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Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

vitalik.ca

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Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#291

Post by ddrdrck_ »

_7fvc wrote: post #289

I consider myself fairly knowledgable with cryptocurrency. I create and run a crypto project myself. I read this post and maybe understand 10% of it. This is probably the rate of things I read from Vitalik. Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem. A warning for those who think getting…

Vitalik is extremely smart, but even people that are 10 times less smart than Vitalik can create a crypto project ...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#292

Post by Nursie »

seibelj wrote: post #216
koheripbal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as coins are designed as a store of value rather than an actual currency, they will have limited use-cases. People need to get over the concept of inflation. Inflation is GOOD.

Inflation is good for governments who want to reduce their debt obligations denominated in their own currency, and it encourages economic activity. It’s bad if you have little money, your wages don’t raise automatically with inflation, and every year what little you have has been reduced in value 1 to 10%. I as a homeowner with a government-subsidized 30 year fixed rate mortgage love it however, as what I pay for my…

It's irrelevant if you have little money. "The poor" don't give a fuck about inflation.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#293

Post by ddrdrck_ »

yodsanklai wrote: post #247
MuncleUscles wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart contracts are a bad paradigm for developing applications on the ledger, they're far too permissive, the stakes are too high to want to trust your assets to arbitrary turing-complete code. You can do much better with composable state machines, because everything you do gets the same level of security as the native token transfers https://www.radixdlt.com/post/radix-engine-a-simple-secure-s... Disclaimer: I work…

> the stakes are too high to want to trust your assets to arbitrary turing-complete code. Does it matter whether the language is turing-complete or not? you're trusting a contract, not the PL used to write the contract, and the contract can be very simple (and formally verified, if the PL has a formal semantics).

I think the point is that it is easier to formally verify a non-Turing-complete PL

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#294

Post by gerikson »

DennisP wrote: post #175
gerikson wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

32 ETH is ~$4,800 at today's price of $151.07[1]. What's the expected "payout" for this stake? [1] CoinMarketCap used as source.

Expected payout depends on the total amount staked. With a large amount staked it's only a couple percent annually; with a small amount it's up to 18% annually. The idea is an equilibrium will be reached in the middle somewhere.

That's an interesting formula.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#295

Post by alanfalcon »

semiotagonal wrote: post #248
alanfalcon wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our CTO likens developing a smart contract to civil engineering. Our CTO also remembers what it was like to ship your software in its final form on a floppy disk! I think it’s great that more and more people are jumping in and learning what it’s like to develop in such an unforgiving domain (no point here, I just think it’s great!)

Learning on the job in an unforgiving domain can be costly.

The blockchain is indeed fraught with peril. Code review, audits, and bug bounties are an absolute necessity when it comes to smart contracts! Learning in a high stakes situation seems pretty good as long as you have a robust support structure.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#296

Post by alanfalcon »

simias wrote: post #171
alanfalcon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best smart contracts don't need to be reverse engineered, they've got shared, verified source code. The bugginess is a real problem as you've pointed out. The "impossible to sell anything" couldn't actually be farther than the truth from all my experience buying and selling NFTs. Over $150,000 USD worth of digital collectable game cards have been traded this week alone over at https://opensea.io/recent - everythi…

Digital assets are obviously the best possible use case for blockchains and smart contracts, but can it really work outside of that use case? And even for that use case is it really more convenient than centralized solutions? From what I can tell browsing through this website those digital "assets" seem to be yet another speculative outlet with some limited gamification on top. It's cool from a technical perspective…

We're going to get the Metaverse from there, eventually! And it will be glorious. A great definition of the Metaverse and what role blockchain may play in it: https://soundcloud.com/siggraph-spotlight/30-tim-sweeney-and...

