[HN Gopher] Are blockchains decentralized?
___________________________________________________________________
Are blockchains decentralized?
Author : rdl
Score : 129 points
Date : 2022-06-21 09:01 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.trailofbits.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.trailofbits.com)
| [deleted]
| prettyWise wrote:
| "On October 25, 2021, a vulnerability in all prior versions of
| Geth was discovered that permitted a carefully crafted peer-to-
| peer message to inflict a denial-of-service attack on the
| receiving node. 42 From our crawls of the Bitcoin network, we
| observe that 21% of Bitcoin nodes are running an old version of
| the Bitcoin Core client that is known to be vulnerable."
|
| The beginning of this excerpt is talking about Geth, and how
| unpatched Geth resulted in a fork of Ethereum. Then, out of
| nowhere they indicated 21% of Bitcoin nodes are vulnerable and
| running an old version of the bitcoin core client, and they bold
| it. They didn't say anything about this vulnerability in the
| preceding paragraph. Vulnerable to what? Certainly not vulnerable
| to the same thing that Geth exploit took advantage of.
| roenxi wrote:
| This is interesting research and I encourage everyone to go read
| the article. But, on the assumption that a lot of people will
| just read the headline and comments I'm going to preemptively
| talk about the question there ...
|
| People misunderstand decentralisation in practice. Computer
| types, when they talk about decentralisation, usually mean a
| relatively large number of homogeneous nodes acting as peers.
| Which is cool but not how decentralised systems work in practice
| out in the meaty reality we all live in.
|
| In reality, we have an economy that quickly works out who is the
| best (say, Samuel is the best) at something (say, mining bitcoin)
| and routes most of the resources available for hashing to Samuel.
| The situation is still decentralised, because if Samuel stops
| being the best at calculating hashes then resources will be
| reallocated to someone else. But in the short term all the
| resources will go to Samuel and he could do a lot of damage to
| the network.
|
| People keep thinking that because the economy picks out a few
| winners that means that the system is now locked in stone - that
| isn't the case. The economy is perfectly happy to change things
| up radically when the situation changes. At least until a
| government steps in and regulates the ability to change flexibly
| out of the system.
| hansworst wrote:
| By this definition, the current financial system is also
| decentralised. After all, if one bank fails, a new bank could
| very easily take its place. Even our system of central banks
| consists of a relatively large number of more or less equal
| peers. If the US central bank fails, I'm sure "the economy"
| will be more than happy to change things up radically and
| reassign some of the global influence on the financial system
| that the fed currently has to competing nations' central banks.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It is, from a different perspective.
|
| Pre-Fed, we routinely had depressions and bank failure cycles
| because the private markets weren't resilient enough to
| withstand different types of shocks.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Except that Samuel wants to keep his place. So he will do
| whatever he can to leverage his current centrality to continue.
| His hope is to be in control when the hammer falls and
| flexibility stops. One way of doing that is to force the issue.
| Those in central positions within a dynamic market eventually
| seek to kill that market, leaving them in the monopoly position
| (amazon, google, facebook etc). To maintain decentralization in
| the long term such leaders need to be periodically culled,
| hopefully though market forces prior to them killing the
| market. In bitcoin, that might mean periodic removal of the
| largest commercial actors, perhaps by periodic price crashes
| that favor niche setups.
| masswerk wrote:
| However, in praxis, not every participant in an economic
| system is a perfect player in the sense of game theory. Take
| for instance the history of the London Underground and its
| rivaling companies and directors. There are several
| instances, where a player maintained a position detrimental
| both to their own economy (as in profits and strategic
| position) and to the entire system (as in gains that may be
| secured in the future), as other motives take over. (E.g.,
| hurting another player gains top priority, even if the
| damages inflicted to the respective own position exceeds the
| damages inflicted to the competing player. Even to the extent
| of losing that position altogether, as in being fired as the
| director.) Notably, this was a system with multiple
| controlling parties, as directors and boards, acts of
| parliament, financiers, etc, still, this couldn't stop this
| kind of behavior. (E.g., blocking closing the circle line is
| a prime example.)
| roenxi wrote:
| > (amazon, google, facebook etc)
|
| I'm not sure where I sit on your major point, but these 3
| just are not monopolists and this is a mistake that keeps
| getting made. All 3 of these are in cut throat markets where
| they compete by selling really great products (AWS, Google
| Search and Facebook respectively).
