Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 463 posts

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#351

Post by DougBTX »

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…

That scam relies on the purchaser sending the full payment almost as soon as the bank transfer details have been sent to them, otherwise they’ll see the legit details too.

When I’ve bought residential property in the past, there have always been various fees to pay in advance, using the same bank details. So when it comes to the final big payment, I’ll have already had the bank details for weeks, and have already used them to send previous payments. Double checking the payment instructions by phone just before making the payment helps too, as that allows confirming the account and the final amount.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#352

Post by Melting_Harps »

Taek wrote: post #187
josh2600 wrote: post #10

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures. Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land…

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…

> Defi is insanely cool, insanely powerful, and it will dramatically change the landscape of society.

As a person who has been around this tech since 2011, can you explain what exactly it is you find so fascinating about this other than the seemingly absurd amounts of money some people have made so far?

This all just seems like a reshased version of the DAO to me and I have ignored it entirely.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#353

Post by aidos »

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.

Not sure if it’s general but here in the UK our lawyer made us come in to collect the bank account number and were very explicit about never using other details because of this scam.

I saw a variation of it first hand at a company I once worked at. The scammers gained access to the lobby of the building, removed the post and replaced it with invoices with different bank account details on.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#354

Post by [deleted] »

DougBTX wrote: post #351
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…

That scam relies on the purchaser sending the full payment almost as soon as the bank transfer details have been sent to them, otherwise they’ll see the legit details too. When I’ve bought residential property in the past, there have always been various fees to pay in advance, using the same bank details. So when it comes to the final big payment, I’ll have already had the bank details for weeks, and have already use…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#355

Post by tsimionescu »

sneak wrote: post #302
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 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.

I think the most important point is that it's slow, it involves many people, and leaves a physical trail. These are all advantages for any kind of ability to prevent or recover from fraud or simple mistakes.

Perhaps you can build a similar electronic system, but if one of the purposes is to make it slow and make it involve lots of manual confirmations, is there really a purpose to it? It's going to be much more complex than the paper system (replacing physical properties like uniqueness with brittle/complex cryptographic versions). Complexity always begets bugs.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#356

Post by dmihal »

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.

Many of these transactions are not using ETH the currency, just Ethereum the network. Ethereum has many tokens such as stablecoins (USD pegged tokens), governance tokens (capital assets), synthetic assets, even wrapped versions of Bitcoin.

Ethereum is still a "world computer", but it's a world computer for high-value transactions, which are generally financial.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#357

Post by dmihal »

Jasper_ wrote: post #117
spir wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend a lot of time on Ethereum and wanted to respond to your points. 1) Yes, proof of work is terrible long-term, mainly because its cost scales with the market cap of the cryptocurrencies it secures. Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue 2) There are also a lot of excellent ideas and projects. For example, Gitcoin, quadratic funding, quadr…

> Ethereum is switching to proof of stake, which uses a normal amount of electricity and forever solves this issue This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it. Ultimately, Blockchain seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem. There are a lot of issues with the current implementations, and a lot of…

> This has been said for a few years now. The originally deadline for this was January 2020. Suffice to say, it didn't happen. I'll believe it when I see it.

Definitely not the first time a tech product has been delayed!

The beacon chain (first phase of the PoS transition) is on it's final testnet right now and operating well. The community is hoping for a mainnet launch in November.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#358

Post by keymone »

kinakomochidayo wrote: post #275
keymone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s far too everything . Too low level, too high level, bad abstractions, bad syntactic constructs, bad evaluation model. The more I see people burning themselves on “smart contracts” the more I realize how deeply thought through bitcoin’s design is. Creators have thought of so many things in advance, it’s outright creepy.

Well, Bitcoin design WAS well thought out, until Blockstream nerfed it, and pushed its own product, Lightning Network.

That’s a myth. Blocksize limit increase was rejected by all parties relevant to bitcoin: miners, developers, users, and merchants.

Blockstream has no control over bitcoin protocol. They built a product on top of it and there isn’t anything in bitcoin that prevents you from building a competing product.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#359

Post by dmihal »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #188
iSnow wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sentiment that gets expressed under most every blockchain-related submission on HN, and I wonder why. Maybe it's something about blockchain tech, but I have the nagging feeling that HN is just getting old and complacent. If this community had existed, in 1995, on a BBS, it probably would have found nothing but fault with the emerging web. I can't understand why a tech-minded person would find blockchain repuls…

Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value. The community appears full of -as another commenter put it: “Blockchain culture is full of Ferengi-style near-religious greed”. Crypto-anarchists with an axe to grind about inflation and monetary policy/government spending. I find the technology fascinating, if woefully inefficient. It’s a novel idea whose use case doesn’t seem t…

> Because blockchain keeps promising things and never delivering anything of actual value

My friends in Argentina would disagree

Blockchains (Ethereum specifically), cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance have allowed them to exit their broken financial system and survive hyperinflation.

They all get paid in stablecoins across borders, self-secure their funds using smart wallets like Argent or Gnosis, and earn good interest rates using lending protocols.

I think many of us forget how broken the financial system are outside of western developed countries.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#360

Post by rglullis »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #325
iSnow wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they don't, they will be put out of business. Do you think if Walmart says "I will only buy from you if I am able to audit you and prove that your shrinkage is less than X%" they are just going to say "Opposite, sorry we can't do that."?

Or if Amazon ever starts a blockchain-based certification system to crack down on counterfeit products, the legit distributors are not going to push down on all their suppliers? Of course they will.

Post reply on HN