Ethereum Is a Dark Forest • Hacker News Board

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#301

Post by jkepler » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Taek wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> ... It allows society to coordinate.

That's also the role of prices - they are signals for people to take action, provided the actors are free. Prices as an information signal simply fail to work when entities like the government use coercive force to interfere. Prices also fail if the markets are based on coercion or violence towards others.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#302

Post by sneak » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #225

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.

This is an artifact of insecure communications systems and poor operational security. Making people shuffle physical paper around, especially considering things like pandemics and climate change, is a temporary workaround, not a long-term solution.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#303

Post by boring_twenties » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #229

koonsolo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which banks allow non-trivial ATM withdraw limits?

My experience with 4 different banks:

1. Limit of $500 cannot be changed

2. Limit raised to $1,100 over the phone; apparently if I show up at a branch and bring my first born, I can get it as high as $1,500.

3. Limit of $500 suddenly reduced to $200 (!) with the option to call in and raise it to $400.

4. Limit raised to $2,000. Some years later, suddenly reduced to $1,000. Haven't bothered looking into this yet.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#304

Post by sneak » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 1:57 AM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #202

dkarl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me a year ago, and they called early in the morning on the day of closing to repeat the warning. It wasn't even mentioned when I closed on a house seven years ago.

I tend to phone people I'm making transfers to, where they've emailed or otherwise electronically sent the sort code and account number, to verify. Adds a couple of minutes, but could save tens of thousands.

This is possible because the telephone network is (more) secured, in the same way email and other forms could be, but aren’t.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#305

Post by cortesoft » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:10 AM UTC

xur17 wrote: post #261

cortesoft wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to reverse a charge isn't just about helping you if you are cheated by a merchant, though. It is also about if your credentials are compromised and used by someone else. Sure, you might be happy to give up your ability to get a chargebacks against a particular merchant.... but what about against a thief?

It's a tradeoff - in a number of cases, I would be willing to accept that risk. I already do with cash.

Sure, but the more articles like this I read about crypto, the more it sounds like carrying cash at 3am in the worst part of town....

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#306

Post by AtHeartEngineer » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

jkepler wrote: post #282

pjc50 wrote: post #3

As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.

I thought Ethereum's primary aim was to be an unstoppable world computer that runs any code where the fas fee was paid, not money. Bitcoin aims to be peer-to-peer censorship-resistant electronic cash---and at this point its protocol has far higher levels of tested security.

Transactions on ethereum get processed from the mempool in order of who wants to pay the most gas to have their stuff processed.

And yes, ethereum has more potential for problems, it's a much more complicated system than bitcoin. Their current goals are proof of stake (getting away from energy wasting mining) and scalability. Bitcoin is great for what it's great for, being digital gold, but it's pretty far from replacing Visa, ethereum actually has a shot at that.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#307

Post by marcell » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

vmception wrote: post #293

> Because I’m a professional DeFi thought leader, I had never actually deployed a contract to Ethereum before. As a developer that uses the EVM quite often, this had me laughing out loud! That matches my experience with pretty much everyone! And yet there are still the people doing things I could never think of doing and doing it very quickly. I want to get to that place.

Curious what do you use the EVM for?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#308

Post by milchek » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

hoytech wrote: post #55

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,…

Yes to all your questions. See http://frontrun.me/ for some logs of gas auctions. There is/was also so-called "back-running" where bots spammed many transactions with the same gas price as a target transaction: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/21350

So, with front-running on Ethereum, am I understanding correctly that what is happening here is that bots are being used to look at buy and sell orders on decentralized exchanges and then sending their own tokens with a slightly higher gas price to get in 'front' of the detected order?

What is the point of "back-running?"

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#309

Post by Igelau » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

Sargos wrote: post #259

xg15 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case? Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?

There's finance stuff which is mostly large organization to large organization. Everything from escrow, loans invoices, to things like RFPs and supply chain management. Then there's the NFT/Unique items section which is for gaming (God's Unchained/Magic the Gathering where each card is owned digitally and can be traded freely with others or used as collateral for a loan), media (You own a movie but can use it on any…

Except you don't need a cryptocurrency to have decentralized applications or neutral platforms.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#310

Post by techsupporter » Sat, Aug 29, 2020, 2:32 AM UTC

nend wrote: post #297

creato wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reasoning also (especially?) applies to voting. Trying to make voting "efficient" is not worth it when we do it rarely and we have not had a problem just getting people to count ballots manually.

This is a really bad comparison. Making it easier to vote has a big affect on how many people vote. Requiring a hand delivered check vs wire transfer to buy house has a minimal effect on how many people buy a house. Plus, the US has elections far more frequently than how frequently an average person buys a house.

> Making it easier to vote has a big affect on how many people vote.

I think OP meant "efficient" as in "efficient for the people doing the counting." In this case, efficient is not the same as easy. It's efficient to count a bunch of ballots by having people enter their choices directly into a bunch of counting computers that are networked to a central counting computer.

It's easy to vote by getting a ballot (by mail or in person), marking it, and dropping it into a box. But counting those votes is not efficient, or at least not fast.

I'm with you; I want the latter, not the former.