|
| A lot of individuals don't like them (I refuse to use Google,
| for example) but that doesn't change the fact that they get
| market share by being great at what they do.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I know less about AWS and Good ads, but Facebook has bought
| each and every social network it could afford to prevent
| any chance of havjng competition - most notably Instagram
| and WhatsApp. That is the very definition of monopolistic
| practices.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Google is very much a monopolist in search. They have more
| than a 80% usage share of the space (most places I look at
| say 90% today), and have had that much share for more than
| a decade. (On a separate note they are in a duopoly with
| Apple in the Phone OS market and a borderline monopoly in
| the web browser market, giving them a lot of power to throw
| around in general.)
|
| Facebook I go back and forth on. They are undoubtably the
| biggest player in the social media space, but if you count
| all social media (reddit, twitter, Pinterest) they are
| large but definitely not monopoly level. On the other hand,
| when it comes to real name interaction and local community
| organization they are completely dominant over the other
| players. Ultimately I consider the acquisition of instagram
| to have been over the line enough to consider them
| deserving of the treatment of a monopoly, but it's not as
| obvious a case a google. Their space also isn't as cut-
| throat as you would expect due to network effects, and
| there are other countries where they are in fact locally a
| completely dominant monopoly.
|
| Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable
| definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple
| other major players as well that they are in fierce
| competition with.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable
| definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple
| other major players as well that they are in fierce
| competition with
|
| I can't agree with that.
|
| 1) Amazon self-preferences their own products
|
| 2) Amazon makes knock-offs of third-party products that
| succeed
|
| 3) For third-party sellers, Amazon is just about the only
| marketplace that matters. The rest combined don't come
| close to matching it.
|
| John Oliver covered all of this recently.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-
| mon...
|
| https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-
| tech-...
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| 1 and 2 are anti-competitive (and anti-competitive
| practices on that level are 100% a reason to bring an
| anti-trust case again them), but that doesn't make them a
| monopoly. From a buyers perspective, there are plenty of
| other places to go buy everything they sell.
|
| 3 is an interesting point though. I'm having trouble
| finding good numbers on exactly how dominant they are as
| a platform for third party sales but they have at least
| 3-4 times the GMV of their next largest competitor, Ebay.
| Best I can find is that, in the US, there was about 900
| Billion in online marketplace in 2021, of which Amazon
| represented about 400 Billion. Being 44% of the market is
| probably bordering on monopoly level.
|
| (And to the first points, about half of their sales were
| their own products on their own marketplace, so I'd
| definitely be in support of an anti-trust investigation
| at the least here)
| Melatonic wrote:
| It may just be that we need to update our definition of
| what a Monopoly is.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Personally I'd rather monopoly keep its meaning (a
| commodity or market sector controlled by a single party)
| and people use other words to describe the other ways a
| large company can be anti-competitive. But languages do
| often evolve to take a word specifying thing A that is a
| subclass of B and start using it to just refer to the
| entire Subclass B, so wouldn't be unusual for that to
| happen.
| deebosong wrote:
| Aren't Goog/ Ama/ Fbook known for swallowing up smaller
| companies who might be potential threats/ competitors, and
| "kill them off" via this method? Seems like it's common
| practice for such entities.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Google is, and acts exactly like a monopoly in search. They
| intentionally degrade the effectiveness of their search to
| support their otyer business. Even when they are trying,
| they have been getting progressively worse at finding the
| real content, and many times put the same 5 garbage spam
| sites into the top 5 positions for a huge variety of
| searches. They even use their monopoly position to bully
| the entire world into degenerating all online content into
| a homogeneous soup of gpt-3 generated gibberish and to push
| products like amp.
|
| They are a duopoly in mobile OS, and a monopoly on browsers
| -- which they use to bully the world into altering the
| internet to their benefit and reduce the effectiveness of
| ad and tracking blockers.
|
| Facebook have such domination over the social graph, that
| they intentionally sever vertices, and then charge for the
| privilege of having them reconnected. The precise opposite
| of what they claim their service is for.
|
| AWS has competitors for now, but google and microsoft are
| only able to half-compete by leveraging their other
| monopolies.
| theplumber wrote:
| Wow... and you really believe that? It's just like with
| Microsoft. Once they've got enough money and market share
| they destroyed their competition through various
| monopolistic tactics: i.e acquisitions, dumping, lockin etc
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Making great products isn't incompatible with being a
| monopolist, is it? For example, Google isn't the default
| search provider for Firefox just because it's a great
| product. They pay Mozilla more than any new competitor
| could afford.
