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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#231

Post by rglullis »

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.

How?

We are talking about a scenario where cryptocurrency become prominent enough that people would be trading with it. Governments and financial institutions can only control the on- and off-ramps from fiat to crypto. So now the US can claim to a quarter billion USD from North Korea [0], but what about a scenario where your assets are just numbers in a ledger that no one can control and these fiat ramps simply are irrelevant?

You want to talk about Governments trying to make it illegal? That is debatable, but a better argument. You want to make the argument that States and Institutions will create their own blockchains with backdoors so that they can override it? That is possible (or actually implemented if you look at Ripple), but that will be no real disruption of the existing global financial system.

I fail to see how "Governments will allow it as it is, but control it" is a possibility, though.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielcassady/2020/08/27/feds-m...

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#232

Post by sjy »

rglullis wrote: post #141
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…

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?

I’m sure I remember people saying the same thing about proof of stake 2 – 3 years ago. What’s the hold up?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#233

Post by TeMPOraL »

Taek wrote: post #210
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…

> 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…

I haven't done the exact math (I'm sure somebody did, though), but I based on some rough estimates I do believe that for widespread use as currency, trust-based systems beat trustless systems significantly in terms of energy efficiency. Partly because scaling factors - trust scales sublinearly with the number of participants (like average path between two arbitrary vertices in an acyclic graph). PoW energy use scales superlinearly. On top of that, energy use in trust-based systems is upkeep - it's a waste that participants have to pay out of their pocket, so everyone has strong incentives to minimize it. Whereas in PoW systems, energy waste is network security, so the incentive is to maximize it.

"Massive court system with a massive law enforcement arm" doesn't exist just for the large financial institution. It's the baseline, arguably the core piece of social infrastructure. Beyond finances, it serves to protect just about any kind of dealing that involves more than two people. It allows society to coordinate. So if you want to count that in, be sure to limit the scope to just the impact on securing financial deals - otherwise, you'll have to include on the crypto side of the ledger the costs these institutions incur so that crypto developers can spend their days developing financial systems, instead of hunting animals for food with rocks while hiding from the local warlord.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#234

Post by literallycancer »

lmeyerov wrote: post #216
Taek wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

How do you check for front running? What if your checker tells you that you can't fix it just by changing your own code?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#235

Post by TeMPOraL »

rglullis wrote: post #231
TeMPOraL wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How? We are talking about a scenario where cryptocurrency become prominent enough that people would be trading with it. Governments and financial institutions can only control the on- and off-ramps from fiat to crypto. So now the US can claim to a quarter billion USD from North Korea [0], but what about a scenario where your assets are just numbers in a ledger that no one can control and these fiat ramps simply are i…

> I fail to see how "Governments will allow it as it is, but control it" is a possibility, though.

I do not claim that. I believe governments will allow it iff it's in a shape and form they can control. If some features prevent effective oversight, these features will have to be removed for the cryptocurrency to be officially sanctioned.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#236

Post by anamexis »

hbosch wrote: post #169
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…

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.

Likewise. Ours instructed us to look up the title agency in the phone book, call that number, and verify the wire details before we did it.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#237

Post by sickygnar »

NortySpock wrote: post #121
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 don't know about "repulsive", but currently it seems like blockchain burns a lot of electricity (=> CO2 emissions) for very little purpose. For that reason I currently stay away. Perhaps at some point someone will design a distributed blockchain system that (a) isn't a total power hog and (b) provides some sort of human curation that I can do so that I'm not hosting someone else's NSFL picture collection. Until the…

there are plenty low power proof of stake blockchains. they are becoming a lot more popular for scalability and efficiency reasons. currently everyone is on the hunt for the next proof of stake 'ethereum killer' with a lot of speculative investment. ethereum itself is planning a migration to proof of stake.

right now, i'm not personally a huge fan of proof of stake because of the 'nothing at stake' problem, but one will eventually take off.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#238

Post by andrewflnr »

DevX101 wrote: post #90
gus_massa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't need permission: "Code Is Law"

I don't think what the author did was illegal. This is more of an ethical consideration where consent should have been requested from contract owner before doing a known risky operation.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics strikes again. OP tried to help and didn't actually make things worse, but they touched the situation so now it's their fault.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#239

Post by _csoo »

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…

>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.

Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#240

Post by literallycancer »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #128
spir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend a lot of time on Ethereum and wanted to respond to your points. 1) Yes, proof of work is terrible long-term, mainly because its cost scales with the market cap of the cryptocurrencies it secures. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue 2) There are also a lot of excellent ideas and projects. For example, Gitcoin, quadratic funding, quadr…

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I'll preface with saying that I listed my points as a contributors to the source of feelings I have about the crypto space - they're observations subject to selection bias. RE 1. I keep hearing this for years now; I'll believe in PoS when I see it actually working. RE 2., I just tend to keep finding (or being approached with) really bad ones. Last time I got excited was with Fil…

If by trading you mean people trading these tokens on exchanges, they almost certainly don't give a crap about whether or not something is a scam and are not looking for scams. They simply look for the required correlation, volatility, etc.

Compared to stonks, crypto exchanges have APIs that you can use to access them directly without a broker and lower and simpler fees (i.e. no minimum fees per trade, so you can easily make a bot and test it with low amounts and whatnot). Some jurisdictions don't tax crypto trading profits or have a lower rate.

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