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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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True, but the article was about a situation in which they were retrieving money that was inadvertently available to anyone. That's not normal.

Any well-written smart contract has protections against front-running. For about a year I audited them for a living, and front-running opportunities are definitely something we looked for.

Sure, well written software has no vulnerabilities.

We never guaranteed there were no vulnerabilities. My point is just that there are simple ways to defend against front-running in particular, and it's common practice to do those things.

In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property.

The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to pledge as collateral which the public can auction in the event of non-payment.

This way money is placed in circulation so that the interest paid for the first use of legal tender is publicly collected and immediately spent back into the economy and so that the total quantity of money expands dynamically in proportion to the aggregate quantity of physical durable capital.

Why? This is unnecessarily encumbering the utility of money.

Real and Useful: people can use the money as a store of value, medium of exchange, and a unit of account - and enough people believe in it.

Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervised labor, and worsens inequality.

There is no way of distinguishing between a "real" and "speculative" land value.

The only reason inflated valuations based on speculative hype, i.e. your 'fictitious capital', are able to redistribute wealth from the productive economy to rent-seeking interests is that parties taking irresponsible risks are bailed out by government programs that socialize losses. These programs are sold to the public as making the market safer for consumers:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22223

Competing theories say that the main value of monetary tokens comes from the government's monopoly on violence. What I mean is that governments ask taxes to be paid in tokens that they issue (pounds, dollars etc) and they threaten you with jail / physical violence if you don't pay. Governments then issue these tokens and pay people in order to employ them. Under this model, money is devoid from the value of the asset backing it (in the case of fiat money, no such asset actually exists).

This is primarily an issue for contract writers[1], of which there are relatively few. You get similar kinds of automatic exploitation on exchanges of all kinds too (stock, currency, futures, etc), though I think it's fair to say Ethereum makes it (quite a bit) more complex and more automate-able on average.

[1]: transitively it affects users too, but it's a bit different either way.

I thought Ethereum's primary aim was to be an unstoppable world computer that runs any code where the fas fee was paid, not money. Bitcoin aims to be peer-to-peer censorship-resistant electronic cash---and at this point its protocol has far higher levels of tested security.

Transactions on ethereum get processed from the mempool in order of who wants to pay the most gas to have their stuff processed.

And yes, ethereum has more potential for problems, it's a much more complicated system than bitcoin. Their current goals are proof of stake (getting away from energy wasting mining) and scalability. Bitcoin is great for what it's great for, being digital gold, but it's pretty far from replacing Visa, ethereum actually has a shot at that.

Many of these transactions are not using ETH the currency, just Ethereum the network. Ethereum has many tokens such as stablecoins (USD pegged tokens), governance tokens (capital assets), synthetic assets, even wrapped versions of Bitcoin.

Ethereum is still a "world computer", but it's a world computer for high-value transactions, which are generally financial.

How so? Ethereum requires a computer, and it's far cheaper to compute on your computer than compute has on your computer.

Ethereum is an unstoppable world chat room (ledger), maybe.

You do realize that replacing "ethereum" with "the stock market" or "the USD" in your sentence pretty much yields another truism, right?

Why? Those are the places people do normal business. Extremely efficiently.

> being sniped, frontrun, or exploited

All of those and more will occur to you if you try to professionally trade large public markets

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