|
| By the way: I'm not an economist, so I read this article to
| see if my claim makes sense:
| https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=3262
| [deleted]
| t_mann wrote:
| By your definition of decentralization (a central entity could
| theoretically be replaced) everything from the Roman Empire to
| North Korea is decentralized - nothing is guaranteed to have
| its place forever. A definition that applies to every
| imaginable instance is pointless, but more importantly, it's
| far from how people commonly use the word.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Which is cool but not how decentralised systems work in
| practice ... In reality, we have an economy that quickly works
| out who is the best .. and routes most of the resources
| available for hashing there
|
| I disagree, somewhat. It depends on the purpose of the
| decentralisation. If your aim is "best" which I think also
| means "cheapest" then yes, you have described what could
| happen.
|
| But decentralisation can also have "resilience" as the goal,
| even at the expense of the best performance.
|
| These goals might even be in conflict. What if Samuel, as noted
| "wants to keep his place". What if Samuel wants all the traffic
| to go him so that at some time, he can subvert it in some way.
| He may only need 51% of the traffic. He may be willing to take
| a loss for a while to get into this position. He may even have
| a government backer willing to spend a lot on outcomes and not
| be seeking a profit in itself.
|
| And as noted, when Samuel is suddenly no the "best" after a
| long time in that position, chaos could ensue.
|
| I hear "resilient" when "decentralised" is said. Many others
| will too. You're showing how this may be very misleading.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > People keep thinking that because the economy picks out a few
| winners that means that the system is now locked in stone -
| that isn't the case. The economy is perfectly happy to change
| things up radically when the situation changes. At least until
| a government steps in and regulates the ability to change
| flexibly out of the system.
|
| This flexibility and survival of the fittest mentality is
| costing people billions; of course a government would step in,
| because clearly the economic techno-libertarians aren't able to
| come up with a secure and stable system.
|
| At some point, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies
| sounded like We The People taking power back from the big bad
| government and banks. In practice, it turns out - to everyone's
| sarcastic surprise - that a handful of people got very rich off
| it and shat on those lofty goals.
|
| I'm not buying it. Never did. Yeah I missed the boat on getting
| rich and I am salty about it, so it exceeded my initial
| cynicism, but it's still inherently broken. Unregulated finance
| attracts conmen. So does regulated finance but at least they
| can be tracked down.
| gizzlon wrote:
| > At least until a government steps in and regulates the
| ability to change flexibly out of the system.
|
| Just as often, the government is the only one who can _keep_
| the flexibility and ensure free competition. E.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890
| roenxi wrote:
| The US economic policy in the 10s and 20s is a candidate for
| the cause of the crippling depression in the 30s. I note from
| the wiki article that once the 30s roll around they all but
| stopped having notable anti-trust cases.
|
| The US's industrial policy for the last 50 years has
| successfully pushed a lot of manufacturing out of the country
| to the point where the US is arguably being out-competed by
| communists. It isn't obvious that US government economic
| policy in living memory is succeeding in promoting a healthy
| market. The argument for why that is going to change and
| their intervention will help needs to be more clearly
| articulated.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The US is the 2nd largest manufacturing economy in the
| world, and is much higher than China (no. 1) on a per
| capita basis. Also, Let's not pretend for a second that
| China is actually communist when it comes to manufacturing
| gizzlon wrote:
| > The US economic policy in the 10s and 20s is a candidate
| for the cause of the crippling depression in the 30s
|
| Or too little regulation. Or too the wrong kind. Or
| something else. I'm not arguing for or against current US
| economic policy.
|
| This is the theory: Without any regulation, one or a few
| actors can grow large and stifle any competition and
| innovation.
|
| This theory seems to be proven by history.
|
| Some might say: " _that wasn 't a *real* free market_".
| Just like some might say: " _that wasn 't *real*
| communism_". These both need some strong arguments to back
| them, or they come off as _No true Scotsman_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman)
| pixl97 wrote:
| > US is arguably being out-competed by communists.
|
| I mean if you mean communist by countries that give no
| shits about how they treat their population, where they
| dump pollution, and the absolute drive to monopolize
| commerce, then yea we can use your definition of
| communists.
|
| Of course, feel free to go live in those conditions if that
| sounds like a great work environment to be in.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| The royal family of Britain has occasionally changed over time.
| Is it decentralized?
| wslh wrote:
| In July 2016, we created a simple spreadsheet [1] comparing
| different blockchains and security state of the art at that time
| [2]. There are things to review there but the theoretical attack
| to Bitcoin was relatively low for state actors and miners. Miners
| are not incentivized to do this or do it only as the latest
| option.
|
| It is also important to know that new blockchain technologies
| such as Solana, Algorand, Avalanche don't have enough scientific
| peer reviews to make a strong claim in favor or against them now.
|
| [1] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/07/Block...
|
| [2] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/cryptocurrency/overview-of-
| block...
