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Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

medium.com

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Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#81

Post by cryptica »

ethbro wrote: post #35
josh2600 wrote: post #10

I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures. Remember that all complex systems operate in a degraded state. If there's ever a way that only part of a complicated swap executes correctly the trade can get really far out of position. People in Ethereum land…

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…

>> each exploit and oops only improves the system

This is not necessarily true. If the system architecture is highly complex and poorly designed, each exploit will result in a patch which will only make the system more complex and more brittle. IMO this is exactly what is happening with Ethereum.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#83

Post by alkonaut »

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 find it uninteresting because it still looks like an overcomplicated solution in search of a problem.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#84

Post by marcus_holmes »

detaro wrote: post #68
marcus_holmes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, assuming the original person in TFA had some kind of authentic claim on the money, why are they not losing it according to GP?

They (by accident) put the money in a spot where anyone can claim it. Arguably, that's where they lost it, OP just tried to recover it without someone else noticing "ohh, there's free money there" and failed. (that's not a very satisfying answer, but pretty much seems to be the logic behind those things)

Thanks for the explanation :)

So not so much that they lost it from malicious activity, more by accident.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#85

Post by est31 »

hoytech wrote: post #55
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

That's interesting, thank you!

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#86

Post by [deleted] »

kjsthree wrote: post #32
recursive wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, there weren't enough words to actually make any sense of it. What I got is approximately "if you try to do ethereum stuff, bots will somehow do the same thing but earlier, and you'll lose your money".

Agreed, somehow bots are able to jump the queue but there’s no description of how or why that’s possible. Why would the bot transaction be given higher priority than the submitted transaction?

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#88

Post by panarky »

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…

> basically unusable for everyday transactions

Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?

> the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure

Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#89

Post by Igelau »

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…

> You're just used to the stupidity

Those examples you listed are at least an explainable, understandable flavor of stupid. "Hello, bank? I'm disputing this charge" or "Yes, I really bought that stuff".

It's no accident that TFA has Cthulhu in the header -- we're crossing into a malevolent and incomprehensible dimension of stupid. "Hello, void? Robot monsters ate my contract" and you hear nothing but echoes in your marrow.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#90

Post by DevX101 »

gus_massa wrote: post #74
DevX101 wrote: post #36

Did the author get permission for this attempted Good Samaritan deed? Or did he go out on his own and screw up the implementation without the contract owner's knowledge? If it's the latter, that's kind of a shit move.

He didn't need permission: "Code Is Law"

I don't think what the author did was illegal. This is more of an ethical consideration where consent should have been requested from contract owner before doing a known risky operation.
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