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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#341

Post by vvpan »

landryraccoon wrote: post #95
vvpan wrote: post #66

Perhaps due to a certain naivete I enjoy almost all discussions on HN. There are few exceptions and discussions under blockchain-related posts are the a prime example. I will disclose right away that I wholeheartedly think that blockchains are here to stay and to solve many problems. The general sentiment on HN, and this thread so far is an example, seems to be animosity toward the idea in general lightly veiled by p…

You sound pretty well informed, so I'm genuinely curious - what's the "killer app" of smart contracts? What use case do they fulfill that the traditional financial system just falls flat on?

Um, well I'll try my best. In a way it's true that it's a solution looking for a problem and I think we are seeing novel ways to use it. I think a problem is that people still associate blockchain with "currencies" and payment. That is a fairly narrow view of an immutable ledger. A project that, in my opinion, gives a glimpse of the direction blockchain will go in is the Baseline Protocol - a joint project between EY, MS and Consensys. I have tried describing it in another comment [1]. But to give a basic idea is that it does not necessarily use blockchain to transfer value, but instead to coordinate two entities. Basically it puts communication between business entities exchanging, for example, supply chain orders on the blockchain. Essentially the blockchain becomes an auditable protocol for communication, reducing technical overhead and making things like adjudication easier.

Coca-cola is piloting this: https://medium.com/unibrightio/baselining-the-north-america-...

And here is a more technical example of hooking up SAP to order-matching on Ethereum. It's a little basic, but gives an idea. https://blogs.sap.com/2020/08/21/sap-integration-with-ethere...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824584

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#342

Post by vvpan »

xondono wrote: post #124
vvpan wrote: post #66

Perhaps due to a certain naivete I enjoy almost all discussions on HN. There are few exceptions and discussions under blockchain-related posts are the a prime example. I will disclose right away that I wholeheartedly think that blockchains are here to stay and to solve many problems. The general sentiment on HN, and this thread so far is an example, seems to be animosity toward the idea in general lightly veiled by p…

I won’t dare to speak for anyone but me, but personally the issue I have with blockchain is that is a solution looking for a problem. If you’ve ever done any business (sales/purchasing), you’ll soon see that trust is not really a problem . Trust is only a problem in single-transaction deals (two entities trade once and expect to never trade again), which is pretty rare. Even in that weird case, branding and reputatio…

I think the concerns are real. And I addressed some of what you are saying in a reply to the other comment. But I think the concerning difference in how you see the technology and how I see is due to the word "cryptocurrency". In seeing blockchain as only addressing payment or, worse, being an actual currency. Ethereum and other "smart contract" platforms are basically immutable virtual machines and people are coming up with novel ways to use it. Payments and currency narrative just sort of stuck. As I repeat often in these conversations my, by far, favorite project in recent times has been the Baseline Protocol which uses blockchain not for payment but for interbusiness communication. I posted some links of examples of it's use in my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24313941

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#344

Post by vvpan »

landryraccoon wrote: post #211
xur17 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP gave one, uniswap - a trustless exchange between 2 assets.

Please forgive my ignorance, because I still don't get it. Can you give me an example of how this would work in practice? What two assets would you swap in this manner, for example, and why wouldn't that work with traditional financial instruments?

Well it would work with traditional financial instruments. But what wouldn't work with traditional financial instruments is an ability to integrate with them in a matter of, literally, an hour or two. These systems are open and nobody can be stopped from inter-operating with them in any way their imagination suggests. If you wanted to write a bot that does arbitrage between Yen and USD you would be able to do it, easily actually.

If we are going to talk "decentralized finance" - I agree it is weird and dangerous, but I see it a proof of concept. You can get a collateralized loan in seconds, even if you live in a country where banking is almost unheard of. Yes, there need to be things of value that you own on the blockchain but value tied to physical world is becoming more of a thing. And, again, yes it's dangerous and untested. But these are the hacking and experimentation years. One must be able to crawl before one can run.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#345

Post by drdrey »

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…

If you just fire up the client and mine, it will do practically nothing. You will have essentially no compute power, so no chance to ever get the block with the transactions you want included

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#346

Post by darcys22 »

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 not just being the miner, its winning the block and including that transaction in the block without it first being included in the mempool and transmitted over the network.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#347

Post by Melting_Harps »

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.

> 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.

