Comment by ShamelessC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShamelessC | Hacker News Reader

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> It's ten years of hype, get-rich-quick schemes and other scams, hardly new.

Right, a portion of which happened right here on HN until it became too blindingly scammy to ignore. NFT's came out which are demonstrably a scam that don't actually do what they claim to. DAO's show up, claiming members will have cryptographic (?) guarantees about decision-making when in fact they are ultimately dependent on some level of human decision-making, so ripe for scams. This maybe climaxed with the push for "web 3.0" to be some sort of new crypto-based meta-internet. People are trying to cash out, I think.

I'll be honest, until then I wasn't even aware of things like the oracle problem, the "nothing at stake" issue inherent to proof-of-stake systems, and the horrible horrible idea that is programmable smart contracts. Cryptocurrency seems like a nice idea when you handwave the actual implementation details as "the tech people figured it out somehow!" Unfortunately, they never really did. This stuff only "works" in a frictionless vacuum.

Could be fun to do a sentiment analysis of block chain posts/comments on HackerNews and see if it possible to see the break

> the "nothing at stake" issue inherent to proof-of-stake systems

The "nothing at stake" problem was inherent to proof-of-stake more than six years ago. It has, since then, been solved on Ethereum (and Polkadot) with Slasher, which is a penalizing system that burns (a portion) of the stake of malevolent actors, and then kicks them off the consensus layer.

Ethereum's consensus layer has been live for 1.5 years now, and there have been 175 slashing events during that time [1]. Some have been misconfigurations by small pools, others have been caused by users running their keys twice on two different machines (causing double attestations and double block proposals).

[1] https://beaconcha.in/validators/slashings

Long range attacks likely exist on any implementation. It has not been "solved", the buck has simply been passed to more motivated adversaries.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8653269

The most effective mitigation mentioned in the paper is the use of a "trusted" CPU module such as the Secure Enclave in Apple devices. Suffice to say, that's probably not going to see widespread adoption anytime soon and doesn't consider the other security problems inherent to such enclaves.

What they call "moving checkpoints" is a pretty widely-accepted mitigation to long-range attacks. Checkpoints might seem like a security issue, but it really depends on how recent they need to be (which is a function of staker exit delays) and the process for discovering checkpoints.

E.g. most blockchain clients come with a genesis state baked in, which is effectively a (very old) trusted checkpoint. Someone could try a long fork attack by changing the genesis, but the attack would be obvious from the git history. (Many users might still not notice, but that goes for any attack on the client codebase.)

The paper I linked discusses moving checkpoints.

Yes that's why I used their term. It doesn't say much about it though. The Ethereum Wiki [1] has a much better discussion of its security implications IMO.

But my point is mainly that moving checkpoints is the standard solution to long forks, so a discussion about PoS security should probably focus on that, vs theoretical alternatives like trusted hardware.

[1] https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...

The jury is still out on whether or not blockchain’s originally intended purpose, currency, has value, and if it will see anything resembling widespread adoption in the future. I’m personally skeptical.

But almost all of the problems you list apply to blockchain uses other than cryptocurrency. The failures and scamminess of Web3, DAOs, oracles, and Proof-of-Stake are not arguments against the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

The “tech people” have definitely figured out something. The question is whether or not enough people really want to use whatever that something is.

It's a distributed ledger that is verified via proof-of-work. People have decided to assign it speculative value, largely as a sort of fin-tech smart-banking pitch. Ultimately though, there just aren't many non-financial usecases for a _public_ distributed ledger. Simply verifying transactions doesn't solve much - you need to vet the _nature_ of the transaction to make sure that screwy things aren't happening using _other_ stores of value (not bound by the laws of proof-of-work). Centralization will appear to "solve" these problems, just as it does with USD.

That's why I feel that bitcoin is always going to be ripe for abuse and highly adjacent to scams, even if the original paper is impressive and an interesting result.

I think we’re mostly in agreement here, I just found it important to distinguish the original idea from the numerous questionable applications that have been developed in its wake.

Fair enough!

In the .com days, I was active in the e-commerce space, using public-key cryptography to solve problems. We had digital certificates, digital signatures, etc, which we used to solve various problems like authenticating and securing access to websites, creating encrypted and signed emails, etc.

One thing was non-repudiation, i.e. if I send you a digitally-signed email with a purchase order, then you can legally rely on it. There were some attempts to use similar techniques to allow trusted third parties to register documents, but nobody was willing to pay for the service.

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