| simonw wrote:
| I found this information about the DARPA contract that funded
| this research: https://govtribe.com/award/federal-contract-
| award/definitive...
| uncomputation wrote:
| Interesting they are totally different. ZK proofs are used in
| cryptocurrency, but they can also be used totally separately
| just as mathematical objects on their own. I don't see how ZK
| proofs for defense "capabilities" relates to centralization
| risk in cryptocurrency networks.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I think this misses the elephant in the room: the tech may have
| flaws, but there's far worse flaws.
|
| Who is it that actually has control and influence in crypto?
|
| 1. The developers. 2. The miners. 3. Everyone else (very distant
| from the rest)
|
| The developers aren't decentralized at all, they typically are a
| single, small team with some sort of leader. They can make a lot
| of decisions almost unilaterally.
|
| Then very close below are the miners. The miners have serious
| economic concerns, so they can do things like refusing to run the
| software the developers provide. So we can expect devs and miners
| to be in close contact in most cryptocurrencies.
|
| And very far below that is everyone else. You can run your "full
| node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or doesn't
| on the network.
|
| And that's why Bitcoin is the way it is. Back when fees rose to
| $50/transaction because the capacity was overwhelmed...
|
| Did the devs have a problem? No, because they had ideas how to
| sell add-on products to deal with that issue, and such products
| are much easier to sell when there's a problem that needs fixing.
|
| Did the miners have a problem? No, because the network was still
| heavily used and they were reaping all those juicy fees coming
| their way.
|
| Did the users have a problem? Yes, their experience sucked badly.
| But for both parties actually in control solving those problems
| would require losing money.
|
| And thus crypto ends up being controlled by a small cabal of
| elites, while the normal users get screwed.
| samatman wrote:
| > _You can run your "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners
| decide what goes or doesn't on the network._
|
| Limiting myself to BTC, this is not how it works.
|
| Miners can emit as much nonsense, noise, malformed information
| as they want. Full nodes perform validation: they decide what a
| compliant chain looks like, and only accept contributions from
| miners which have that shape.
|
| This is why there was such a vicious fight about block size:
| the side which won the mindshare and economic value fought for
| a small blockchain so that running a full node remains feasible
| forever.
|
| Validation is a huge problem with more profligate blockchains,
| some/many of which are de-facto centralized due to the
| excessive hardware requirements.
|
| It is on an architecture and algorithm level a critical part of
| the decentralization of bitcoin, something I expect HN to get
| right regardless of their position on bitcoin's worth to
| civilization.
|
| Edit for more detail: an object-level example is that miners
| _cannot_ unilaterally start issuing larger blocks. These will
| fail validation by the full nodes, ergo, it is the full nodes
| which determine what Bitcoin is or isn 't. Miners merely
| construct data which has that shape.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| I don't think this clarified it at all. The crux: miners can
| decide to OMIT transactions, REORDER transactions within a
| block, or DELAY them for later. All of those actions pass
| "validation", because they cannot be detected by a validator.
| Miners do so at the expense of lost transaction fees, or with
| reordering, for free, or with delaying, with the possibility
| that some other miner will reap the transaction fee first.
| There is a lot of money in doing this, called 'miner
| extractable value' / MEV, which is bigger when you are
| processing complex smart contracts with funky clauses to
| exploit. They are not able to INVENT new transactions (as
| that would be caught by a validator, miners don't know your
| private keys and couldn't easily forge a transaction). A
| validator cannot detect a missing, silently dropped
| transaction. Nobody can detect such a thing except whoever
| submitted it and doesn't see it in a block. Nobody at all can
| detect a reordered or delayed transaction; you just have to
| assume the miners will act according to their own interests
| as much as possible.
|
| The paper goes into this, of course. Miners are not even the
| only ones who can decide to omit transactions -- submitting a
| transaction is not secure, so any intermediaries between the
| transactor and the mining nodes also have a chance to
| silently drop it or MITM it for delay etc. It could have done
| more on high-end MEV though.
| samatman wrote:
| Which doesn't contradict a word I said. The things you
| describe are all on the miner side of the contract.
|
| Most of the problems you are describing are less relevant
| on BTC, which doesn't support complex smart contracts in
| practice, but yes, the miners are the only entity which can
| generate data of the valid shape, and only when they get
| lucky.
|
| So OMIT/REORDER/DELEY are privileges which a miner has to
| sweat to earn temporarily. If 80% of the hash rate hates
| you they can probably keep your transactions out
| indefinitely, presuming willingness to bear the cost, which
| y'know, war is hell, it could happen.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Miners can emit as much nonsense, noise, malformed
| information as they want. Full nodes perform validation: they
| decide what a compliant chain looks like, and only accept
| contributions from miners which have that shape.