THat's a very rose-colored view on voting, one that conflicts with amount of recounts and outright election fraud that has taken place just in my lifetime. Not to mention the outright denial of some to candidates to attend or speak at conventions and caucuses or having heir delegates ignored entirely.

Ethereum was recently, and succinctly described to be the following by Udi Wertheimer:

“I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don’t know what it’s good for but fine; other people like it. Good for them.”

That pretty much sums up my perception, at first it was supposed to be a global computer, which made no sense to me... then it was THE Blockchain upon which smart contracts could be created, entirely ignoring Bitcoin's could do that multi-sig txs or nLock. But would facilaite things like smart-contracts for hotels and car rentals, then that faded into obscurity when they knew it was not practical at all given its limitations. Then when Crypto Kitties fad came on I stopped attending the local meetups entirely as I couldn't take them serious anymore.

I was always the 'Bitcoin maximalist' at those events, and while I was using their meetups as a way to grasp why Ethereum even mattered as I was at IBM's Blockchain division where they were openly pushing for ETH based solutions and using an equally complicated things as Solidity was when they mandated everything be done in Hyperledger Fabric.

Ultimately, I realized it was complexity for complexity's sake driven by people who really don't understand this technology at all, and did so with no real reason to justify it other than it fit with the 'it isn't Bitcoin, its this other thing' narrative. IBM really dropped the ball on their advantage to capitalize on the use of this tech to many of its multinational customers, many who seemed eager to explore the possibilities, as a result of this.

I still have some screen caps from the internal study material from the exams and other internal material on a phone somewhere that just focused on how Bitcoin was nothing more than digital currency for criminals online. And how Ripple and Ethereum were some how immune to that with no real explanation to anyone who actually understood the technology [1].

To this day I'm still baffled how anything but greed explains how Vitalik, a former member of Unsystem, was the guy behind this and the subsequent clusterfuck that is ETH/Classic/DAO whatever it wants to call itself.

I kind of wished it had all been a big prank to transfer funds from stupid investors and Putin who were mesmerized by empty claims and buzzwords to fund Unsystem's loftier goals for privacy on Bitcoin but after the DAO I was pretty convinced it was never going to happen. Crypto Kitties made me realize that even they had no idea what they were really building.

1: https://thexrpdaily.com/2020/01/20/ibm-said-ripple-is-unique...

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#348

Post by rglullis »

ivalm wrote: post #315
rglullis wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some quick Google searches: - World GDP: 142 trillion USD. - Global cost of corruption: At least 5% of World's GDP according to WEF. [0] - Cost of violence: estimated to be 11% of GDP in 2012 [1] We are already at 16% and we are not even counting resources and parts of the world economy under the control of authoritarian regimes. [0]: https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/sc13493.doc.htm [1] https://www.researchgate.net/p…

Then for crypto you need to count what fraction of value is used for illicit activity. Here is a paper estimating its about 46% of transactions [0]. If you look at transactions that cause real economic activity (as opposed to speculation) I bet the fraction would be in the 90%+. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102645

You are moving the goal posts. The point initially was to show that the current socio-political institutions are no better than "Wild-West" blockchain systems to avoid fraud and misappropriation of assets.

You are now talking about how much of a "real economy" blockchain can handle, which is a different matter and a totally unfair comparison. Let's talk about a "real economy" when people are allowed to enter a work agreement and have a contract specifying a salary in crypto.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#349

Post by lmeyerov »

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #279
lmeyerov wrote: post #114

I can't imagine running (or investing) in a software-based company here without also having an automatic model checking layer for verifying all runs + 24/7 monitoring for disabling any live contract. If you're going to put $10M+, years of your life, and who knows how much customer money into this, why not spend $500K of it so you're running with the blockchain equiv of CI testing? You'd be able to deploy faster , wit…

You can validate your contract all you want, but if it matters in which order executions matter, you're still subject to the whims of the underlying blockchain.

That's something you can verify and fix, or decide to otherwise include in your risk calc.

But yep, after looking at the hoops verification folks are having to jump through to run safe contracts on insecure blockchain VMs, maybe doing something else with your $ can also make sense.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#350

Post by martinko »

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 not different. The issue you run into in both systems is that unless you have a large amount of specialized hardware, you will not be able to mine a block in your lifetime.

The number of blocks being mined is constant for the entire mining ecosystem, so you are basically competing with all the other miners to create a new block.

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