Newsfeed for Crypto/DeFi Scams
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When you say it like that, it sounds like you're poking fun at the stupidity of defi and cryptocurrencies in general.
But what if there were public contracts, with billions of dollars locked in them, with no firewalls, essentially a huge self funded bug bounty, widely publicized, running for literally years, and it... just works as intended?
You probably still wouldn't like it because it doesn't fit your mental model of how security should work.
But if years go by and any of it keeps working despite the massive bug bounties, people will build on the stuff that works. 90% of smart contracts can fail, as long as knowledge is gained and confidence goes up in the 10% that are left. The contracts are composable, so if something works, you can reuse it in a trusted way. After all, anything with billion dollar bounties that survived this long must be pretty strong.
The contracts provide a feature that you can't get anywhere else: trustless decentralized computing. The "pile of money exposed directly to the internet" is actually a feature that tests trust.
It might not seem like a big deal to you, but for banks or funds or nations or anyone with very large sums of money, the ability to withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.
With all the billions being thrown at this problem, I don't see how smart contracts could fail.
> when things inevitably go pear shaped
If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?
> It’s interesting the folks with piholes and boobie trapped routers are the first to get behind this idea.
Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.
That's a means, not an end, and has no intrinsic value. Any value it has is extrinsic - derived from its applications. Of which there are none that are better handled that way.
TCP/IP has no intrinsic value either. What's built on it has value.
> ...withdraw/transfer/borrow/lend with no possible downtime or fraud is extremely appealing.
Really? No possibility of fraud? Are you sure? Might want to click through the link at the top of the page. Didn't half of DeFi go down with AWS? Didn't Solana get DDOSd and also have to get rebooted recently? Can't you nuke any NFT on OpenSea from orbit by filing a DMCA complaint with Google? I suggest this position is aspirational... at best.
> If you really believe all of these contracts will inevitably go pear shaped, are the billions not enough incentive for you to go find the bugs yourself?
That's not my area of expertise, but there are plenty of folks for whom it is. I trust this task is in good hands already.
> Yes, these people are called "early adopters". They're excited by new technologies, even when they involve risk. You should try it sometime.
I do, when those new technologies have value. I've been daily-driving Rust since 2015. I've been following crypto since 2016, I've used a number of chains a number of times. I heated my condo mining ETH for a while on a 3090. Closed out the position via dex. It's pretty dang pointless. Not everything new is good.
That and the safari crowd with closed-source paid adblockers
What do you guys work on all day long ? How to convert a DOGE to USDT to BTC then to a bored ape NFT looking to the right ? Hope you dont work at SafeMoon or other such "project" you guys call "crypto" because there's 1 hash function somewhere and one key elsewhere :p
You see, this is the issue I have. This is just twattish behaviour.
> What do you guys work on all day long?
Pretty interesting problems. In the last year or two I've worked with some of the founding designers of Haskell on compiler profiling. I've heard from Leslie Lamport on using TLA+ to formally prove consensus algorithms. I profiled worst-case-performance of cloud infrastructure across the world. Stephen Wolfram and Vint Cerf gave internal talks to us at monthly learning sessions. I've written systems code in Rust, Haskell, Golang, F#, and multiple other 'cool' languages. I got to ask the guy who introduced monads to functional programming wtf is a monad? I spoke to SPJ about programming. Been taught property-based testing by the creator of QuickCheck. Etc... It's a really cool space if you like tech with some great minds in it.
Sounds a lot like university, what do you guys produce as a result ? Do you work at BlockOne, I hear a lot of such dilettante feedback where work is more about learning fun things at random without any specific purpose. I mean from compiler profiling to property testing, do you have time to focus on a tight deadline ? How many systems do you focus on, if you have to touch 4+ languages just to apply a change ? I hope at least it's not each end to end feature that requires all those languages -_-.
But at least, good you accept to work on all of them, problem where I work, where we do more classical Python/Java/C#/JS,is I have trouble to convince my colleagues just to touch a second one and de-specialize.
