The Ethereum Paradox

[TPTB_need_war]

Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies.

That is one of the funniest posts I have read in a long while

You guys must all have English degrees!

It is entirely devoid of technological acumen. I haven't seen stoat display even a rudimentary level of comprehension of the technological issues we discuss.

Last time I checked English professors do not create software. Btw, I did get an A in English 101 as a freshman at the University in 1983, but I think that is entirely irrelevant here. If stoat wants to display the value of his English prose, perhaps he should try a literary forum.

We are investing in, analyzing, and developing software.

As well, the level of creativity in that sentence is minor taken in isolation. It's no Shakespeare unless he can produce volumes of such material in a concerted form. And still even such an accomplishment would be essentially worthless in the context of this forum.

Frankly I don't put that much thought into my verbiage on these forums. The volume of writing I do simultaneously with the volume of deep technological thinking, doesn't afford me the luxury of focusing on eloquent prose. The 80/20 rule of efficiency applies. Seems stoat subscribes to the 99.9/0.01% rule of pedantic non-accomplishment.

Ran twice today. Starting my training awaiting stoat's arrival in Davao for the boxing challenge.

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[Buddytronic]

Allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies.

That is one of the funniest posts I have read in a long while

You guys must all have English degrees!

It is entirely devoid of technological acumen. I haven't seen stoat display even a rudimentary level of comprehension of the technological issues we discuss.

Last time I checked English professors do not create software. Btw, I did get an A in English 101 as a freshman at the University in 1983, but I think that is entirely irrelevant here. If stoat wants to display the value of his English prose, perhaps he should try a literary forum.

We are investing, analyzing, and developing software.

As well, the level of creativity in that sentence is minor taken in isolation. It's no Shakespeare unless he can produce volumes of such material in a concerted form. And still even such an accomplishment would be basically worthless in the context of this forum.

Aha, found it in Pastbin:

Allow me to play double advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.
Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the facts, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like its a peach of cake.


Still funny though

[TPTB_need_war]

Aha, found it in Pastbin:

Allow me to play double advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies.

Ah thanks so he is a plagiarist a la John Conner of VNL VanillaCoin. These low lifes seem to have similar scambug tactics.

How technologically clueless does someone have to be to not realize that any text on the internet can usually be found with Google. It is as if they never used internet before.

[child_harold]

And Nick Szabo is discussed in this thread, click "All" then use Ctrl+F on your browser to search for "Szabo".

>>

.

Did Nick "Satoshi" Szabo mention any such analysis during his apparent endorsement of Ethereum in his presentation where he promoted centralization as a problem.

Did Ethereum just violate the SEC securities law by underpromoting transparency (c.f. the linked Coin Center report), e.g. hiding it in obscure layers as r0ach has shown and put talking head Vitalik on a stage to promote the shit out of it with technobabble.

You've sure got a hard-on for Ethereum.

I'll create a post on Ethereum redddit raising your points in posts like this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1361602.msg13924697#msg13924697

With any luck Vitalik, Nick, Gavin or any of the many others involved can address your points.

[monsterer]

You have failed to read the linked thread and understand the issue. Please report back after you have read the linked thread (not the Monero thread) and understood how a certain script can open the security hole for a rented 51% attack:

I had read that link but concluded that it was largely concerned with DE transactions; which boils down to a faulty script but that script not affecting the security of the chain in general, but only the funds involved in the script in the worst case.

Casper aside, I still don't see how programmable scripting in general weakens the security of the entire chain; if anything it's analogous to the cascade of invalidations related to the particular output of a double spend. Only that script and related scripts are at risk.

[TPTB_need_war]

You have failed to read the linked thread and understand the issue. Please report back after you have read the linked thread (not the Monero thread) and understood how a certain script can open the security hole for a rented 51% attack:

I had read that link but concluded that it was largely concerned with DE transactions; which boils down to a faulty script but that script not affecting the security of the chain in general, but only the funds involved in the script in the worst case.

Casper aside, I still don't see how programmable scripting in general weakens the security of the entire chain; if anything it's analogous to the cascade of invalidations related to the particular output of a double spend. Only that script and related scripts are at risk.

Okay I am going to explain this one time for those who weren't able to extract the salient point from what I wrote in the DE thread that I had linked to. And then after this post, I don't want to discuss any more shit on this forum (no insult/blame intended to those who have tried to have productive discussions with me including monsterer, which has been helpful and my sincere thanks is accorded in spite of any intermittent difficulties in attaining mutual comprehension).

