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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#51

Post by natcombs »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #21
Igelau wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see I'm not the only one. Most blockchain stuff seems like an incredibly dull game of Fantasy Stock Exchange, but this was more like Eve Online.

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…

> They have nothing on the current financial system

Ok, so you have some grief with how the banking system works

> These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today.

How is this related? No one is pitching building a KYC government regulated financial banking system?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#52

Post by emerged »

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 even sure how to justify it.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#54

Post by pacoWebConsult »

Animats wrote: post #15
atarian wrote: post #7

Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be something in a financial contract.

Yes. They should have gone with something simple and declarative, like decision tables.[1] Those have a finite number of cases and can be exhaustively tested. Which is what you want for a smart contract for something real. But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Ether…

At the very least people should be formally verifying the behavior of their smart contracts before investing millions of dollars in them. The ETH VM is actually pretty simple to model and formally verify at least some of the basic properties of contracts.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#55

Post by hoytech »

est31 wrote: post #20

I wonder how these bots perform the shorting. Do they take the modified instruction and increase miner reward to make it more prioritized than the original transaction? Such a bot would be hard to counter as if you set some reward value, even if it's extremely high, it would take it and increase it by 1. Even if you saw that value yourself and increased it yourself, they could counter your counter by inceasing again,…

Yes to all your questions. See http://frontrun.me/ for some logs of gas auctions.

There is/was also so-called "back-running" where bots spammed many transactions with the same gas price as a target transaction: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/issues/21350

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#56

Post by [deleted] »

redahs wrote: post #48
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.

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property. The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to…

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#57

Post by AnthonyMouse »

weego wrote: post #28
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…

You can as easily blame the previous generations of sex toy sellers for their shady practices as you can banks for responding to it by separating those industries for special treatment. Higher processing fees or outright blocking is just a response to risk. It's not some moral pillar that crypto is taking a stand against at all, it's just removing all the processes that protect both sides of transactions and distribu…

Except that it's not "shady practices" that caused it. It's, man buys porn on credit card, wife questions the man about it, man denies it was him, wife has the charge reversed. Then the bank stops wanting to deal with anything related to the adult industry.

What you need is a payment system that can handle transactions where the seller is honest and the buyer is flaky when the existing one is built around the opposite assumption. And if the banks can't provide that (or the existing regulatory environment doesn't allow them to) then it's good when something else fills the gap.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#58

Post by alkonaut »

Analemma_ wrote: post #46
ethbro wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the whole security / obscurity point? That true security only comes by being exposed to active, intelligent, informed adversaries for a sufficient amount of time? Or, another way: each exploit and oops only improves the system, rather than being a signal of its failure. And let's be honest, the competition is still "Oops, I accidentally sent $900M to the wrong party." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

> And let's be honest, the competition is still "Oops, I accidentally sent $900M to the wrong party." [1] The counterargument there is that Citibank is currently pursuing a resolution in the courts to that issue, and if they win they will get their $900M back. If you flub a DeFi transaction, you're shit outta luck.

Exactly. There is no way I'd ever want to anything remotely important, or remotely high value, on a system that isn't run by humans and with transactions reversible in courts.

Who is it that uses these smart contracts, and for what? Is it mostly a gadget for research and speculation (still)?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#59

Post by mangecoeur »

I have rarely seen so much effort and intellect expended for something so wildly pointless... conspicuously missing from these whole shenanigans: anyone doing anything that a normal person could recognise as being of practical use.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#60

Post by warkdarrior »

StavrosK wrote: post #47
throwaway4good wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the feeling that there might actually be more "professional DeFi thought leaders" out there than people who have deployed something to Ethereum.

Is DeFi an actual thing, or just a term for cryptocurrencies in general?

DeFi is basically financial applications built on top of cryptocurrencies. Sometimes these financial applications (like exchanges, money markets, loan offerings, etc.) are decentralized.
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