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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#321

Post by eli »

nodesocket wrote: post #180
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 am closing on a house, and this is quite terrifying. How in the world did the scammers know all the exact details of the house? I am guessing the $12k was good faith money? In my case, I was able to write a plain old check for my good faith money.

No need to be terrified, lots of ways to confirm the wire instructions are legit. Calling a known good phone number or going to the title company in person.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#322

Post by RhodesianHunter »

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…

For anyone interested, a friend of mine works on a technical solution to this exact scam.

https://certifid.com/

No affiliation besides having a friend who works there.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#323

Post by bsenftner »

Sargos wrote: post #281
api wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always makes me think of that STTNG episode where they destroy the Borg collective by injecting a fascinating but impossible geometry problem. Cryptocurrency basically did that to the hacker and startup spheres, wasting unfathomable amounts of money, resources, and brain power.

Do you honestly believe, and this is a real question, that all of these brilliant people who come from well known companies spend nearly a decade of their life working tirelessly on building an ecosystem that many thousands of other developers interact with daily, just haven't realized yet that it's completely useless?

There are complex developed pseudo-sciences filled with serious people too deep and stubborn and too invested and too old to start over - so they continue, creating a masterpiece of fiction that carries too many fools to ever end. Religions, pseudo-sciences, short sighted and impossible political ideologies are rampant today and have been throughout human history. Of course I believe it is a sham.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#324

Post by Waterluvian »

kbenson wrote: post #298
taneq wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure I fully understand, in retrospect, the desire to shave off inconvenient corners for large life events you do so rarely. Same. I’ve seen people but one car over another just because it was available nearby instead of a half hour bus ride away. How many times in your life do you buy a car that an extra half hour is significant?

For this, I think it also matters how people view the car, the class of car, and the cost of waiting or goi g somewhere else. If you're buying a cheap car to get you from point a to point b and you don't care about amenities, what does it matter? Will that civic the next town over make you much happier than the corolla in front of you (or vice versa, or whatever)? Some people just don't care about cars, or at least n…

I was so picky and spent months looking for my car. To the point the dealers were getting a bit irritated. When I finally picked I was asked what colour. “Don’t care. What do you have on the lot?”

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#325

Post by RhodesianHunter »

iSnow wrote: post #129
alkonaut wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There is no way I'd ever want to anything remotely important, or remotely high value, on a system that isn't run by humans and with transactions reversible in courts. Who is it that uses these smart contracts, and for what? Is it mostly a gadget for research and speculation (still)?

I work in old industry and the supply chain guys as well as finance is having a boner from the idea of moving their crufty systems to blockchain. The whole paper trail around a bill of lading isn't a joke if you are shipping from say China to South America. But - like the internet - it's just a fad that will soon pass.

It'll never happen on the supply chain because of all of the entities in the middle with zero desire to participate.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#326

Post by Waterluvian »

bawolff wrote: post #287
Waterluvian wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's so inconvinent about that? I assume you have to go into the lawyer's office anyways. A cheque is just a signed document telling your bank to transfer the money-if you're buying a house then a cheque is the least of the things you're going to have to sign. Was it just a normal cheque? (Not a certified cheque or money order, or anything special) if so many people will already have them on hand.

For $100k it had to be certified. And was a bunch of hoops to jump through to get them. Took like a week.

Mind you this is Canada so things are likely different.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#327

Post by hnick »

api wrote: post #161
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…

Is it just me or is there fantastically more fraud these days than a decade or two ago? Any transaction feels like walking around in northern Canada during black fly season. I receive several cold scam calls per day and I’ve known people who have done things like purchase a home and been inundated by fake calls from “the underwriter” and other scams. Is there no mail and telemarketing fraud enforcement any more?

We're definitely getting more of the Chinese robocalls and other SMS spam here in Australia too. I think there are two sides to it: scammers like everyone else are feeling the pinch from reduced economic activity, and desperate people are easier to scam.

A lot of scams do feel like low hanging fruit that would be easy to track down. I think there is a lack of will and capability for resolving "small" scams of up to a few thousand dollars which can be crippling for individuals.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#328

Post by porcine-flight »

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…

This problem can be avoided if the parties use digital signatures and require a phone call for final confirmation of the instructions.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#329

Post by Animats »

pacoWebConsult wrote: post #54
Animats wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They should have gone with something simple and declarative, like decision tables.[1] Those have a finite number of cases and can be exhaustively tested. Which is what you want for a smart contract for something real. But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Ether…

At the very least people should be formally verifying the behavior of their smart contracts before investing millions of dollars in them. The ETH VM is actually pretty simple to model and formally verify at least some of the basic properties of contracts.

Formally verify against what? You need some simple model of what's supposed to happen to verify against.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#330

Post by rsync »

hooande wrote: post #9

"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

I came here to ask about that specific quotation:

"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."

In the bitcoin ecosystem, as far as I know, basically everyone can be a miner, right ? If you are running the bitcoin client you are mining and there is no particular barrier to entry to mining ... just run the client and mine.

How is the ethereum ecosystem different ? If they could avoid all of these complications by mining, why didn't they just fire up their miner ?

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