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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#201

Post by schoen »

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…

> the same people will talk about meticulous cold storage key exchanges with someone always being there to watch, driving into the desert for bootstrapping secrets, and then for their actual operations, deploy unverified contracts

Although they, or their predecessors, didn't necessarily do the former in the first few years of Bitcoin. Lots of exchanges, including the very biggest, were compromised and robbed.

Maybe there's a cycle where particularly terrible outcomes help to create a new consensus on basic safety precautions.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#202

Post by philjohn »

dkarl wrote: post #183
hbosch wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tend to phone people I'm making transfers to, where they've emailed or otherwise electronically sent the sort code and account number, to verify. Adds a couple of minutes, but could save tens of thousands.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#203

Post by pas »

WalterSear wrote: post #160
TeMPOraL wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By definition, if it can be regulated, it's no longer decentralized. And if it's not longer decentralized, blockchains have no benefits over regular databases. Blockchains solve a very specific problem - decentralized transactions. Unfortunately solving that problem for the world's organized criminals brought a massive amount of heretofore hidden financial activity to light. Consequently, people, most of which don't…

TLS issuance is decentralized too, yet Certificate Transparency provides accountability, and inclusion into Mozilla's trusted CA list is basically the vetting process that binds CAs to legal entities.

In theory in crypto currency world "staking" is this process.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#204

Post by xg15 »

panarky wrote: post #88
marcus_holmes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider looking in, though, it seems that banks are getting better at this, while crypto is getting worse. There's a bajillion fintechs helping the banks sort out their UI issues and make it friendlier/better. Bitcoin is still basically unusable for everyday transactions, and the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure. As TFA says, the hazards for normal folks playing…

> 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?

> Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?

Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#205

Post by iSnow »

cdelsolar wrote: post #101
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 agree. I don't even understand what is happening here honestly, and why it is seemingly so popular. Could someone explain what exactly these bots are sniping, and why it's so hard to avoid?

This is a super special case and I am honestly amazed that some bot is watching for it.

The common use-case on Ethereum is sending tokens from A to B, and that can't be front-run or falsified by a bot. This is the original use-case of crypto: sending around symbolic tokens that represent money.

Ethereum also has a lot of other usages though, and here is where it can get hairy. For instance, exchanges exist (Uniswap) where you can swap Token A for B. However, your intent is an Etherereum transaction which can be read by bots as you publish it and can be front-run if you are not careful.

In this case, someone basically misplace money: instead of sending it to an account, they put it onto their car rooftops, up for grabs. And then, some Mexican stand-off happened: the bots wouldn't notice but once the white-hat hackers moved, the bot would try to grab the money faster.

Ideally, the white-hatters would have crafted their Uniswap interaction in one transaction - they are atomic and the bots wouldn't have a chance to interfere. But it got late and they tried to hammer away the problem and allowed the interaction to spread over two transactions.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#206

Post by ertian »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #165
ak_111 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a well-articulated list, and captures a lot of my negativity towards crypto. But as I like to keep an open mind about new tech, I always wonder if something like this could have been said about the early days of Linux: 1) Open-source is pure unadulterated theft of other peoples' work. This model cannot ever be allowed to become significant in the software economy. 2) That people who are into open source have…

I'll concede that points 2) and 3) could plausibly be raised in the early days of Linux. Point 1) - I don't think so. Nobody is stealing anything; people are voluntarily giving it up for free, for the benefit of the community. What could be argued is that "open source is literally communism" (therefore bad) - and I believe it was argued at some point. > one can argue that that is its way of showing that it will be a…

> Point 1) - I don't think so.

I remember having discussions online with people who passionately argued that open source software was effectively theft from programmers at large--permanently filling niches that used to gainfully employ coders. I remember a guy who had some little utility he'd been selling online, which had been providing an income stream for him for years--and then along came some little free tool (that he claimed was an obvious rip-off) that did the same thing, and his income dried up. He absolutely thought OSS was theft.

Also, SCO, MS, and other companies certainly did try to paint a lot of open source software as explicitly stolen or copied. They always stopped short of providing proof, but that sure didn't stop them from making wild claims. SCO in particular went on and on about the sheave of Unix code they'd identified in the Linux kernel (while asking the judge to extend the deadline yet again for them to have to present evidence).

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#207

Post by dexen »

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.

>The receiver account can still be seized by government institutions

That is hardly an advantage for the victim. Come to think of it, that's a (rare but realistic) threat for normal, licit commerce.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#208

Post by Groxx »

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.

This is primarily an issue for contract writers[1], of which there are relatively few. You get similar kinds of automatic exploitation on exchanges of all kinds too (stock, currency, futures, etc), though I think it's fair to say Ethereum makes it (quite a bit) more complex and more automate-able on average.

[1]: transitively it affects users too, but it's a bit different either way.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#209

Post by dimator »

andybak wrote: post #6

This was as much fun to read as some of the classic Eve Online war stories. Thank God it's just a game.

I know next to nothing of ethereum or how it works, so the whole thing read like a cyberpunk caper that I couldn't put down. I imagine the author on his Ono-Sendai deck.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#210

Post by Taek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
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 have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…

> 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way to work.

Proof of Work gets a bad reputation because people have a hard time wrapping their heads around why it is useful. People don't complain about all of the energy that goes into making concrete, or transporting people around, or making houses cooler, because the impact of these things is more direct and less abstract.

But proof of work has a massive benefit that - as the market shows - well outweighs the cost. Thanks to proof of work, a group of counter-parties that are all fully mutually distrusting can interact with eachother without electing a mutually trusted subset or finding a trustworthy third party to facilitate the transaction.

Within the rest of society, trust is extremely expensive. Large financial institutions are only able to operate within the context of a massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm and necessarily privacy violating technologies like KYC. Proof of Work allows us to throw all of that away and use something much simpler and more privacy preserving! You trade one expense for another, and in many cases, Proof of Work transactions are able to succeed in areas where banks could never reasonably get established. That is _massive_ value added to society. And yes, the cost is this giant proof of work engine that burns a lot of electricity. But it's not _waste_, it's serving a key purpose that nothing else is able to serve.

In areas where trust is cheaper than Proof of Work, you should use trust instead of PoW. But the world is full of places and opportunities where PoW is by far the cheapest way to get something done.

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