Escaping the Dark Forest

Forgive me - I thought that was tongue in cheek ? I thought the op was humorously paraphrasing some current, popular trend in ethereum contracts ?

No ? That's the actual function of these contracts ?

Can someone point me to one of these in the wild where I can see the actual pitch / advertisement ?

The end game of those governance tokens is for them to control the whole platform, so absolutely no changes can be made to the platform without being voted in by the token holders. All of this is enforced trustlessly on the blockchain through smart contracts. As a token holder you really own part of the platform.

This is a very powerful concept, so a lot of people are interested in buying those governance tokens outright. So what you can do is put your money in one of those platforms, receive governance tokens and sell them to people that want to buy them outright. You can make quite good money doing this.

Now a lot of projects popped up that basically had nothing to offer, yet people were still buying their governance tokens, meaning you could still make money by putting your money in there and selling those tokens to those people quick before those tokens became worthless, basically an advanced game of chicken.

So what I'm saying is not all of those 'stake your money and receive tokens' are outright scams. There are some very legitimate projects being built that give away governance tokens. Uniswap comes to mind, the most popular decentralized exchange, doing over half a billion in volume yearly. There's of course a lot more nuance and not everything works as it should yet, but there's a lot of interesting stuff being built every day.

Maybe this is a good article for someone deep into crypto, but for myself, as a casual morning read - I have no idea what happened.

But I have no idea how an "investor" could read this and think they can price the risk correctly. This isn't even the wild west of finance--this is intergalactic space.

I came out thinking why anyone would fuck with this gameable broken system, the more i learn about cypto the less I think of it.

You can't take advantage of a "normal" cryptocurrency transaction this way because the "normal" transaction is like a super-minimal smart contract that's designed to pay only one hard-coded recipient. Therefore, that transaction either happens or doesn't happen, but its recipient can't be altered. Nor can you take advantage of a non-vulnerable smart contract this way, because the non-vulnerable smart contract can't be triggered to perform an action that its creators would consider inappropriate. But for a vulnerable smart contract, there's a series of events that would cause it to send value to an arbitrary address (and not in exchange for some other adequate compensatory value). It's this case where the front-runners want to find a way to swap in their own addresses for these transactions, and that's also why obfuscation could deter that -- making it hard for the front-runners to notice that that was possible.

Thus, you have white hats racing to siphon money out of a buggy, immutable contract which also happens to be worth millions of real dollars. It'd be funny if there wasn't so much real money involved.

One day you go to get it so you load up your pickup with gold digging equipment and drive to the ranch. On the way are spotters. They see your truck has gold digging equipment. They see that the road you're going down leads to the ranch. It's obvious what you're going to do.

They load up their faster Ford Ranger and blaze down the road. You can't catch up. They have a faster car. You get there. They have taken your gold.

If you hadn't gone there, the gold was relatively safe. Maybe some day someone happens on it but realistically probably not.

But you went. By looking for it you revealed you were looking and you revealed where you were looking.

What the bot does is that it checks each transaction that is waiting to be executed and simulates sending that transaction itself on a private blockchain forked from the real network. If the simulation results in a profit, it frontruns that transaction -- i.e., it sends the transaction itself for real, but bidding a higher price than the original sender did, so that its transaction will get executed rather than the the original transaction it's copying.

It doesn't need to perform any sort of vulnerability scan; it just mimics other people exploiting arbitrage or vulnerabilities and pays more to get there first.

Similarly, it doesn't need to adjust any destination addresses. It's just looking for arbitrage opportunities or vulnerabilities that will direct ether to the sender. Smart contracts are entirely capable of getting the address of the message sender, and using that as a destination to send ether to. So the bot doesn't need to adjust the transaction data at all, which would be substantially more complicated.

The Dark Forest attack is possible because everyone can see all the notes on the board waiting to be processed, and everyone can simulate exactly, precisely what the really slow computer will do with a given note.

Suppose you found someone wanting to sell TSLA stock for $5 and someone wanting to buy it for $400. You would write up a note to buy it for $5 and sell it for $400, and stick it on the board. However, the moment you put the note on the board, the attackers and their automated telescopes have simulated that this note results in the holder having $395 more than they started with, and gave nothing away in return. The attacker then simulates an alternate future in which they post the note instead, and verify that they get the money. It works! So the attacker copies your note, signs it themselves, puts a much bigger wad of cash on it than you did, and slaps it up on the board.

When the operators come out, they collect the attackers note first (more cash) and by the time your note is run, the opportunity is no longer there.

If you're going to use two similar looking services for something using ETH, do you go with the one by some no-name or the one created and championed by community heros?

Contractors’ basic obligation: The Contractors identified in Box 1 hereby agree to use their best endeavours to salve the property specified in Box 2 and to take the property to the places stated in Box 3 or to such other place as may hereafter be agreed. If no place is inserted in Box 3 and in the absence of any subsequent agreement as to the place where the property is to be taken the Contractors shall take the property to a place of safety.

The Contractors’ remuneration and/or special compensation shall be determined by arbitration in London in the manner prescribed by Lloyd’s Salvage Arbitration Clauses in force at the date of this agreement.

That's the deal.

You need some agreed way to resolve how much the job is worth for this to work. The Lloyds Open Form is an agreement to do the job and discuss later how much it's worth. That's generally settled by insurance adjusters. It's much like the aftermath of auto accidents.

How much does the salvor get? 15% - 35% of the recovered value, reports Lloyds.[2] Of course, salvors work under tough conditions. They have to have equipment and people ready 24/7 to go somewhere and do something. That's expensive. Some classic worldwide names exited in the past decade. Mammoet and Titan both dropped out.

All this is against accidental losses, not against an adversary. Where there's an opponent, it's a much tougher problem. Marine salvage is vs. the ocean. Whether this model can be made to fit programmed contract problems or ransomware is a big question. One worth pursuing.

[1] https://www.lloyds.com/market-resources/lloyds-agency/salvag...

[2] https://www.tugadvise.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/lloyds-...

All that "rescuing" people who have fucked up does is make the system seem more artificially reliable than it is. Providing a failsafe to people who have very deliberately and explicitly eschewed failsafes (at extreme effort and by subverting the system itself, no less) seems rather pointless and paternalistic.

About Solidity in particular - I think most people would say it's not the best. There are endeavors to develop better languages but Solidity has become quiet deeply entrenched in the Ethereum world. Everybody is busy with much more pressing issues - like scalability.