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The Verge Hack, Explained

blog.theabacus.io

1–10 of 68 posts

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#4
This is because, in decentralized networks that obstinately refuse to grant any special authority to third parties, accurately enforcing time synchronization is no simple matter.

That depends on what you’re going for. The concept of time is actually a local phenomenon, as relativity shows. To compare whether events A and B happened first, you must first trace some path from A and B to a third party C (maybe C = A or B if you really want) and then ask C which came first.

We had to deal with this when building our DLT. See this: https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#5
post #2

PoW coins outside Bitcoin will never work. This will continue to happen over & over again to every smaller PoW chain

PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#6
>>>In both cases, this hack presents a strong argument for tending towards sticking to things proven to work and to be wary of overcomplicating things and thereby introducing unnecessary risks when people’s financial assets are involved. Which, I suppose, means two points for team Bitcoin.

What? The same bitcoin that is betting everything on an untested and incredibly complex second-layer protocol called "lightning network" instead of just scaling with larger blocks?

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#8
post #5
post #2

PoW coins outside Bitcoin will never work. This will continue to happen over & over again to every smaller PoW chain

PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?

Probably because they're not trying to actually solve a problem. They're just on the hype train.

More seriously, if the name of the game is efficiency then a distributed ledger isn't the answer.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#9
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW is leader based consensus. It’s slow and can’t handle millions of simultaneous payments. Why do new distributed ledger technologies still prefer to use it, when there are other, far faster consensus algorithms out there?

Probably because they're not trying to actually solve a problem. They're just on the hype train. More seriously, if the name of the game is efficiency then a distributed ledger isn't the answer.

> More seriously, if the name of the game is efficiency then a distributed ledger isn't the answer.

And if you're only looking for immutability, then time-stamping is already good enough (and available since the late 90s or so). I suppose you can use a Merkle tree and then proceed to put "Blockchain" in your marketing materials without technically lying.

Re: The Verge Hack, Explained

#10
post #2

PoW coins outside Bitcoin will never work. This will continue to happen over & over again to every smaller PoW chain

This statement is against the spirit of HN. Although I agree that none of other pow coins currently have as robust code, but making an absolute statement like that is not rational.

You are saying every merge in the core code protocol is trusted by you even if that code has not even been written yet.

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