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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#331

Post by devin »

creato wrote: post #269
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.

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.

I find myself commenting on this more and more often, but check out what freeandfair.us is doing in the voting space.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#332

Post by rsync »

dimmke wrote: post #145

The environment described in this article is horrifying and definitely sounds worse than our current financial system. That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all. I agree with the other comments on here. Blockchain/crypto has always made me uncomfortable. I think it's a mix of the slimy get rich quick aspect of it that draws a lot of people and the cyberpunk/dystopian rhetoric around it. I also th…

"That person just lost $12k to fraud and has no recourse at all."

Did they ? Why is it fraud ? If you kill my orc in WoW and steal my gold, is that ... what ? Theft ? Fraud ?

Are liquidity bots fighting over broken ethereum contracts more or less abstracted from reality than WoW gold ?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#333

Post by dheera »

treis wrote: post #299
dheera wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't this be avoided simply by making sure the property owner gives you wiring instructions in person?

You aren't (usually) wiring the money to the property owner. It goes to the title or escrow company processing the transaction. They get the money, execute the paperwork, and then transfer the money to the owner after everything is squared away.

What is the incentive to use an escrow instead of dealing with the owner directly? How do I know the escrow won't run away like a crow with my money and the house?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#334

Post by wolco »

rglullis wrote: post #272
sjy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure I remember people saying the same thing about proof of stake 2 – 3 years ago. What’s the hold up?

I am not so sure that people were talking about having PoS already used in 2020. What has been planned was to have the first phase of a PoS on testnets, and this milestone has been hit. In any case, Ethereum still has a lot of characteristics of a research project. If you follow closely, you start seeing that ideas are explored, some approaches are validated, some are proven impractical, etc. Some delays and hiccups…

So that 2 year timeframe mentioned earlier means very little?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#335

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Well, I'm not sure why transfers are not checked against the name, especially for high value ones

This is fraud. It might not be recoverable immediately but it merits a police report. And maybe with that report you can have the receiving bank take action

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#336

Post by gottagetmac »

desdiv wrote: post #267

Why did they try rescuing the $12,000 pot on their very first attempt instead of planting a bunch of $10 dummies and rescuing those instead? Once they perfected how to rescue the dummies, then move onto the real target.

Time pressure was the main reason.

We also couldn’t have been sure that a method that could recover $10 would be able to recover $12,000. Bots won’t bother to snipe opportunities that are too small (they have to put a little money at risk to even try).

Finally, there was a nagging worry that demonstrating this kind of transaction for the bots could “teach” them to look for this opportunity, which could lead them to this money even before we tried to pick it up (since they could scan the blockchain for it). I had heard that these bots sometimes used recent transactions as “hints” to look for new profit opportunities. It sounded like a wild idea, but all of this was pretty wild.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#337

Post by xiphias2 »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #245
Taek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This DeFi stuff is playing with fire because the products being released have significantly outpaced the state of the art in building safe smart contracts. To make an analogy, imagine that instead of DeFi, we were talking about skyscrapers. Imagine that thousands of engineers funded by millions of people who believed in them were building 25 kilometer tall towers using technology that they discovered in Isaac Arthur…

I don’t disagree with your claim here, but aren’t existing systems even worse? The conventional electronic payments system is in many ways permissionless. Even if crypto doesn’t live up to all the promises it makes, it may still add value. If crypto is building poorly-engineered space elevators to get out payments to and from the sky, maybe the current system is throwing them in artillery and parachutes and hoping th…

I stayed with Bitcoin not because I don't see how cool Ethereum contracts are, but because it's all about getting at least 1 thing right, which is digital scarce money. Even that itself is an incredibly hard problem. Getting smart contracts to be secure will take much more time, so I'm staying an outside observer.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#338

Post by Twisell »

iSnow wrote: post #166
rkayg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad someone else feels like this. One of my friends is in the space, and I don't understand anything he says. I wonder if this community has created a whole language / framework to give a feeling of value to what they are doing. It's kind of like gamers talking about KDA, meta, etc.

My god, have you tried to explain React code so someone outside of coding? Every field with any kind of intellectual depth invariable has to create an own set of terms to describe what they are doing. Stop talking down on people just because you don't understand their jargon. Either keep quiet and learn or don't judge at all.

And maybe also stop talking down on people just because they don't understand your jargon. Either keep quiet and learn what's not obvious for outsiders or just explain your jargon so that more people understand it.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#339

Post by shp0ngle »

rsync wrote: post #330
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 ... ju…

Its the same in bitcoin ecosystem, really.

But bitcoin transactions are orders of magnitude less complex. So you don’t get these “frontrunners” at all.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#340

Post by rebuilder »

dheera wrote: post #333
treis wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't (usually) wiring the money to the property owner. It goes to the title or escrow company processing the transaction. They get the money, execute the paperwork, and then transfer the money to the owner after everything is squared away.

What is the incentive to use an escrow instead of dealing with the owner directly? How do I know the escrow won't run away like a crow with my money and the house?

The escrow company is supposed to be more reputable than the owner. They also handle this type of transaction, and know how to get it done properly, how to check the seller actually owns the house etc.
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