321–330 of 378 posts
None of these are the actual hard problems in cryptocurrency and the fact this is the focus speaks volumes. The real hard problems are: 1. How do we stop using more power than Switzerland to process 4 transactions per second (lol) 2. How do we stop payments to international terrorists and rogue states. 3. How do we stop money laundering. 4. How do we stop price manipulation by fraudulent actors. 5. How do we allow pe…
In a space absolutely filled with hucksters and scam artists, vitalik is legit. Good read.
Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicat…
During the 2016-2017 bubble he was even tweeting that the crypto space had done very little to even deserve the runup. However you had several other prominent people tweeting things that only amplified the bubble, so it did little to tame things, but at least he wasn't participating in it.
If he's a scammer, as you put it, he's doing a very poor job of that.
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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…
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There hasn't been any high profile smart contract hacks for a while now. Early days are always fraught with disasters. The field is evolving with "best practices", formal verification and lessons learned from past mistakes, so you'll find that these days things are more stable. One example is MakerDAO which has around $300 million in value locked, and has been running without incident for a while now.
I bet you that their smart contract, like most other significant ones, has been designed to be upgradable. That means the authors can modify the smart contract whenever they want, which means it implicitly has a centralised trust mechanism (I.e. you had better hope that the authors don’t go rogue and screw over the users) Central point of trust => blockchain part is now pointless, as ever.
Although the main achilles heel with Maker is the governance and the oracle. The new version of maker has minimised the governance, and the new oracle design has better protection against an oracle attack. Ideally, you want as little governance as possible.
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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.
And yeah, if someone steals your cash or your gold, you can sue them and obtain a restorative court judgement. With your magic beans you just blame the victim and shrug suggesting they should have been more careful, aka "SFYL."
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Luckily there are efforts being made to stop it, and fines paid and systems put in place. Are they perfect yet? No. It is still orders of magnitude better than pretending the problem doesnt exist or outwardly encouraging and abetting it.
I work in banking. AML is always a fine line. Don’t do your job well, you get hit for enabling laundering. Do your job too well and you kill millions/billions in deposits. AML at its core is asking a bank to purposefully reduce their profit. Other than fines and morals, there’s no real incentive for them to give their all, and those don’t seem to bother most of the industry.
It's such a shame that useful proof-of-work is so impractical. The amount of cycles spent mining for the sake of mining is pretty depressing.
Besides proof-of-stake, there's also a coin that tries (tried?) a proof-of-work with greater public utility: Primecoin [1]. It creates Cunningham chains of prime numbers [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primecoin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain
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If by "everything" you mean "the balance in one address was moved to one other address" then that would be a correct statement.
No, they forked the whole thing, and essentially destroyed the concept that cryptocurrency ledgers were immutable.
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I bet you that their smart contract, like most other significant ones, has been designed to be upgradable. That means the authors can modify the smart contract whenever they want, which means it implicitly has a centralised trust mechanism (I.e. you had better hope that the authors don’t go rogue and screw over the users) Central point of trust => blockchain part is now pointless, as ever.
Nope, Maker contracts are not upgradable. Although the main achilles heel with Maker is the governance and the oracle. The new version of maker has minimised the governance, and the new oracle design has better protection against an oracle attack. Ideally, you want as little governance as possible.
This may have been true in the past, but not anymore. Here's [1] an example of a minor bug that was recently discovered in the MCD deployment and how they're going to patch it. The modules in the Maker system have variables that point to which smart contract to call to execute their actions, and the Maker governance is involved in changing these values.
[1] https://forum.makerdao.com/t/proposal-upgrading-the-flopper/...
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If by "everything" you mean "the balance in one address was moved to one other address" then that would be a correct statement.
No, they forked the whole thing, and essentially destroyed the concept that cryptocurrency ledgers were immutable.