Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)

It's a super massive stretch to imagine this invalidates Ethereum. Only some specific types of contracts are vulnerable to front-running issues and there are workarounds. The article is about the difficulty of being the first to take from a contract offering free money. This isn't an issue about regular contracts being unsafe to use.

I think the title misportrays the issue as being much more general than it is. For some reason I see the article brought up often in Twitter conversations by people who don't understand Ethereum and are trying to argue as if regular transactions are vulnerable to theft.

The only reason it's popular is the low bar of entry, stealing large sums of money, and (to an extent) the promise of some utopia of truly free wealth transfer and algorithmic mechanisms around it.

But IMO etherium is not that by a long shot. From the protocol, to all existing contracts, and the user experience resulting from those, etherium is fucking amateur hour.

Why did we build nuclear weapons? Even knowing that they could potentially annihilate humanity - indeed, that was the point. Because if we didn't, Nazi Germany would've, and then we would've been the ones annihilated.

History has a shape, and that shape is largely dictated by science, technology, and game theory. Whenever a technology gets discovered that gives its controllers a significant advantage over others, and its discovery is obvious enough that it could likely have been discovered elsewhere, you have to adopt it. Otherwise, others will, and gain enough of an advantage over you to threaten your existence. There's a reason that the permanent members of the UN Security Council are the U.S, Russia, China, Britain, and France, and that Germany and Japan are not on it.

Similar dynamics are why we still have arms races; climate change; lying & exaggeration; corruption; profiteering; and privatization. For more thoughts on this, you might want to check out this SlateStarCodex blogpost:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It's tempting to look at a situation as a whole and say "This is bad for everyone. Why are we doing it?" without looking at the incentives and levers of control for each of the individual actors. Sometimes, these people even resolve to not engage in the bad behavior themselves, not realizing that not engaging in the bad behavior is marginalizing themselves out of the discourse, and that's why bad behavior persists.

I hope your link is not correct!

The Aug 2020 article is about real estate transactions at the close of escrow. Does that mean people are accidentally using Ethereum? Yikes!

It's kind of the opposite.

Highly intelligent people are most productive when they are tackling problems they enjoy. You cannot just order them around and tell them to go tackle climate change or whatever.

As long as they enjoy tackling crypto shaped problems, they will keep jumping in until enough crypto shaped problems are solved that only really frustrating ones are left.

If you want to change how things work, you have to change the environment for problem solving. Make it more or less enjoyable.

I’d probably rather they keep flocking to the crypto honeypot instead of doing weird pseudo intellectual crap to my teams code base.

I don't really understand this take, and I hear it a lot. What's the point of using a blockchain if you're going to abstract everything away to a centralized ledger? The whole "gas is expensive" shtick doesn't warrant centralizing your ledger and doing all of the important stuff off-chain. Am I missing something here, or are layer 2 protocols really that wishy-washy?