671–680 of 754 posts
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> Block scoping is default now in JS The default best practice, you mean? Declaring with 'var' will still get you the same lexical scoping rules as always. I believe OP meant 'inherited from pre-ES6 JS'
I thought using "var" is deprecated... If there's anyone who has the chance to use let/const but still doesn't, I'd be very curious to learn about their reasoning
Just skimming through the Solidity docs, I see a lot of unwise decisions there aside from the weird visibility defaults. All state is mutable by default (this includes struct fields, array elements, and locals). Functions can mutate state by default. Both are overridable by explicit specifiers, much like C++ "const", but you have to remember to do so. Even then, the current implementation doesn't enforce this for fun…
The only small correction I would make concerns this:
> Functions can mutate state by default. Both are overridable by explicit specifiers, much like C++ "const", but you have to remember to do so. Even then, the current implementation doesn't enforce this for functions.
When interacting with Ethereum you can do two things: send a transaction, or call a function against your local copy of the blockchain. The former is mutating, costs ether (in gas fees) and requires the transaction to be included in a block. The latter is entirely local, cost-free, and any mutations to state are ignored.
The 'constant' modifier in Solidity serves only to tag the resulting ABI of a function so that calls to it from common interfaces default to local calls instead of sending transactions. It's not intended to enforce that calls to that contract are read-only, only to indicate to callers that it should be called locally instead of creating a transaction for it.
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Hah I am not sure if you are joking. > The crypto currency space is currently so fraught with fraud and crime The lack of KYC requirements has led to some criminals using cryptocurrencies, but BTC is fully public and so money laundering, counterfeiting, and tax evasion both go away when we move to a public blockchain. Those three crimes are all so much bigger and more costly to society than the petty crime that has f…
>but BTC is fully public and so money laundering, counterfeiting, and tax evasion both go away when we move to a public blockchain. So you believe that all the public mixers are compromised? It's certainly possible, but even so, they clearly aren't publicly compromised, and as such, I'd argue that tracking down large amounts of money moved conventionally is easier than tracking down large amounts of money through the…
If a person isn't linked to KYC in any way and the coins are anonyously owned, then it's a bit harder, but as BTC becomes more mainstream it becomes increasingly difficult to prevent most transactions from touching KYC-regulated accounts.
As a borderline anarchist I'm not arguing this is a great thing, but it nonetheless offers a much more efficient path to enforcing money laundering laws.
FWIW I suspect some are compromised. Also, mixing adds cost, and so even if money laundering happens but is heavily taxed by this additional cost there is some utility to the blockchain based system.
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What I don't like about monero, and why I think it'll ultimately lose to another anon product, is that the transaction history is written to the blockchain, albeit in obfuscated form. But there is no proof on the bounds of what a sophisticated blockchain analysis can uncover given enough information. Roughly speaking, its conceivable that given enough transaction information downstream from a transaction of interest…
What you said is essentially meaningless though. "I don't like a blockchain-based currency because the record of transactions is permanent." Well...yeah, that's the whole point of blockchains. The strength in Monero's case is that everything is so obfuscated (and amounts + addresses are encrypted) that it's the best option out there. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than its competitors. e.g. F…
It's true that a system doesn't have to be perfect to win, but I don't see how monero has the edge on any dimension. It's not necessarily the most secure, its not the furthest along in development, not the most user friendly, not the fastest mover, etc. The overall bullishness people have for monero is because its supposedly better in terms of privacy than its rivals. But this is dubious without the right kinds of proofs when the competition does have proofs.
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Various insurance contracts could be applied redundantly and/or recursively, and of course over time the real-world characteristics ought to become known and the price of insurance for well understood contracts should approach free.
There's a lot wrong with this argument. First of all, a primary concern when buying insurance is proof of the solvency of the insurer. That means the insurer has to hold the capital covering their outstanding risks. So any insurer that can prove solvency also has to sit on a ton of capital instead of using it productively, which means the minimal insurance cost of a contract is going to be value * (risk + r * time),…
Your argument is valid, but consider that most contracts execute very quickly and so the scope of the insurance is quite limited. For more elaborate contracts, or for a set of inter-related contracts, insurance will be available for highly demanded combinations.
