21–30 of 142 posts
Curious about the use of SparkPool to bypass the mempool and get the transactions minted directly into a block. It looks like anyone can sign up and contribute their hashrate to SparkPool. Is there a risk of malicious miners running workers in their competitors' pools and then frontrunning?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I have no idea how an "investor" could read this and think they can price the risk correctly. This isn't even the wild west of finance--this is intergalactic space. To be a successful investor, you don’t necessarily have the price the risk correctly, you just have to price it better than others. I imagine someone successfully investing in crypto can read stuff like this fluently.
Anyone "successfully" investing in crypto got in at least 4 years ago or when we the last big run up was and just held in a reputable exchange or in their own wallet that they secured well. They don't need to understand anything really except how to deposit 5000+ in a reputable exchange. I think this makes up most successful crypto investors.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/08/06/v...
Makes me think of salvage operations, and then raises the question of how do people get paid? They're providing a valuable service. I think in shipping there are both conventions and an ability to quickly negotiate that allows contracting for a salvage ship to rush to the aid of a grounded or sinking container vessel.
If you're going to use two similar looking services for something using ETH, do you go with the one by some no-name or the one created and championed by community heros?
This is the consequence of programmable money; there’s no getting around it, and, in my opinion, people shouldn’t want to. Rescuing people and brands who don’t put the effort into security from the consequences of their own mistakes isn’t a net benefit.
I'm all for anonymous teams, but look at the hoops this person had to jump through just to get in touch with them to report the bug.
When you're anonymous, all you have is your brand, and theirs should have burned to the ground for this entirely preventable error.
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…
About Solidity in particular - I think most people would say it's not the best. There are endeavors to develop better languages but Solidity has become quiet deeply entrenched in the Ethereum world. Everybody is busy with much more pressing issues - like scalability.
This read like a piece by William Gibson in the Neuromancer universe. I finally understand now why people are attracted by cryptocurrencies.
Yes, if you're an enthusiast, it seems like good, technical fun. But I have no idea how an "investor" could read this and think they can price the risk correctly. This isn't even the wild west of finance--this is intergalactic space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amateur has nothing to do with that. Ethereum, and "smart contracts" in general, are built on such shaky foundations that unless shakiness is what you're looking for, you have nothing of interest to find there.
Can you elaborate? Why do you find that "smart contracts" are built on a shaky foundation?
Need more reasons?
the logical conclusion is that within a few months we'll have dark pools run by miners who will process your transactions without broadcasting to mempool, in exchange for an increased gas fee. and, within a year, we'll find out that some dark pools sold order flow to those HFT's anyways, a la UBS https://sites.law.berkeley.edu/thenetwork/2015/01/29/ubs-dar...
I still don't understand what's happening at the core of this and the other dark forest post from a few weeks ago. How exactly are these bots front-running/stealing the ethereums? My understanding: -these bots scan the smart contracts that are waiting to be executed by the miners -the bots find vulnerabilities (another grey area in my mind) in the contract -the bots adjust the destination address of where the contrac…
You can't take advantage of a "normal" cryptocurrency transaction this way because the "normal" transaction is like a super-minimal smart contract that's designed to pay only one hard-coded recipient. Therefore, that transaction either happens or doesn't happen, but its recipient can't be altered. Nor can you take advantage of a non-vulnerable smart contract this way, because the non-vulnerable smart contract can't be triggered to perform an action that its creators would consider inappropriate. But for a vulnerable smart contract, there's a series of events that would cause it to send value to an arbitrary address (and not in exchange for some other adequate compensatory value). It's this case where the front-runners want to find a way to swap in their own addresses for these transactions, and that's also why obfuscation could deter that -- making it hard for the front-runners to notice that that was possible.
I still don't understand what's happening at the core of this and the other dark forest post from a few weeks ago. How exactly are these bots front-running/stealing the ethereums? My understanding: -these bots scan the smart contracts that are waiting to be executed by the miners -the bots find vulnerabilities (another grey area in my mind) in the contract -the bots adjust the destination address of where the contrac…
Thus, you have white hats racing to siphon money out of a buggy, immutable contract which also happens to be worth millions of real dollars. It'd be funny if there wasn't so much real money involved.