|
| That highly depends on who the full node is. A random joe
| with $100 worth in the wallet can be safely ignored. If their
| node refuses to see the new blocks as legitimate, the owner
| doesn't get to use their money for anything anymore. The
| likes of Coinbase though would have a lot more influence.
|
| There were plenty full node owners that were onboard with big
| blocks, but since they didn't have the pull, they didn't
| matter. They could reject validating the blocks all you like,
| but the network can keep on working fine without their
| approval.
|
| > This is why there was such a vicious fight about block
| size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value
| fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node
| remains feasible forever.
|
| No, the side that won is the side that wanted to make profit
| from selling L2 solutions and collecting fees. There's no
| technological reason for a 1MB limit that makes any sense.
|
| Bitcoin started in 2009. Since then there have been 4 main
| generations of the Raspberry pi, disks went in size from
| ~1-2TB maximum to ~20TB maximum, gigabit internet became
| fairly commonplace, and CPUs also improved greatly.
|
| Plus, the modern BTC is pretty much useless for small
| transactions anyway -- if you have any use for it, you can
| certainly afford decent hardware.
| jasode wrote:
| _> There's no technological reason for a 1MB limit that
| makes any sense. Bitcoin started in 2009. Since then there
| have been 4 main generations of the Raspberry pi, disks
| went in size from ~1-2TB maximum to ~20TB maximum, gigabit
| internet became fairly commonplace, and CPUs also improved
| greatly._
|
| Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ... will
| inevitably _reduce_ the number of participants able to run
| full validating nodes. Consider various discussions on
| network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks:
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0
|
| So the question is: Is the reduction of participants from
| the higher technical requirements significant enough that
| it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)
|
| I guess someone can put together a spreadsheet model with
| some "reasonable" guesses for the ripple effects of a
| hypothetical 20MB block size and try to predict game theory
| of what might happen. Has anyone done such a math exercise?
|
| Sure, many participants already processing 1MB blocks today
| can easily switch to bigger 20MB blocks with no problems.
| But many can't and we don't seem to have a consensus
| prediction on what the percentage is.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ...
| will inevitably reduce the number of participants able to
| run full validating nodes. Consider various discussions
| on network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks:
| https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0
|
| That discussion is from 2018, that was 4 years ago.
| Surely things have improved somewhat since then.
|
| > So the question is: Is the reduction of participants
| from the higher technical requirements significant enough
| that it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)
|
| No, that's far too simple of a question. A better is:
| where do you find the balance between technical
| requirements for the network and the usability of the
| network for end user?
|
| It makes perfect sense that as the usage grows, the
| network will become more expensive to operate. More users
| is more data, and more bandwidth. If you just refuse to
| increase the requirements an inch, you're refusing to
| support the growing userbase.
|
| Many other projects have to make such decisions. Your
| space sim gets more popular -- that costs more bandwidth,
| requires more polygons on the screen. Do you bump up the
| system requirements, or do you stall your growth to allow
| 10 year old hardware to be usable? And pretty much all of
| them bump the requirements. You can't play modern games
| on a 386.
| kevinak wrote:
| You're optimizing for the wrong thing here IMO. You
| should optimize for decentralization. Without it, there
| is no point to Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency for that
| matter). Increasing the block size won't solve the
| inherent problems with scaling the bitcoin blockchain.
| The only thing it will end up doing is push the can down
| the road and result in less full nodes running on the
| network.
|
| The solution is of course to not increase the block size
| but to scale in other ways, like for example the
| Lightning Network.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The size of the blockchain right now is 390GB. It grows
| at 144MB/day. You can get a 2TB hard disk for $50 right
| now, and it'll be enough for 30 years more.
|
| 1 MB blocks take 2 minutes and 30 seconds on at 56 Kbps,
| which means you can keep up with the blockchain on a
| freaking dial-up modem.
|
| I'm not seeing exactly where the problem is here, and in
| what scenario would somebody go "Gee, I'd love to run a
| full node, if only it took something less amazing than a
| computer I can find lying in the garbage for free".
|
| If you want more nodes what you need instead is
| incentives to run a node. Give people some reason to run
| one other than that it provides some nebulous benefit to
| the network, and so it's a good thing to run this out of
| the goodness of their hearts.
| simiones wrote:
| Sure, but it is very easy for the miners to also run full
| nodes and validate whatever they want - much easier than it
| is for someone running a full node to also mine (at any
| realistic hash rate). So miners can more or less trivially
| flood the network with full nodes that validate their
| preferred chains.
|
| > This is why there was such a vicious fight about block
| size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value
| fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node
| remains feasible forever.
