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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

medium.com

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#221

Post by sterlind »

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…

There should actually be a big market for formal verification tools: malicious users can use them to find and exploit buggy contracts.

I imagine this will happen after the low-hanging fruit (the front-runners described in this article) is gone.

Providing formal security proofs may be forever out of reach, but if the tools get expressive eventually it'll be a battle of who can throw the most CPU at the solver, to the point where no cost incentive remains.

Either way, it will spur developers to use these tools before their attackers do.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#222

Post by xg15 »

emrehan wrote: post #71
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…

Good point but it won’t stop DeFi’s growth. In my opinion, such risks shouldn’t stop DeFi’s growth neither. Similar risks have been present in conventional finance and economy too. Relevant: https://youtu.be/ed2FWNWwE3I Instead of fearing from the risks we should quantify and analyze them.

Oh great, so we'll solve the problem of insurmountable complexity by putting another layer of complexity on top that is supposed to understand the first layer of complexity for us.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#223

Post by xg15 »

Ok, I got the part with the arbitrage bots and frontrunners - but could someone ELI5 to me what the uniswap contract was supposed to do in the first place?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#224

Post by _7fvc »

I'm not sure when Ethereum supporters would wake up. Ethereum's design creates this kind of Dark Forest problem. When it is programmable, you are at risk of being overpowered by bots. Computers are far more efficient than humans. Smart contracts are not smart. If they're too complicated (smart), humans can't comprehend them. So they're mostly dumb. Bots will overrun humans. With Ethereum, you know you're entering a digital Dark Forest. But you still want to explore it. You venture into the Dark Forest and got attacked. It does make an interesting story. But it's a fairly useless system.

With cryptocurrencies, you want to "slow" the system down. You want more redundancy. You want less efficiency. It's the only way to fight the automation monsters. Bitcoin is money. Ethereum is a fun and experimental Dark Forest.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#225

Post by Waterluvian »

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 wanted it to be convenient and electronic transfer but my lawyer said I’m simply not allowed to. I had to get cheques from my banks and hand deliver them to the lawyer’s office.

I’m not sure I fully understand, in retrospect, the desire to shave off inconvenient corners for large life events you do so rarely. I think there’s real wisdom in some of these things being so slow and old school.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#226

Post by wins32767 »

dexen wrote: post #207
est31 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What do you think the government does with the money? Keep it?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#227

Post by WalterSear »

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…

Doh, that should have read 'there aren't many other use cases for decentralized transactions'.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#228

Post by iSnow »

schoen wrote: post #198
Taek wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The paper is 2y old - which is a bit of time in blockchain space - and yet, no one has performed this attack successfully in the wild. So, either everyone is just loving Bitcoin and wouldn't harm it for profit, or it's not so easy (hint: you cannot short Bitcoin for hundreds of millions, it's not liquid enough).

Also, this is strictly about PoW, the ETH roadmap (and this is where we are coming from in this submission) is moving to PoS where attacks are potentially way more expensive.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#229

Post by novok »

koonsolo wrote: post #190
est31 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Its easy to get fake ids that look very real (ask a local 20 year old).

Also you often do not even need to take a picture of an ID to open an account online, just have the info of an identity that you steal. After that, you get an atm card, wear a covid mask, shades and hat, call to raise the limit and take it out asap.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#230

Post by um_ya »

xg15 wrote: post #222
emrehan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point but it won’t stop DeFi’s growth. In my opinion, such risks shouldn’t stop DeFi’s growth neither. Similar risks have been present in conventional finance and economy too. Relevant: https://youtu.be/ed2FWNWwE3I Instead of fearing from the risks we should quantify and analyze them.

Oh great, so we'll solve the problem of insurmountable complexity by putting another layer of complexity on top that is supposed to understand the first layer of complexity for us.

That's the entire state of computer science. Over time, strong systems become black box tools for more complex systems.
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