wrote: post #115
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…

It's a sentiment that gets expressed under most every blockchain-related submission on HN, and I wonder why. 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 repuls…

Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value.

The community appears full of -as another commenter put it: “Blockchain culture is full of Ferengi-style near-religious greed”. Crypto-anarchists with an axe to grind about inflation and monetary policy/government spending.

I find the technology fascinating, if woefully inefficient. It’s a novel idea whose use case doesn’t seem to markedly improve things for the average user, but introduces a number of downsides.

> the biggest and most powerful distributed computing environment

That does what exactly? Wasting energy to determine if I can transfer $0.3 to my friend to demo it? Suppose you wired them and ran scientific studies/simulations. You’d probably get more useful results out of the energy you just spent.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#189

Post by [deleted] »

bondarchuk wrote: post #175
dimmke wrote: post #145

The environment described in this article is horrifying and definitely sounds worse than our current financial system. That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all. I agree with the other comments on here. Blockchain/crypto has always made me uncomfortable. I think it's a mix of the slimy get rich quick aspect of it that draws a lot of people and the cyberpunk/dystopian rhetoric around it. I also th…

> That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all. The original person lost $12k by a mistake of their own, namely sending it to the wrong place. I wouldn't call that fraud. That this money is then in a weird unintended limbo and can be picked up by anyone who noticed, and someone tried to whitehat get it and give it back, and they failed, does still not make it fraud IMO.

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#190

Post by koonsolo »

est31 wrote: post #163
ballenf wrote: post #102

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 sup…

> After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. The receiver account can still be seized by government institutions though, something much harder with cryptocurrencies.

You would think, but in all scammer cases that I heard, they are able to get their money out.

I really don't get it, because I have to provide my ID every year or so for verification. I really don't get how these scammer can get away with that, but obviously every time.

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