|
| This is a tangent, but I wonder how this squares with the
| people claiming that Bitcoin's (terrible, horrible, no good,
| very bad) transaction rate is not limited by design, just by
| some temporary politics.
| samatman wrote:
| What you're describing is a fork, clearly.
|
| The assertion that miners can unilaterally fork and get
| away with it hasn't been backed up in practice. The
| creation of a whole bunch of brand-new full nodes which do
| something besides validate Bitcoin is the creation of
| something other than Bitcoin. Happens with reasonable
| frequency, just not the way you've described it.
| simiones wrote:
| Right now the Bitcoin network consists of ~59,000 nodes
| (according to the article), running various versions of
| the Bitcoin software, implementing the same protocol.
|
| If the biggest mining pools were to launch ~100,000 nodes
| of their own, initially running the exact same software
| as the other 59k nodes (until they get some reputation)
| and then modifying the software to allow larger blocks,
| that they would start sending to the network as well,
| what would prevent them from effectively changing what
| Bitcoin is, leaving the current nodes as a legacy fork?
| Especially if they were doing this together with the
| Bitcoin devs?
|
| Edit: more realistically, there are far fewer popular
| nodes, so the miners would have to create a much smaller
| number of nodes to achieve this effect.
| samatman wrote:
| What you would then have is 100,000 nodes running one
| piece of software, and 59k which are doing exactly what
| they were doing, and in your scenario, the 100k chain
| also has a higher hash rate.
|
| What happens next is a social phenomenon. No one knows.
| But which chain is original is perfectly clear: it's the
| the 59k chain, which will still be mining blocks, and it
| all comes down to who wants to use which one more.
|
| But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of
| validators can force a minority of validators to choose a
| new protocol. It's nothing like mining.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| > But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of
| validators can force a minority of validators to choose a
| new protocol. It's nothing like mining.
|
| Define "force".
|
| Because to me - if you are on a chain that has no future
| (as in the fork has more resources, better hash rate,
| better social support) then while you can continue to use
| the original, the odds that it holds any value is
| basically zero.
|
| Same is true in the inverse - creating a fork and then
| expecting to be able to move any significant value off
| the original chain, when the original chain holds better
| social support and more resources, is usually folly.
|
| Take bitcoin cash - which is a great example of this.
|
| They split in 2017 and began trading at ~240 USD to
| bitcoins ~2700 USD. So they started with the assumption
| that their fork had roughly 1/10 of the value of bitcoin.
| Today they trade at 119 USD, to bitcoins 21170 USD (and
| this is after the HUGE drop over the last month): Roughly
| 1/200th the price.
|
| Further - I strongly suspect that the reason BCH is still
| worth anything at all is that we're well into a crypto
| bubble - there are FAR too many completely worthless
| coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose
| and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values. The
| fact that a usable chain forked from BTC for genuine
| technical reasons (and a social disagreement over segwit)
| drops so much value is a BAD sign for that group of
| original folks on the 59k chain.
|
| They can certainly keep mining away on that chain, and if
| the goal is to still facilitate exchange only in that
| original chain, they're fine. The second they need to get
| off that chain and on to something else (whether it's
| another coin or USD) then they're probably fucked - their
| chain won't have held value, because value is a social
| construct, not a number on a chain.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >there are FAR too many completely worthless coins
| floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and
| still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values
|
| Correction: No cryptocoins have any value or serve any
| purpose, besides gambling and fraud. It's scams and wash
| trading all the way down. I have still yet to see a
| single valid use for blockchains that actually requires
| this inbuilt mechanism, where the participants pump the
| value of some token that serves as payment access to the
| chain. The whole point of any of them using a blockchain
| is apparently to take something that serves no purpose
| and trade it at ridiculous values.
| kevinak wrote:
| This is just your opinion, and wow is it a privileged
| take. Of course there is value in being able to trade
| with whoever you want, regardless of jurisdiction. Just
| because YOU do not see the value doesn't mean it's not
| there.
| hnthrow1010 wrote:
| >being able to trade with whoever you want, regardless of
| jurisdiction
|
| That has absolutely nothing to do with blockchains at
| all. Blockchains do not enable that, they have never
| enabled it. You can indeed build a service that does that
| with blockchains, but you can also build it without them.
| Black markets existed for a very long time before bitcoin
| was created.
|
| If you're suggesting there is value in having totally
| unregulated unrestricted trade, then no, I would still
| have to say I don't see value in that. There is actually
| negative value in allowing people to trade illegal
| weapons, or trafficked humans, or counterfeit products,
| or contract murders, or tainted animal products that
| infect humanity with a plague, and so on... you get the
| picture. These things are actively destructive to a
| functioning society and market. It's even more of a
| privileged take to try and suggest that these things
| don't exist or won't happen if everyone can just trade
| whatever they want without any restrictions whatsoever.