But this submission got nuked. It went to #4 in an hour, and then disappeared. Maybe we need decentralized HN!
Perhaps you should look at why people become anti-crypto. Most of us have had bad experiences with it and have decided that the problems outweigh the benefits.
I still think it's an interesting experiment, but I won't invest another cent in it.
What problem can it solve that a central database can't?
Half the scams I've seen are stopped because a central 3rd party (like OpenSea) refuses to deal in the "stolen" property. At which point, there's no decentralisation.
Look, I'm pro-decentralisation and pro-cryptography. But no one working in your space has built anything which has convinced me you're on to something brilliant.
I hope I'm wrong though. Because if not - an awful lot of money, talent, and goodwill have been wasted.
Don't you dream of doing work that people actually use ?
Charity is when the taxpayers failed :(
And I'm glad at least you helped people buy clothes, that sounds more rewarding than selling them debt and misery :) And I've sold personal loans, I know :D
It's like working as a food expert at Herbalife. Sure it must be interesting to invent new receipe, but can you really Van Braun your way out of what misery you're helping produce just because it s fun to optimise the Haskell compiler ?
Another way to say it: project yourself 5/10 years in the future and the entire thing collapsed. Everyone knows where you work and what you contributed to: was it worth it, net? Did you learn more than the suicide rate of the people losing their savings cost ? You can leave now, imagine you're an employee of Theranos a year before Carreyrou.
My mind isn't made up. But I'm struggling to find use cases which fit the Blockchain model.
One killer feature that doesn't get nearly enough hype is uptime. Check out these stats: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-uptime/ The last incident to cause downtime for bitcoin was in 2013. Ethereum has never had downtime.
Another is speed. People like to talk about how slow web3 is, but even Ethereum is super fast compared to a traditional banking transfer. Traditional accounting isn't expected to be instant, so it has a lot of waiting periods and days-long SLAs.
Also trust. Not everyone can trust their local bank or local government. And even if they can, why should the default preference be to have a company with a spreadsheet tell me how many assets they have marked to my name? I'd rather have a decentralized ledger that doesn't require me to place my trust in an individual company or government.
You can't really build these features without some sort of "blockchain". You could try to put together a consortium of companies or individuals to run a shared database with consensus and vote about administration, having it backed by contracts that would be enforceable by world governments. That'd get you 95% of the way there, but it'd still be less good than a public blockchain run by volunteers that provides the same trustless features.
Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
There are some amazing theoretical gains for Blockchain technology. I hope they become practical in the near future.
If you believe that all the world is really the divine right of the queen, I suppose sending payments instantly within the UK is more than sufficient.
> Uptime is legitimately amazing. But when you look at the computational speed - a Raspberry Pi on a UPS is probably more powerful.
Way more powerful, but practically useless, as 100% uptime globally is the requirement.
> Trust is great. How do you do a chargeback on a fraudulent transaction on Ethereum?
Blockchains completely prevent chargeback fraud by simply not allowing for reversal of transactions. You might not want this feature if you're buying a cup of coffee, but it's very important if you're dealing with large sums.
Phone credit based economies still exist in Africa. They have internet but no banking infrastructure. Using a blockchain allows people to create accounts and build a credit history as opposed to phone credit balances.
The Gates foundation mentioned a lot of pain points in direct giving was the fees taken along the way. Again, something that could be looked at with crypto.
Digital licenses - they aren’t transferable because the resale market doesn’t give returns to the creators. With NFT licenses you could trade them with fixed royalties going back to the creator.
Etc
If you debate OOP vs. functional or choice of programming language as if it were the central issue, you are helping scammers con investors by focusing on the wrong thing.
At least one cryptocurrency has made a sales pitch of "Haskell is a secure language immune to exploits", and it's important to remind ourselves that using a technology that agrees with our preferences or programmer identity doesn't change the scam-status of it.