Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#1

Post by gottagetmac » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
medium.com

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#2

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#3

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

As an elaborate real-money PVP system, Etherum is amazing. As a means of doing relatively normal business, being sniped, frontrun, or exploited is hugely off-putting.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#4

Post by pstrateman » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

That's a lot of words to say "this system is insanely complicated for what it does (ie doesn't do)".

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#5

Post by AaronFriel » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

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.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#6

Post by andybak » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

This was as much fun to read as some of the classic Eve Online war stories.

Thank God it's just a game.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#7

Post by atarian » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be something in a financial contract.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#8

Post by Igelau » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #6

This was as much fun to read as some of the classic Eve Online war stories. Thank God it's just a game.

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.

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#9

Post by hooande » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

"Better yet, if you happen to know a miner (we didn’t), you could have them include the transaction directly in a block, skipping the mempool—and the monsters—entirely."

ugh. It's not what you know, it's who you know

That said, this looks like a very interesting and rewarding system to hack. But it seems to serve little purpose. The other comments comparing it to Eve Online are spot on

Re: Ethereum Is a Dark Forest

#10

Post by josh2600 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

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 will say things like "the smart contracts can't possibly execute if all of these conditions aren't met!", but I can assure you that lots of extremely fault-tolerant systems built by very smart people (like electronic stock exchanges) have failed in very surprising ways.

Weakly collateralized flash loans are just faster leveraged tools with all of the tradeoffs that entails.

YMMV, there's definitely a lot of money to be made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME << Relevant.