|
| Edit: I'm thinking about this a bit, and it's really
| insulting to be told I have a privileged take when in the
| past several years myself and my family members and
| friends have been actively harmed by ransomware and
| crypto scams. It's not nice to kick someone when they're
| down. In my case, the people evading jurisdictions were
| doing it entirely to harm me. I'm really not seeing how
| I'm supposed to be the privileged one.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean - I mostly agree (I'm fairly clear about my
| distaste for the current crypto market in many of my
| comments).
|
| That said - there is a floor value for a single coin that
| captures the dark market space. The original use-case for
| crypto is still there: There are folks who want to
| exchange stored value for black market goods, in a scope
| where government regulation is already assumed to be
| absent because the goods being exchanged are forbidden
| items.
|
| This is basically what bitcoin was originally. It kept a
| fairly stable price point around the single dollar mark
| for use on the silk road ~2010/2011. The problem is that
| folks started noticing that any time the media talked
| about it, the price would spike. And that started the
| whole rollercoaster of speculation that I find absolutely
| immoral and greedy, that ruined the whole thing.
|
| So basically - amend your comment to "besides gambling
| and fraud and dark market exchange" and I'd agree.
| olalonde wrote:
| You are misunderstanding the meaning and purpose of running
| a full node. Coinbase[0] runs a full node to validate
| transactions. If miners start mining blocks that Coinbase
| considers invalid, Coinbase will reject the transactions.
| The number of full nodes on the network is more or less
| irrelevant, what matters is your own node.
|
| [0] You can replace Coinbase here with pretty much any
| Bitcoin participant, including individual users.
| simiones wrote:
| If the largest miners switch to emitting larger blocks,
| and Coinbase starts receiving almost exclusively invalid
| nodes, what will they do next?
|
| What if Binance starts accepting these blocks, and now
| users have some BTC balance on Binance, and another on
| Coinbase?
| olalonde wrote:
| We don't have to speculate, it has happened multiple
| times already[0]. What happens is the hard forks are
| either ignored or they are supported but under a
| different name to avoid confusion (e.g. Bitcoin Cash,
| Bitcoin SV, etc.). The only way I could imagine a hard
| fork succeeding (e.g. retain the "Bitcoin" name) is if it
| if it had an overwhelming community consensus, not only
| from miners but also from users (like Coinbase).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks
| DennisP wrote:
| Ethereum has five independent execution clients, five
| independent staking clients, and an open community of
| researchers.
| eldenwrong wrote:
| And one Infura node to bind them all
| DennisP wrote:
| Any Ethereum node can talk to the network, and runs on a
| modest home computer. Infura is popular but not everyone
| uses it, and it's easy to replace.
| loopdoend wrote:
| I was wondering how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is able to
| walk around without a security detail, going on extensive
| backpacking trips, what if someone steals his keys?
|
| He'd just fork the entire blockchain.
|
| Normal users don't have that luxury.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No. Any fork requires a consensus among the community. While
| it was possible to fork Ethereum for the DAO hack in 2016
| (note the DAO hack had affected 30% of all ETH in
| circulation), a lot has changed in the Ethereum ecosystem
| since then and break-off forks do not happen willy nilly.
| Besides all of the applications that need consistent state to
| make sense (such as USD-backed stable coins), you need a
| coalition of developers, miners, and community members to
| back it. No one in their right mind carries their private
| keys on a backpacking trip.
| q-big wrote:
| > He'd just fork the entire blockchain.
|
| > Normal users don't have that luxury.
|
| Everybody else can fork the entire blockchain, too. The
| difference is that if a "normal user" does such a fork,
| hardly anyone does care. The central difference rather is
| that the trust and authority that Vitalik Buterin holds - if
| he does a decision, it is accepted by and large.
|
| The question that you should rather ask is: why do so many
| people involved in Ethereum have so much trust in Vitalik
| Buterin's authority and decisions?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Main reason is Vitalik is one of the brightest minds in
| crypto. He's a 10 year veteran of the space and a genius.
|
| But no, even Vitalik could not get a split off fork done
| unless it was something with major security implications
| for the whole Ethereum ecosystem.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| So genius that both EVM and Solidity have huge unforced
| footguns that have caused gazillions of dollars in
| damage.
| yokem55 wrote:
| There are numerous instances where Buterin's suggestions
| have not been just accepted at face value. He's an
| influential voice, but is no dictator.
