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Escaping the Dark Forest

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Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#41

Post by microtherion »

nullc wrote: post #8
ladberg wrote: post #2

I love that they're continuing the Dark Forest analogy! Makes me also realize I never want to dip my toe in crypto like that. It's like an amateur going up to an entirely unregulated wall street and expecting to earn some quick cash.

The word you want here is "ethereum" not "crypto". Crypto is cryptography, and even if you want to redefine it as 'cryptocurrency' the sheer reckless yolo incompetence and scammyness of ethereum is not especially representative.

What IS a "representative" cryptocurrency, then, if the #2 by market cap is not representative?

Would it be Bitcoin, used for such time-honored business as drug purchases and hiring contract killers? Would it be Tether, the fiat currency for people who think that central banks are excessively transparent?

The one extra element that Ethereum brings to the table is computationally much more powerful contracts, which makes it technically intriguing, but also adds another level of scammyness and incompetence to the enterprise.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#42

Post by currymj »

vvpan wrote: post #25
currymj wrote: post #16

i tried writing some toy Ethereum smart contracts circa 2016. at that time it was immensely difficult to write them in a secure way -- even a simple "hello world" level Solidity contract could easily have exploitable bugs if you don't code in an extremely defensive style. i'm told things have improved since then -- can anyone who's used Solidity more recently comment on this? is it true? this, plus the fact that putt…

Well, what are the fixes? Writing "smart contracts" is not meant to be for anybody but very seasoned developers. Also if you write a contract and do not get it audited by 3rd parties than nobody will (or should) take for anything other than a toy application. That's just the nature of writing immutable code that potentially transfers a value. About Solidity in particular - I think most people would say it's not the b…

what i recall was that there were many pitfalls even to do something simple, and this event suggests that even experts may find it difficult to avoid mistakes.

part of the challenge was just the inherent weirdness of the ethereum execution environment, where the functions you write can be directly called by an adversary, and they can set up their own version of the stack however they want.

it didn't seem like the language helped to mitigate the inherent difficulty however.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#43

Post by SilasX »

danielvf wrote: post #34
snake_plissken wrote: post #19

I still don't understand what's happening at the core of this and the other dark forest post from a few weeks ago. How exactly are these bots front-running/stealing the ethereums? My understanding: -these bots scan the smart contracts that are waiting to be executed by the miners -the bots find vulnerabilities (another grey area in my mind) in the contract -the bots adjust the destination address of where the contrac…

Imagine that everyone agreed that just one slow computer would handle banking, contracts, and the stock markets for the entire world. This gets rid of any pesky concurrency issues. To move money from person to person, or to execute contracts or programs, you write up a sticky note with what you want to have done, sign it, and attach some money to it. Once every couple minutes, the computer administrators come out, co…

Great analogy! The only thing I would add is that, if your arbitrage trade takes away too much money from an account belong the core devs (which would be like, the regulators responsible for the computer), they would retroactively undo that transaction in the computer's logic (force a hard fork).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819268

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#45

Post by dash2 »

danielvf wrote: post #34
snake_plissken wrote: post #19

I still don't understand what's happening at the core of this and the other dark forest post from a few weeks ago. How exactly are these bots front-running/stealing the ethereums? My understanding: -these bots scan the smart contracts that are waiting to be executed by the miners -the bots find vulnerabilities (another grey area in my mind) in the contract -the bots adjust the destination address of where the contrac…

Imagine that everyone agreed that just one slow computer would handle banking, contracts, and the stock markets for the entire world. This gets rid of any pesky concurrency issues. To move money from person to person, or to execute contracts or programs, you write up a sticky note with what you want to have done, sign it, and attach some money to it. Once every couple minutes, the computer administrators come out, co…

It sounds like the whole system has a huge public goods problem. In the real world stock market, buying TSLA is a signal that you believe the price is good, and if you're a big enough investor, your buy might move prices up before you complete. In this world, other people can steal that signal and move the price before your transaction even starts. Isn't this a design flaw?

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#46

Post by bodski »

iameli wrote: post #21

Love whitehat crypto postmortems like this. They always read like heist movies. Curious about the use of SparkPool to bypass the mempool and get the transactions minted directly into a block. It looks like anyone can sign up and contribute their hashrate to SparkPool. Is there a risk of malicious miners running workers in their competitors' pools and then frontrunning?

AFAIK only the pool operator can see the full set of transactions for the block being mined. Pool workers only get to see the block header for the new block. This header only contains the hashed root of the transaction tree, and so they are unable to front-run private transactions in this way.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#47

Post by AgentME »

itronitron wrote: post #6

seems like a very interesting story however after the third voice change I lost interest and the specialized tech jargon just makes it sound goofy

I was wondering why the article kept repeating details in re-worded ways as if they happened to other people. I didn't even realize that different parts were by different authors.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#48

Post by AgentME »

schoen wrote: post #29
snake_plissken wrote: post #19

I still don't understand what's happening at the core of this and the other dark forest post from a few weeks ago. How exactly are these bots front-running/stealing the ethereums? My understanding: -these bots scan the smart contracts that are waiting to be executed by the miners -the bots find vulnerabilities (another grey area in my mind) in the contract -the bots adjust the destination address of where the contrac…

My understanding of the front-running issue in these two cases is that a human being found vulnerabilities in particular smart contracts, which would allow anyone to claim the value protected by a particular contract. The human beings wanted to use these vulnerabilities to transfer the value somewhere, such as to an escrow account or to the original owners of that value. However, since the vulnerabilities allow anyon…

I think it's an important detail to point out that legitimate transactions mostly aren't vulnerable to the "Dark Forest" issue. A lot of comments I'd seen on the original "Ethereum is a Dark Forest" blog post seemed to be under the impression that this was a general Ethereum issue affecting normal users.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#49

Post by hitekker »

nootropicat wrote: post #37
ordinaryradical wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you're an enthusiast, it seems like good, technical fun. But I have no idea how an "investor" could read this and think they can price the risk correctly. This isn't even the wild west of finance--this is intergalactic space.

It's way safer and less complex than you would expect. Most staking contracts are a copy-paste of two basic staking contracts (from synthetix and sushiswap), so it's enough to do a text diff and see what was changed, which is trivial. For more complex contracts that do something more, funds at risk are the best bug bounty there is - in the current environment if something had >$10M for a month and wasn't hacked, it m…

As an investor who is not into crypto, I don't understand this comment, let alone use it to correctly price the risk of crypto.

Re: Escaping the Dark Forest

#50

Post by 3np »

SilasX wrote: post #43
danielvf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that everyone agreed that just one slow computer would handle banking, contracts, and the stock markets for the entire world. This gets rid of any pesky concurrency issues. To move money from person to person, or to execute contracts or programs, you write up a sticky note with what you want to have done, sign it, and attach some money to it. Once every couple minutes, the computer administrators come out, co…

Great analogy! The only thing I would add is that, if your arbitrage trade takes away too much money from an account belong the core devs (which would be like, the regulators responsible for the computer), they would retroactively undo that transaction in the computer's logic (force a hard fork). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819268

That's an unfair representation of what actually unfolded.
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