Also, since much of the insurance is against fraud, as parties became more trusted the price of insuring against their bad behavior would decrease.
Insurance is and has always been a profitable business simply because pooled risk is desirable in many circumstances. Blockchains don't alter this basic reality, and they make it far cheaper to offer proof of solvency and other meaningful transparency measures that benefit consumers.
Consider, for example, if employees could do a solvency audit of the PBGC at the click of a button.
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I realize that was probably satire or sarcasm or both, but since I've seen people actually seriously take that position I'm going to go ahead and respond as if it was serious. How do these smart contract deal with the real world? I can see how they can work for things that entirely involve activities that take place on the block chain (e.g., a smart contract that automatically pays a crowd funded project if and only…
Have you ever been to some old manor or library with hundreds of weathered ancient leather bound books...I always wonder about their contents... (usually they are under lock and key)...Cotton case law now seems a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Is this even illegal? Or just frowned upon? It seems this is just one big game, you find the weakness and you profit.
The practical challenges to tracking hackers or 'hackers' stealing digital currency mean you don't see regular prosecutions, but the ease of getting away with it shouldn't imply legality.
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Not really true. Nothing has to be perfect if there is insurance infrastructure. People should not use contracts they have no reason to trust. As a contract becomes more important it should be viewed/vetted/trusted by as many entities as possible. Users of the contract should pay an insurance fee that goes to the vetters, who promise to reimburse in case of unpredictable behavior. Yes, this means applying some meatsp…
A few days ago people on HN were arguing that it's okay if cryptocurrencies use a decent fraction of the world's energy, because securing the blockchain and building a financial system that is decentralized and impossible for any human to gain control of is a major project for humankind and worth spending a decent fraction of the world's resources on. Does that argument still hold up if you're going to have human ins…
I think it does. You don't need human arbitration, but there are so many cases where having it makes people more likely to transact.
Similarly, a hotel can put up a rack with brochures in the lobby, or can hire a concierge to smile and interact with guests as they walk by. The purpose of the concierge is to create more transactions than would have happened with a rack of brochures.
As for the question in the previous thread, I'm not sure if it's worth the energy expenditure or not, but predictions are that energy will cease to be scarce by 2030 or so.
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I don't think anyone doubts that smart contracts can be written that allow for a trusted third party to effectively reverse a payment, especially not in Turing-complete languages. I think the point is that if mutability and trusted third party oversight is actually usually a necessary and desired fraud prevention feature in a payments system, there's probably not huge demand to replicate all that using blockchains wh…
> if mutability and trusted third party oversight is actually usually a necessary and desired fraud prevention feature in a payments system, there's probably not huge demand to replicate all that using blockchains whose most-touted virtue is immutability and trustlessness This is exactly right. Once you empower trusted intermediaries to police and reverse transactions, you lose cryptocurrency's primary raison d'être.
I don't think this is accurate.
Let's talk about intermediaries:
I buy a shirt online using cryptocurrency. The merchant teams up with an intermediary to ship it to me.
I buy a shirt online. I team up with an intermediary to verify that the merchant ships the product as promised in exchange for a small fee.
I buy an electric skateboard online. I view reviews written by intermediaries about their experiences and watch some videos those intermediaries have posted of them riding the boards over various terrain.
I make a transaction where I am asked to commit money upfront without receipt of any goods. I use an intermediary (escrow service) to hold the funds in a specifically sanctioned way, to avoid the risk that my counter-party is dishonest.
None of these things are replaced by the core mechanisms of a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies just make some kinds of trust more efficient to establish, but it still must be established and in most cases cryptocurrencies don't offer mechanisms for it. Ethereum does, but in a way that necessitates trusting the behavior of smart contracts, so it's a building block for efficiency and scale, but not a replacement to the core human institutions that involve intermediaries.
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You could take inspiration from a system like Dafny or F-* and write your contracts with the assistance of a type system and compiler that generated proofs that your contracts satisfied some postcondition given a precondition. People have already written moderately complicated applications like operating systems in these languages, so there's some evidence they could be applied to contracts on the blockchain.
There is some research using dependent types in the Idris language to build safe smart contracts. The earlier discussion (quite limited sadly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12130282