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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#211

Post by landryraccoon »

xur17 wrote: post #184
landryraccoon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please forgive my ignorance, because I still don't get it.

Can you give me an example of how this would work in practice? What two assets would you swap in this manner, for example, and why wouldn't that work with traditional financial instruments?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#212

Post by iSnow »

sickygnar wrote: post #23
est31 wrote: post #20

I wonder how these bots perform the shorting. Do they take the modified instruction and increase miner reward to make it more prioritized than the original transaction? Such a bot would be hard to counter as if you set some reward value, even if it's extremely high, it would take it and increase it by 1. Even if you saw that value yourself and increased it yourself, they could counter your counter by inceasing again,…

Well, gas prices are insane right now so no doubt bots are bidding them up. Gas prices hit 250 gwei or so 2 weeks ago. $150 fees for some of these contracts and arbitrage aren't abnormal. Here is a $188 transaction fee - looks like they were trying to "mine" compound from a $5 million flash loan? https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0d5def630cd20a1a24389982e99801e011...

They farmed $4140 before tx fees and interest, so they made about $4k. Not too shabby...

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#213

Post by Barrin92 »

xur17 wrote: post #109
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…

The fundamental problem of ownership still isn't (and won't be) solved by the existing banking system. Money that you actually own, that you can do whatever you want with (for better or worse).

this isn't a fundamental problem for anyone who isn't caught up in this weird ideologically libertarian crypto cult.

Virtually nobody wants to 'actually own' money or do whatever they want with it, they want to buy groceries, pay rent, or put it in their bank account.

If people wanted to actually own stuff they'd buy pinephones instead of samsung galaxies.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#214

Post by xg15 »

ak_111 wrote: post #156
TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Open Source didn't have as its only unique feature the ability to evade regulation.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#216

Post by lmeyerov »

Taek wrote: post #200
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…

For background, I've built verifiers for harder languages, reviewed papers for crypto systems, seen the inside of crypto operations & crypto security startups, and help build software for adversarial, investigative, & high performance scenarios. I'm not an expert in blockchain stuff, but I'm also not unfamiliar with the software challenges.

* I would agree that paying consultants to audit contracts is prohibitively expensive. It's the equivalent of paying pen testers to do your unit testing & security engineering - that's a costly way to do your basics

* I disagree that model checkers can't check for stuff like front-running. It's not textbook, but close: the first papers on model checkers were specifically temporal logic for stuff like ordering issues. That was ~35 years ago! Contracts are similar in size, and both computers + solvers have gotten exponentially better. For my day job, we do TLFOPS for $0.20/hr, in Python.

* Reproducible builds, bootstrapping, etc. are real... but the 20%, and skipping the 80% I'm talking about. Verifiable VM IRs + verifiable contract lang subsets + contracts verified against them. Yes, we've seen sw supplychain attacks against some projects. More than that? Buggy contracts, buggy contract libs, & buggy blockchains.

I get that crypto startup people don't know this stuff, but you can hire 1-2 devs (= $500K) that can. Even if verifying against full abstraction is likely out of reach due to the security mess that is the ETH VM & friends, chiseling out subsets and running the model checking equiv of fuzzers isn't hard. The status quo of not doing it makes it look like an industry of folks not running unit tests before pushing to prod. (See: article.) It's not that hard. As more money gets into any company here, my expectations go higher, even if that industry's haven't.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#217

Post by ethbro »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149
rglullis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In two to three years, Ethereum 2.0 will be using a Proof-of-Stake system and environmental concerns will be no more. > the court can still order the thief to send back the money. What if the court can not find the thief? What if the thief is from another nation? What if the thief is another nation?

It will ultimately have to be handled the same way these problems are handled with fiat: through international treaties and multinationals subject to several jurisdictions simultaneously.

It's amazing how many cryptocurrency users are citizens of Panama...

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#218

Post by maipen »

dawkins wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste The more you pollute, the richer you get. I can't understand why nobody talks about this.

Not only that, the Proof-of-work system also is prejudicial to holders. Miners are constantly dumping their newly mined coins to pay for there astronomical electricity bills. (constant selling pressure isn't good for the price)

Also, most of the mining power is always in china, so that isn't good. Mining is very centralized, miners can just join forces and 51% attack the network, which seems unlikely but not out of this world. It surely can happen, specialy if they find a way to be very profitable. 51% attack a network, or using exploits isn't illegal.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#219

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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.

My title company gave us all of the relevant information and account numbers in person on paper and made us sign documents agreeing that we were warned not to trust any information sent via email, web, or phone. You should expect the same.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#220

Post by iSnow »

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…

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

Which is true for every early field. I was around in the 2001 dot-com bubble, and it wasn't different. AI has a 70-year history of broken promises, but lately seems to come into it's own. Quantum computing is another hyped tech that may or may not change the world. Video-telephony was hashed out in the 1970's and only after roughly 2010 has become reality.

>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.

All snark aside, it's much more than sending money around. You have a fully digital system of distributed apps that can interact and very strong assurances to authenticity of the results. Finance is only one area where that sounds interesting, logistics, provenance, data recording in regulated fields like health-care or polluting industries, notary services, cadastral land registers, IoT are all fields that could profit from machine-to-machine interactions that are free from human interaction.

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