The problem is that once you enable the ability to put hashes of private keys on the block chain and enable multi-sig where revealing those keys allows a designated party to spend the transaction to any one, when this depends on the order of confirmations, then it opens a way to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Now you claim this is only isolated to a flawed DE script and I say that there are unbounded number of unknown scripts which may expose similar ways to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Thus it is a generalized security hole. The only ways to close the security hole are to only allow miners to run scripts which have been vetted and authorized, but that then centralizes the control. The only decentralized solution I can think of is to use zk-snarks to run the scripts in a black box in homomorphic zero knowledge so that miners can't see the data stored on the block chain.  The only other solution would be analyze all the permutations of Op codes and be sure that all culprit op codes were removed.

This is why I had sent a private msg to Gregory Maxwell, yet he says my msg is incoherent, because he didn't even take the time to understand, because I allege/observe he is an overconfident cocky destroyer of Bitcoin and destroyer who knows what else (in spite of apparently being very proficient at designing efficient algorithms for sound compression and apparently also reasonably expert at cryptography and much more so than me at both of those).

Ethereum's even more generalized scripting will be much more vulnerable to this.

The security hole funds an attacker to 51% attack a coin. This affects not only the unwinding of derivative transactions (which could span most of the coins if the attack is lie-in-wait long enough) and also impacts all the coins in terms of loss of value due to the market reaction to a 51% attack and also enables the attacker to do some double-spending while he is attacking. Also we can't characterize all the types of scripts which might create such losses and thus be directly impacted by stolen coins.

[child_harold]

You have failed to read the linked thread and understand the issue. Please report back after you have read the linked thread (not the Monero thread) and understood how a certain script can open the security hole for a rented 51% attack:

I had read that link but concluded that it was largely concerned with DE transactions; which boils down to a faulty script but that script not affecting the security of the chain in general, but only the funds involved in the script in the worst case.

Casper aside, I still don't see how programmable scripting in general weakens the security of the entire chain; if anything it's analogous to the cascade of invalidations related to the particular output of a double spend. Only that script and related scripts are at risk.

Okay I am going to explain this one time for those who weren't able to extract the salient point from what I wrote in the DE thread that I had linked to. And then after this post, I don't want to discuss any more shit on this forum (no insult/blame intended to those who have tried to have productive discussions with me including monsterer, which has been helpful and my sincere thanks is accorded in spite of any intermittent difficulties in attaining mutual comprehension).

The problem is that once you enable the ability to put hashes of private keys on the block chain and enable multi-sig where revealing those keys allows a designated party to spend the transaction to any one, when this depends on the order of confirmations, then it opens a way to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Now you claim this is only isolated to a flawed DE script and I say that there are unbounded number of unknown scripts which may expose similar ways to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Thus it is a generalized security hole. The only ways to close the security hole are to only allow miners to run scripts which have been vetted and authorized, but that then centralizes the control. The only decentralized solution I can think of is to use zk-snarks to run the scripts in a black box in homomorphic zero knowledge so that miners can't see the data stored on the block chain.  The only other solution would be analyze all the permutations of Op codes and be sure that all culprit op codes were removed.

This is why I had sent a private msg to Gregory Maxwell, yet he says my msg is incoherent, because he didn't even take the time to understand, because I allege/observe he is an overconfident cocky destroyer of Bitcoin and destroyer who knows what else (in spite of apparently being very proficient at designing efficient algorithms for sound compression and apparently also reasonably expert at cryptography and much more so than me at both of those).

Ethereum's even more generalized scripting will be much more vulnerable to this.

The security hole funds an attacker to 51% attack a coin. This affects not only the unwinding of derivative transactions (which could span most of the coins if the attack is lie-in-wait long enough) and also impacts all the coins in terms of loss of value due to the market reaction to a 51% attack and also enables the attacker to do some double-spending while he is attacking. Also we can't characterize all the types of scripts which might create such losses and thus be directly impacted by stolen coins.

Assuming what you say above is correct you have nonetheless already stated it can be fixed.
Therefor if you are correct I assume it will be fixed.

You are punishing of Ethereum claiming wasted resources and failure to fix the real problem. Yet you openly advocate MAID, a platform which has existed for many many years and has exhausted a great deal of resources to accomplish what I'm not sure. It seems to me there is an inconsistency in your arguments here and that you are prepared to give MAID the benefit of the doubt and are less forgiving of ETH. Mentioning SEC issues has muddied your technical analysis and it is only the latter I intend to address on reddit. Ethereum was duly diligent when forming in Switzerland and they hired lawyers to do things by the book. Impugning members of ETH project and stating (as some have) that prison sentences are due is incoherent rubbish and speaks to me how much the Ethereum project is rattling cages, which -as we know- is a good thing.

