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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#371

Post by TeMPOraL »

jkepler wrote: post #301
TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done the exact math (I'm sure somebody did, though), but I based on some rough estimates I do believe that for widespread use as currency, trust-based systems beat trustless systems significantly in terms of energy efficiency. Partly because scaling factors - trust scales sublinearly with the number of participants (like average path between two arbitrary vertices in an acyclic graph). PoW energy use scales…

> ... It allows society to coordinate. That's also the role of prices - they are signals for people to take action, provided the actors are free. Prices as an information signal simply fail to work when entities like the government use coercive force to interfere. Prices also fail if the markets are based on coercion or violence towards others.

That's true - but arguably orthogonal to the topic of fiat vs. crypto. Yes, the government uses coercive force to interfere, but that's very often to counteract various failure cases of the free market. Another thing that makes prices fail is information asymmetry - which, in reality, is a constant of trade.

Crypto or fiat, there will never be a totally unregulated market that works.

In a way, it's like Star Trek TOS epispode "A Taste of Armageddon" - you can't replace war with a simulation (and then voluntary euthanasia). You won't resolve international conflicts through a friendly match of Q3 Arena. It's an unstable situation, because anyone who disagrees with the result can just pick up a club, or a gun, and force their own result - at which point you're back to square one. And so it is with unregulated markets: someone feels cheated, picks up a gun, and you're back to some form of governance.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#372

Post by TeMPOraL »

rglullis wrote: post #268
TeMPOraL wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fail to see how "Governments will allow it as it is, but control it" is a possibility, though. I do not claim that. I believe governments will allow it iff it's in a shape and form they can control. If some features prevent effective oversight, these features will have to be removed for the cryptocurrency to be officially sanctioned.

So you are talking about the "blockchain with backdoors" scenario (which absolutely defeats the principle and the purpose of any major existing system) AND making the existing leading chains illegal. That is certainly is a possibility and a valid view, but to me a very short-sighted one. It assumes social-political systems are static. It makes us take for granted that global top-down Governments (hopefully democratic…

This may be my lack of imagination, but I can't see it ever being any other way. Hierarchical governance seems natural to us, pretty much written into fabric of social reality.

Once a group reaches more than couple dozen members, interpersonal pressures crumble as two random people don't really know each other or depend on one another - and you need to create a level of governance in order for the group to grow and stay coordinated. Rinse repeat, and you end up with hierarchical governance we know from every single society throughout history.

I know that "blockchain with backdoors" (or, "blockchain with anarcho-capitalist guarantees removed") goes entirely against the vision on which leading chains are built. But then, I disagree with that vision and consider it naive. I may be wrong about this, though. Time will tell.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#373

Post by pjc50 »

redahs wrote: post #135
Qworg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? This is unnecessarily encumbering the utility of money. Real and Useful: people can use the money as a store of value, medium of exchange, and a unit of account - and enough people believe in it.

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervise…

There is no way of distinguishing between a "real" and "speculative" land value.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#374

Post by pjc50 »

ur-whale wrote: post #365
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.

You do realize that replacing "ethereum" with "the stock market" or "the USD" in your sentence pretty much yields another truism, right?

Why? Those are the places people do normal business. Extremely efficiently.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#375

Post by Aeolun »

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 makes no sense, unless the money has been taken out of the target account in physical form.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#376

Post by Aeolun »

I have literally no idea what all of the stuff in the article means, but it sounds like the whole thing was broken from the start.

If someone can take the transaction you just sent and somehow jump in front of you to execute the same one, your system seems fundamentally broken.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#377

Post by jetzzz »

koonsolo wrote: post #190
est31 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After one hour, wire transfers sent in error are no more recoverable than crypto. The receiver account can still be seized by government institutions though, something much harder with cryptocurrencies.

You would think, but in all scammer cases that I heard, they are able to get their money out. I really don't get it, because I have to provide my ID every year or so for verification. I really don't get how these scammer can get away with that, but obviously every time.

They can use an account registered for a homeless person who has happily provided an ID in exchange for a small amount of money.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#378

Post by drfuchs »

dheera wrote: post #258
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/05/homebuyers-are-falling-for-t... > Here’s how these scams usually go down: A thief hacks into a real estate or title company’s computer system and then studies the transactions, from the language used to the format of the wiring instructions. When the scammer strikes, he or she will often pose as someone from the real estate or titling company to instruct the buyer to wire funds to them…

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

In the US at least, you typically don’t even meet the owner. (Never mind that it’s not easy to make sure you’re paying the real owner without the aid of the various intermediaries. Nolo Press has good books about buying and selling homes and all the potential pitfalls involved.)

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#379

Post by CryptoPunk »

emerged wrote: post #52

Writing this sort of bot seems like a legitimately fun and interesting thing to work on, but somehow I have less than zero interest in actually doing it. There's just something intrinsically repulsive about the entire blockchain world to me where I just don't want to touch it. I don't mean to offend people who do love blockchain tech, in many ways I don't blame you. But is this feeling I have somewhat common? I'm not…

I suspect it's a political bias. It could be that you see that the blockchain frees people from traditional controls that you have long internalized as valuable.

As such, the permissionless-ness of it, where anyone can send value to any one or thing, for any purpose, evokes disgust.

It's basically libertarianism, institutionalized as a technological platform and network, and if it succeeds, it means the ideological camp you identify with will have suffered a crushing and lasting defeat.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#380

Post by herbst »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #34
hombre_fatal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have nothing on the current financial system, like banks being able to block you because you sell adult sex toys or someone being able to pull money from your account whenever they want because you once gave them your card details to buy a $5 sandwich or having to find a merchant relationship just for people to send you money. These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today. You're…

As an outsider looking in, though, it seems that banks are getting better at this, while crypto is getting worse. There's a bajillion fintechs helping the banks sort out their UI issues and make it friendlier/better. Bitcoin is still basically unusable for everyday transactions, and the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure. As TFA says, the hazards for normal folks playing…

Have you ever used a browser wallet? I have yet to see a banking ui that is even close as fast and comfortable as metamask is. And i regularly try more modern banks.
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