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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#191

Post by TeMPOraL »

Sargos wrote: post #179
TeMPOraL wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Breeding ground for innovation and efficiency" also means breeding ground for various scams. The traditional banks have a good value proposition here, should they choose to take it: they can copy the innovations that work, bolt them on top of their product, and offer something that is both innovative and is secured by men with guns.

Yes there are scams. There are scams with any new technology and people have dealt with them in various ways for hundreds of years. I don't think that will ever change but our ability to point them out and protect ourselves from them will. >they can copy the innovations that work, bolt them on top of their product, and offer something that is both innovative and is secured by men with guns I don't think this has ever…

> I'd take "mathematically impossible to cheat" over "men with guns might be angry if someone cheats" any day.

This may be the point we disagree on fundamentally :). To me, "mathematically impossible to cheat" usually comes with "mathematically unforgiving of mistakes". I estimate chances that the government will cheat me out of my money to be much lower than me getting crushed under a smart contract that, in the fiat land, a human judge would invalidate based on circumstances.

Writing this, I realized I'm thinking from the POV of someone living in a democratic and relatively sane country. I guess the risk calculus is different when you truly, deeply mistrust your nation's government.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#194

Post by FridgeSeal »

iSnow wrote: post #173
mangecoeur wrote: post #59

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.

Whereas coding webshops, advertisement algos or mobile games are so much more relevant.

Oh they’re not, for sure.

But let’s not pretend that crypto is providing any more positive benefit to society than the average ad algorithm or mobile game.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#195

Post by ballenf »

nodesocket wrote: post #180
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…

I am closing on a house, and this is quite terrifying. How in the world did the scammers know all the exact details of the house? I am guessing the $12k was good faith money? In my case, I was able to write a plain old check for my good faith money.

It was the down payment on the house in this case. And was actually a lot more than $12k. It has to be a wire transfer since checks take so long to clear and the title can't transfer with that uncertainty.

My advice to anyone buying or selling is to get the attorney's phone number from a known good source in advance, and call them to verify the wiring instructions before submitting. Also compare the bank account name down to the character with the real one (although I don't know how hard it is fake this). Your bank should read off the bank account info you're sending to before you give the confirmation to proceed.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#196

Post by FridgeSeal »

intotheabyss wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They should have gone with something simple and declarative, like decision tables.[1] Those have a finite number of cases and can be exhaustively tested. Which is what you want for a smart contract for something real. But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Ether…

How has it failed? Seems to me that turing completeness has allowed Ethereum to flourish.

Yeah which is why I buy coffee in the morning with Ethereum right?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#197

Post by iSnow »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #150
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 feel the same way. Storing everything forever perpetually on the blockchain just doesn’t seem like a feasible or good idea to me, and the wasted computation to do anything is annoying. The whole space seems filled with people who hold similar views about economics: all inflation is bad; all government and financial intervention in the economy is bad; all our money problems would be solved if people could just trade…

> why on earth would I store my data on there, encrypted or otherwise? Why would I want random people carrying out business critical computation for me?

Well, I am working in big old industry outside the USA and we just bought a data ingestion solution from... Palantir! The NSA company which is basically a spy arm of the US government.

If it saves a buck, companies will do way dumber things than move to blockchain in an instant.

Also, storing data on the BTC or ETH chains isn't economically feasible - there are chains especially for that and usually, you just store the SHA-256 hash of your data on chain to prove authenticity while storing the data off-chain.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#198

Post by schoen »

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 […

> They _cant'_ be corrupted, because a combination of incentives and cryptography keep everyone safe.

I would like this to be right but then I ran into

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3197300

which discusses economic limitations to the incentives for blockchain mining. (One part is that if a cryptocurrency gets too valuable, the value of a double-spend attack could exceed some models of the reward for honest mining. Another part is that if you have unregulated derivatives, you can own a negative amount of cryptocurrency, which means that your financial incentive can be to actively damage the cryptocurrency rather than helping it. Satoshi's paper seems to assume that you can only own a positive or zero amount of bitcoin rather than a negative amount, when arguing why miners are incentivized to be honest.)

(This is also true for the ability to short, or insure, any asset -- you can be financially incentivized to damage it -- but elsewhere this incentive is partly countered by law enforcement investigations of some trades and insurance claims where people profited significantly from accidents, disasters, or scandals. Smart contracts on blockchains let us build insurance and derivatives markets where you can bet against things without identifying yourself. In fact the whole underlying discussion here is about how the person who claimed this particular asset in Ethereum is anonymous and probably can't be punished for doing so, even if we believed that the claimant wasn't entitled to make this claim. That could be equally true if the person were collecting an insurance contract payout. That's potentially fine if contracts can't create new incentives to cause harm, but maybe not so awesome if they can.)

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#199

Post by reidjs »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #188
iSnow wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The value proposition in my head is you can pseudo-anonymously transfer any amount of value for almost no fee across any border to anyone else in the network within minutes. The implementation details aren’t great (energy wastage) but it is a working MVP of that imo.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#200

Post by Taek »

lmeyerov wrote: post #114

I can't imagine running (or investing) in a software-based company here without also having an automatic model checking layer for verifying all runs + 24/7 monitoring for disabling any live contract. If you're going to put $10M+, years of your life, and who knows how much customer money into this, why not spend $500K of it so you're running with the blockchain equiv of CI testing? You'd be able to deploy faster , wit…

I hate to be that guy but you are vastly underestimating the challenge of formally verifying these software systems. Blockchains are highly adversarial, open source, and doing a lot of innovation. Innovation which means that nobody has ever tried to verify that type of system before.

Model checkers can tell you thinks like 'there are no underflows' and 'these two pieces of code are identical', but if you want to know whether there is no arbitrage or front-running, you're well past the capabilities of the state of the art. It's not merely a matter of spending $500k on CI and auditing.

And then you've got a separate issue, which is that the space is super competitive and moves extremely fast. If you spend 6 weeks getting your new contract audited, you may well miss the window where people will care about the project you launched. I don't think this is a healthy culture, but it is one that many teams are trying to compete in. And therefore they ARE willing to bet millions of dollars without taking any time to audit, because the expected value of deploying faster is higher than the expected value of deploying more safely.

For projects that are comfortable moving more slowly, formal verification IS a big focus, and the cryptocurrency industry has been a material driving force in many security related technologies such as reproducible builds (Gitian), reproducible bootstrapping (Guix), and software verification methodologies.

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