[stoat]

He's a doddery old man

I think you mean "a doddering old man"

Lol stoat calling the kettle black, trolling the thread with off-topic noise (the thread is "Ethereum Paradox" not "Queen's English 101").

Btw, "calling the kettle black" is a strictly grammatically incorrect idiom.

Btw, I am an American and we kicked your tea-sipping, chair bound English arses and will do it again. You can stick your pompous pendant grammar up your A-holes. Yet somehow your youth now admire our Southern idioms in the form of rap music.  

I'd like stoat to provide evidence that he even knows how to code.  

Stoat anytime you'd like to challenge this "doddering old man" to a boxing match, I don't care what is your height nor weight. Let's get it on motherfucker because I am going to rearrange your facial features like putting lipstick on a pig. Put your gloves where you slobbering, technologically-illiterate mouth is.

You see what a native blooded man (Pacquiao) did to your Ricky Hatton. Be aware I have Cherokee native blood. When I am enraged, I don't give a fuck about your bullets. Don't fuck with a native. I've seen best friends here in the Philippines slaughter each other with machetes when enraged. You don't fucking understand that even a female can lift a car when her baby is under the wheel. Don't fuck with native, there is superhuman power lurking that can be called upon.

There is a boxing ring here at my Holiday Spa Gym in Davao. Show up or STFU.

Oh boy

[monsterer]

Now you claim this is only isolated to a flawed DE script and I say that there are unbounded number of unknown scripts which may expose similar ways to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Thus it is a generalized security hole.

In the same way that there are an unbounded number of unknown apps/programs on regular computers which may also be faulty and which, when they become a dependency of another app, cause the other app to fail.

[TPTB_need_war]

Now you claim this is only isolated to a flawed DE script and I say that there are unbounded number of unknown scripts which may expose similar ways to fund 51% rented hashrate attacks. Thus it is a generalized security hole.

In the same way that there are an unbounded number of unknown apps/programs on regular computers which may also be faulty and which, when they become a dependency of another app, cause the other app to fail.

No you fail to understand the salient economics distinction. Apps failing doesn't impact the economics of the security of the PoW that protects the block chain.

Again it seems most people fail to incorporate economics in their assessment of block chain technological decisions.

Assuming what you say above is correct you have nonetheless already stated it can be fixed.
Therefor if you are correct I assume it will be fixed.

You are punishing of Ethereum claiming wasted resources and failure to fix the real problem. Yet you openly advocate MAID

No it can't be easily fixed, because no one has yet figured out how to apply zk-snarks to a Turing complete scripting. I think it may be plausible, but I haven't looked at the nitty gritty details of that.

As I wrote upthread, Ethereum has been moving entirely the wrong direction towards PoS (which is utterly insecure and centralization) and sharding I explained upthread is implausible for Turing complete scripting block chains.

And I have stated my reasons that all decentralized file storage paradigms are fundamentally flawed and offered a fixed design. I have criticized MaidSafe, Sia, Storj, etc. as being fundamentally flawed.

I don't have enough time to continue correcting all the errors of readers who are incapable of living inside my head. My mind is moving much faster than I can possible correlate for all of you my 10,000+ posts. Sorry. I am not the unpaid personal secretary of every reader on this forum!

No you fail to understand the salient distinction. Apps failing doesn't impact the security of the PoW that protects the block chain.

I don't see how there can be any effect outside the particular output involved in the double spend.

You think about it until you realize. Sorry I am not paid to spend all my time in forums explaining to the slow minded.

[monsterer]

No you fail to understand the salient distinction. Apps failing doesn't impact the security of the PoW that protects the block chain.

I don't see how there can be any effect outside the particular output involved in the double spend.

[useless eater]

new link please...

[hv_]

new link please...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB17ThsdEiY

Thanks.

Could anybody help me out in differntiating?

Casper is the thing that makes ETH different and let it be a smart contract Running blockchain?


Or


W/o casper And switch to PoS ETH = NXT ?

[iliasyaco]

If Chinese exchanges start listing ETH, probably more...

whats the names of the exchanges?

[hv_]

Casper is the thing that makes ETH different and let it be a smart contract Running blockchain?

Or

W/o casper And switch to PoS ETH = NXT ?

