>The Dark Forest is my favorite science fiction book
Mine too and Hyperion andandand :)
Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
31–40 of 463 posts
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, but the details in this case are absolutely fascinating! Well worth all the words IMHO.
For me, there weren't enough words to actually make any sense of it. What I got is approximately "if you try to do ethereum stuff, bots will somehow do the same thing but earlier, and you'll lose your money".
Agreed, somehow bots are able to jump the queue but there’s no description of how or why that’s possible. Why would the bot transaction be given higher priority than the submitted transaction?
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#33I 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…
possibly when you are depending on transactions being verified on two different chains but one can do child pays for parent or can be overwritten on a smaller blockchain you could end up with a "blockchain race condition"
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see I'm not the only one. Most blockchain stuff seems like an incredibly dull game of Fantasy Stock Exchange, but this was more like Eve Online.
They have nothing on the current financial system, like banks being able to block you because you sell adult sex toys or someone being able to pull money from your account whenever they want because you once gave them your card details to buy a $5 sandwich or having to find a merchant relationship just for people to send you money. These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today. You're…
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 in this pool are getting worse. If the miners are frontrunning your transaction every time you want to get paid, what's the point?
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#35I 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…
Isn't that the whole security / obscurity point? That true security only comes by being exposed to active, intelligent, informed adversaries for a sufficient amount of time?
Or, another way: each exploit and oops only improves the system, rather than being a signal of its failure.
And let's be honest, the competition is still "Oops, I accidentally sent $900M to the wrong party." [1]
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#36Did the author get permission for this attempted Good Samaritan deed? Or did he go out on his own and screw up the implementation without the contract owner's knowledge?
If it's the latter, that's kind of a shit move.
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#37"Better yet, if you happen to know a miner (we didn’t), you could have them include the transaction directly in a block, skipping the mempool—and the monsters—entirely." ugh. It's not what you know, it's who you know That said, this looks like a very interesting and rewarding system to hack. But it seems to serve little purpose. The other comments comparing it to Eve Online are spot on
The "purpose" is to be able to trade one coin for another without having a trusted intermediary such as an exchange or escrow.
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#38Similar things happen with real money all the time. Many players can hack, over charge, short, manipulate etc. It may be less obvious, or somehow perceived legit, but we are not really shielded from other players taking our invested money with all kinds of "financial tools" that are hard to understand. Ethereum is just more direct, more feasible
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#39This is fascinating. I never thought of writing a bot to watch the mempool for exploitable transactions. Perhaps in the future it will be more common to send your transactions privately to a miner instead of putting them in the mempool.
Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
#40"Because I’m a professional DeFi thought leader, I had never actually deployed a contract to Ethereum before."
Having deployed a contract to Ethereum, I can tell you that it is not for the faint of heart for a variety of reasons too numerous to list here. If the VM can change, but the code can't, it's gonna be hard to maintain.
I have the feeling that there might actually be more "professional DeFi thought leaders" out there than people who have deployed something to Ethereum.