Nice read! That’s why I respect whitehat hackers, to be tempted by ~10million and then proceed doing the right thing. I wonder if they got a reward/bounty for managing to save all this ETH.
Escaping the Dark Forest
61–70 of 142 posts
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#62This read like a piece by William Gibson in the Neuromancer universe. I finally understand now why people are attracted by cryptocurrencies.
You and I came to different conclusions from the same idea.
I came out thinking why anyone would fuck with this gameable broken system, the more i learn about cypto the less I think of it.
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#63If anybody would like more intense blockchain story-telling check out this longish write-up about Justin Sun's takeover of Steem.it from a few weeks back.
https://decrypt.co/38050/steem-steemit-tron-justin-sun-crypt...
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've posted this before [0], but it's still apropos regarding the foolishness that is Ethereum. [Ethereum] only makes sense if all of the following obtain: (a) the code is 100% bug-free (b/c accidents cannot be rewound) (b) all code-writers are 100% honest (their code does what they say) (c) all contract participants are 100% perfect code readers (so as to not enter into fraudulent contracts) (Strictly speaking, only…
And yet the marketcap of the funds locked in a subset of contracts on Ethereum is almost 10 billion today ( https://defipulse.com/ ) and I have been using a popular contract wallet for a while to hold my funds and transact with friends. So clearly it cannot be nearly as catastrophic as you mention, no?
Is it really meaningful to talk about market cap when there are no underlying assets? The value could be entirely (or almost entirely) speculation.
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#65Earlier 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…
Me think you are in a bit too deep and may be underestimating how things can go wrong.
Another possibility is that you have a high risk tolerance as well as an uncommon knack for this sort of thing that most people don’t have.
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#66Nice work, but honestly I'm not sure why they bother. The article states that the purpose of these smart contracts is: "Stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire" That's an obvious scam. Anyone who gave real money to such a cause has already lost it. So why is the author giving away his time to help the scammers?
For the glory? Because even chumps deserve justice? Because someone needs to defend the reputation of digicoins?
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet the marketcap of the funds locked in a subset of contracts on Ethereum is almost 10 billion today ( https://defipulse.com/ ) and I have been using a popular contract wallet for a while to hold my funds and transact with friends. So clearly it cannot be nearly as catastrophic as you mention, no?
Is it really meaningful to talk about market cap when there are no underlying assets? The value could be entirely (or almost entirely) speculation.
Sure, but it is still redeemable value for an attacker, yet attacks are relatively scarce. Or scarce enough for people to keep putting money into it. That's the point I was trying to make.
I know what you mean by "no underlying assets" but I'd say it's arguable. Does BTC (WBTC) have value? By this time it seems like it does. There are also billions of dollars of "stablecoins" on the network. Are they a valid underlying asset? So far it seems like they are... Things have no underlying value until they all of a sudden do, I think that's the story of Bitcoin. A story of value too.
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Me think you are in a bit too deep and may be underestimating how things can go wrong. Another possibility is that you have a high risk tolerance as well as an uncommon knack for this sort of thing that most people don’t have.
>Another possibility is that you have a high risk tolerance as well as an uncommon knack for this sort of thing that most people don’t have.
Ding ding. Which is why returns won't last as the information asymmetry curve is flattened.
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#69Earlier 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…
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?
In the traditional stock market it supposedly works the same way, but the front-running is more well hidden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
Re: Escaping the Dark Forest
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Arbitrage trades and related activities like MakerDAO keepers would be legitimate transactions vulnerable to this (essentially someone else extracting the value from their discovery). Granted that is a very small subset of users.
Liquidation contracts and Arbitrage contracts do check the caller and would not allow to be executed by non-approved senders. This raises the bar, so that you can front run only contracts that you can implement and deploy.
If anyone could just replace an address and execute a profitable transaction by being first on existing contracts, surely miners would be doing it already, no?