Smart contracts are already there & ETH != NXT with or without Casper...   think of Casper as Ethereum's POS implementation.


Read the following:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost/
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/28/understanding-serenity-part-2-casper/

Sorry, a bit more precise: Is casper the  base for the Smart contract executor?

[hv_]

Sorry, a bit more precise: Is casper the  base for the Smart contract executor?

No...   smart contracts are already a reality without Casper.

https://etherchain.org/contracts

Not a Proof. Maybe the core that executes now or in future is called different, but still it needs that casper.

[Sark]

How about for proof just go run a DApp? There are plenty of smart contracts out there live and functioning on the network right now.

Capser is for scaling.

[TPTB_need_war]

Just a heads-up...   I don't have anything specific to say about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StMBdBfwn8c

The discussion continues...    

Part 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMJJl10MVyU

Readers should note I commented on the prior linked video upthread. Now I will comment on the second one you've linked to.

Listening to this video further affirmed how lost the Casper design team is.

Around the 27 minute point, Lucius Greg Meredith interjects the salient point that voting on blocks can't be orthogonal to voting on partitions. And you can see the point I made upthread as quoted below, that there is no possible way to partition the gas for scripts. Thus there can't be a Nash equilibrium on partition voting.

Vlad proposes to separate the voting for hashes of "blocks" (these "blocks" don't reference a prior block hash as in Satoshi's design, so Greg renames them "sequences") which he assumes are pre-partitioned, and then separately vote on how these blocks are ordered into a "state root". But the problem is that scripts need gas to run and since it is impossible to partition gas, then the entire assumption is invalid that validators can assume the transactions in their partition are orthogonal.

Bottom line is they will fail. They apparently haven't realized this yet, and they haven't articulated the core essence yet. I am superior designer (and note that Gregory Maxwell did not reply again because ostensibly he knows I am correct) because I can cut directly to the core issues.

Even if someone argued against my upthread point that strict partitions can't exist for scriptable block chains wherein I claimed this is due to uncontrolled external chaos due to external I/O, there is another unarguable reason that strict partitions can't exist for a scriptable block chain. That is because the gas (currency) transfers must be atomic with the script block confirmation (i.e. if they are orphaned and chain reorganized then they must be done together) so they must be in the same partition. But if the currency for a partition is a static set of UXTO or account balances (i.e. no cross-partition spending), then the system can not function properly.

Yet we also explained above (and even monsterer agrees on this point fwiw) that cross-partition spending breaks the Nash equilibrium.

Thus I continue to maintain my point that Ethereum can not scale with decentralized validation.

The point of the above quote is that gas can't be spent across partitions. There is no way to merge partitions because it introduces the ability to double-spend in more than one partition. Thus if gas can't be spent across partitions then there is no way that gas can be moved in and out of partitions to where it is demanded.

The only way to spend a token across partitions is to have a LCR (a single partial order) for all partitions, i.e. a single partition for inter-partition state changes. LCR means longest-chain-rule. But this can only be a Nash equilibrium when all validators for the LCR validate all partitions (otherwise because as explained upthread, the Nash equilibrium is lost because the winner of a block can't be sure if he is building off an invalid state). Thus cross-partition spending requires centralization of validation (a.k.a. verification) because LCRs require centralization of validation. So if the point of sharding (a.k.a. partitioning) was to decrease latency and speed up and decentralize validation, it is a futile goal. This is unarguable.

Note an alternative to LCR is a traditional proof-of-stake for enforcing a single partial order (yet the point about validation in the prior paragraph still applies), but which is highly flawed and loses Nash equilibrium in numerous ways. Worse is that Casper's consensus-by-betting has a combinatorial explosion of partial orders, so as Vitalk admits in the above linked video, the model doesn't converge on enforcing a single partial order. The failure to converge (or the alternative being over fitness and converging on noise, as Vitalik also admitted) is entirely expected because proof-of-stake is self-referential and thus does not have a reference point from which to anchor a single partial order for which the Nash equilibrium can't be gamed. The way proof-of-stake overcomes this is by being essentially centralized. But I have also shown (see link in prior paragraph) that proof-of-work is also economically driven to centralization of validation.

There is only one way out of this mess for consensus systems, and that is my design which centralizes validation but decentralization control over the choice of validators (and decentralized statistical validation of validators).

[stoat]

Shut up you're boring now

[hv_]

And more condensed again, ETH needs Casper to work as promised, that is the entire core and value, correct?

So if Casper is still not ready and maybe can Never be created decentral, ETH has a value between a MySQL DB and NXT....