I can confirm that the blockchain is way more convenient than centralized solutions for buying and selling digital assets once you get over the initial friction (which is still way too much). The keys here are open standards, composability, and trustless atomic transactions. As a user, I basically look at ethereum as an in-game currency—and the game is the whole of the ethereum gaming space (still nascent, yes, and polluted by a great many scammy speculative shell games) rather than a single game.

As for working outside of digital asset use cases, there are certainly a large number of people trying to get it to work though I agree the use case is much less clear cut. Without exactly agreeing with Vinay here, I at least appreciated the perspective he shared in detail on this episode of the NonFunGerbils podcast: https://nonfungerbils.com/podcast/3-vinay-gupta-indexing-the...

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#297

Post by mateuszf »

hannasanarion wrote: post #232
jstanley wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Points 2, 3, and 5 are essentially "how do we give the government the authority to block or reverse payments even when the sender possesses the relevant private key, or send payments even without the relevant private key". I'm not saying that's not a fine thing to want, but if that is what you want, then you don't want cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is purposefully antithetical to that goal.

Chargebacks? Reversing accidental payments? Theft? Fraud? These are all pretty important parts of the currency system, and people aren't going to give them up just for the sake of some nebulous idea of decentralization for decentralization's sake. Do you always log into every machine as root? Do you want everyone to have admin powers on HN and every other social media/chat/forum you use? Authorities exist for a reaso…

> Chargebacks? Reversing accidental payments? Theft? Fraud?

Cash wasn't solving this either, yet lot of people prefer it to digital money owned by banks. And bitcoin is sometimes called digital cash, because it behaves like cash in that way. One could argue that it makes people more cautious on what they spend money on.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#298

Post by mateuszf »

zaphar wrote: post #214
Terretta wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are the actual hard problems of cryptocurrency and until solved it will never, and I mean never, reach mass adoption... Let's look at these for cash, which has some level of mass adoption. > 2. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states. Both of these are amply funded today, so between cash and banking system, this isn't really a thing. Whatever form does work, isn't hampering adopti…

A friend once tossed a $100 bill from her birthday into the wood stove with birthday wrapping paper. There was no expectation this form of currency could recover access by negligence, fraud, theft, acts of god, or otherwise, yet she was thrilled to mass-adopt that $100 until it turned into ash. Remove the negligence item and fraud and theft are still there. Banks and other regular institutions have remedies for these…

> Remove the negligence item and fraud and theft are still there.

Not with cash or gold. Yet we consider them money.

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#299

Post by optimiz3 »

Avamander wrote: post #279
qes wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name itself might give you a clue, or just look at the code: https://github.com/tevador/RandomX

Yes, but how can JIT be a requirement, people sufficiently determined could keep the JIT output and then there's no need for it any more.

Each hash input generates a code sequence that has to be executed 1000s of times in an inner loop. The code sequence is different for each input meaning there is no reason to save the JITted code as the next hash will use a new code sequence which you cannot predict.

  data = input;
  for (1..10)
  {
     JITtedCode = CodeGen(CryptographicHash(data));
     for (1..100000)
     {
        data = JITtedCode(data);
     }
     data = CryptographicHash(data);
   }
   output = data;

Re: Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later

#300

Post by jasonzemos »

_7fvc wrote: post #289

I consider myself fairly knowledgable with cryptocurrency. I create and run a crypto project myself. I read this post and maybe understand 10% of it. This is probably the rate of things I read from Vitalik. Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem. A warning for those who think getting…

> Either Vitalik is extremely smart or he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Overall, his opinions are just confusing and distracting like the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

Vitalik started out years ago with writings consisting entirely of self-citing the Ethereum echo-chamber. Judging by the citations here he's starting to understand the value in the works of the established institutions, tenured university professors, and career cryptographers -- people whom it's obvious in his circles are either loathed as some irrelevant elites or simply, wholly unknown.

Now that Vitalik has spent the last few years actually surveying the last decades of theoretical achievements in the literature, maybe it's time to build a secure distributed world-computer. Oh wait.

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