Comment by lgregg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lgregg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur.

Can you give any examples you can share? You have state/non-state actors which have mass resources to use to their advantage directly or indirectly (e.g. troll farms). What prevents people from buying these CVL tokens and/or creating multiple accounts to bias your ledger? It's not like they really are taking a hit on these transactions unless they're above $5-$10. The Internet Research Agency had a small budget compared to other actors which were in the millions.

It also could go the other way for voting against reputable journalism. Is there prevention in this area as well? It seems like the Vote Quorum could be abused in this area.

It seems like it might be much easier to challenge your system around voting with an algorithm rather than the social engineering that occurs on social platforms.

Though I might come off critical, I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'm pretty new to blockchain and don't understand it all. Though, I did see the "Attacks against token-curated registries and mitigations" in your whitepaper. How expensive are these coins?

First, acquiring enough tokens to singlehandedly determine outcomes of votes is incredibly expensive. The simple act of buying tokens increases demand on the tokens (which have a fixed supply) thus increasing the market price. By the time a bad actor has acquired 51% (or close to it) of the tokens, they will likely have spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Second, even if they are able to acquire some huge percentage of the tokens, the public nature of the blockchain means we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors (if not by name, at least by account). The community can then decide to "fork" the bad actors out of the system (Essentially the community can deploy a new token that is identical to the old token except the bad actors' account balances are zeroed out. If everyone decides to switch to using the new token, the bad actors' old tokens become worthless and they just spent millions of dollars to slightly inconvenience people).

Specific details of our initial token distribution (how many tokens does 1 ETH buy, etc) are forthcoming, but after that initial distribution, the price of the tokens is determined by the market forces. It's those market forces that (theoretically) make the TCR actually "work" as token holders are incentivized to make the registry as "good" as possible and increase demand for the token (because people want to be on the registry).

-- Nick Reynolds

> they will likely have spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars

To control a central hub of communication for society, that's pocket change.

> we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors

If you're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, gaming the process properly won't cost much more.

I'm not sure this guy has heard of the Koch brothers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com