91–100 of 463 posts
I feel like the dumbest of all (and maybe it's normal it's far away from my area of expertise). But seriously this sound more like a sci-fi plot that actual engineering.
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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?
To understand the equivalent in Ethereum you need to understand 3 things: 1. All transactions require something called "gas" which is based on the complexity of the transaction. The simplest transfer is 21,000 and seriously complicated tasks can go up to millions (11 million-ish is the cap now) 2. Miner's get to decide which transactions go in the blocks they mine. They get the fees associated with those transactions, so they pick the most profitable. 3. You don't get to decide how much gas your transaction uses, but you do get to decide how much Ether you're willing to spend per unit of gas, e.g. gasPrice of 3 Gwei(1/1,000,000,000 of an Ether) means you multiply your 21,000 gas transaction by .000000003 and that's how much Ether the miner gets for including your transaction.
Net Result: Right now on Ethereum Mainnet 100 Gwei is standard, so I see you have a transaction waiting where you offered 100 Gwei. I just swap out my address instead of yours and offer 200 Gwei. Now a miner will pick up my transaction first because they get twice the profits for the exact same amount of work.
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https://defipulse.com/ is a good dashboard that highlights the amount of money "locked" (i.e. as collateral) in various DeFi protocols. It currently indicates $8 billion USD worth of locked funds. In reality, the number is lower, because folks use "yield farming". You can put some collateral in one protocol, use that to mint some funds, and then collateralize that in another protocol. And rinse and repeat. There was…
Hmm, okay, but what is it?
Fantastic story and analogy to Liu Cixin's novel. Writing bug-free code is hard enough, but this adversarial environment is fascinating and takes it to another level.
Not sure if it's covered in the novel but reading this really makes me think these adversarial environments could be very cool hosts for emerging (or seeded and self replicating) intelligent agents some day.
I'm excited (and slightly terrified) to consider a future where autonomous agents rent compute time to host themselves, provide 'services' autonomously within the cloud to earn funds, and then periodically reproduce by splitting their wallet and moving it to a new host. Add in the ability to mutate (or even hire humans to implement directed mutations), and I think this hits all the requirements for my definition of 'what is a living organism'.
Perhaps due to a certain naivete I enjoy almost all discussions on HN. There are few exceptions and discussions under blockchain-related posts are the a prime example. I will disclose right away that I wholeheartedly think that blockchains are here to stay and to solve many problems. The general sentiment on HN, and this thread so far is an example, seems to be animosity toward the idea in general lightly veiled by p…
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I have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…
> Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste The more you pollute, the richer you get. I can't understand why nobody talks about this.
While they will talk about marginal value, they don't talk about entire systems incentivized to operate by creating value destructively, aka externalization at its finest.
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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?
Frontrunning in this context is detecting transactions that yield in profit and submitting them to the pool with a higher price for each instruction (gas price).
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…
(Someone will reply that you're supposed to use a layer 2 protocol for that, but that looks insanely complex for most people.)
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 have it too. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from, but some significant factors are: 1) Proof-of-work systems are pure, unadulterated energy waste (and an ecological disaster as long as we depend on fossil fuels). They cannot, ever, be allowed to become significant in the economy, lest our future will be building a Dyson sphere around the Sun just to power everyone's ability to pay for a hot dog on their way t…
Not really a fan of crypto overall (although I own some eth as a hedge in case it takes off), not contesting your other points.