| faraggi wrote:
| This is such an ignorant and factually wrong comment.
| walls wrote:
| He literally did this after the DAO hack.
| jjulius wrote:
| I'm as "fuck cryptocurrency/NFTs" as the next guy, but
| that's not accurate. As others have said, forks require
| community consensus, not just the decision of a single
| individual. Regarding the specific fork you're referring
| to (italicized emphasis is mine):
|
| >It was initially unclear as to whether the fork would be
| executed. Though it was proposed by Ethereum developers,
| they did not have the unilateral power to implement the
| change. _Miners, exchanges, and node operators also had
| to agree to update their software_. After more heated
| debate in public forums, on July 20, 2016, at block
| 192,000, the Ethereum hard fork was implemented.
|
| https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-
| makerdao#sec...
| walls wrote:
| The crucial question, to me, is: would the fork have
| happened if Vitalik had not been part of the DAO? I don't
| think there's any chance he would have entertained that.
|
| There have been many large ETH compromises since then,
| and the idea of forking for any of them would be
| considered outrageous.
| yokem55 wrote:
| One of the main reasons it went through is because there
| was 'only' one losing party - the hacker, and multiple
| winning parties (developers and investors in the DAO). A
| couple years later when the parity mutlisig was hacked
| such that the funds (150K eth from an ICO) were
| 'permanently locked', the proposal to unlock the funds
| via hardfork was rejected. More or less specifically
| because it would only benefit a very small subset of
| parties, while leaving the frozen funds in place meant
| the rest of the chain benefited from the effective
| reduction of eth supply. Since then no one else has
| seriously proposed forks to move funds out of protocol.
| joshcryer wrote:
| What's crazy is they never "fixed" The DAO "bug."
| Reentrancy is a feature of Solidity. They just tell
| people to make sure to do exception checking for it.
| Which of course makes contracts bloated. Which in turn
| makes contracts cost more in gas fees. So every now and
| again a Defi will be attacked by the very, same, thing,
| that got The DAO, because they didn't put in expensive
| reentrancy checks. Couple of recent examples:
| https://ambcrypto.com/how-these-two-defi-protocols-fell-
| prey...
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yup. The combo of "this is hyper critical financial code"
| and "every extra instruction to check invariants is very
| expensive" are two fundamentally opposed ideas and will
| cause pain forever.
| bsamuels wrote:
| Vitalik was not part of the DAO, and the Ethereum
| Foundation took an extremely hands-off approach to the
| DAO hack.
|
| This is pretty well documented in the Cryptopians book;
| the DAO hard fork was driven almost exclusively by people
| outside the EF.
| carlosdp wrote:
| > The developers aren't decentralized at all, they typically
| are a single, small team with some sort of leader. They can
| make a lot of decisions almost unilaterally.
|
| That's painting everyone with the same brush...
|
| It may be true for many projects, but the second largest
| blockchain (by marketcap), Ethereum, has like 10 independent
| client teams and a strong concentration on client diversity
| [1].
|
| The media likes to paint Vitalik (one of the original founders)
| as the "leader" of Ethereum, but everyone that's actually
| working in Ethereum knows that he's at best an advisor these
| days, and has intentionally taken a back seat in terms of
| leadership to avoid the very effect you are describing.
|
| > And very far below that is everyone else. You can run your
| "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or
| doesn't on the network.
|
| > And that's why Bitcoin is the way it is. Back when fees rose
| to $50/transaction because the capacity was overwhelmed...
|
| That is not why transaction fees are high... and miners do not
| decide what goes or doesn't on the network. That's a huge
| misconception.
|
| Transaction fees are driven by demand, plain and simple. Demand
| is high in a scarce blockspace, so the fee goes up to keep the
| network stable.
|
| Also, miners can't decide to just change the rules, that's a
| big misconception of the Sybil problem further driven by
| popular media. The rules are the rules, if miners don't follow
| them, clients (full or light) won't follow that chain, period.
|
| Even if 50%+ of miners colluded, all they could do is prevent a
| consensus from forming (called "censorship"), so basically a
| DDoS. They _cannot_ change the rules and "trick" clients into
| following them, as it is often portrayed!
|
| If you're referring to miners having influence on what the
| rules are, as in influence over development, that's been tried
| and failed multiple times on multiple networks. In reality,
| devs and companies/user sentiment drives the majority of
| "social consensus".
|
| If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS will
| eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening. For a past
| example, EIP-1559 was opposed by many large mining pools, still
| happened (because it improved _user_ experience by making gas
| fees more predictable / reducing failed transactions -- in
| direct contradiction to your point).
|
| [1] https://clientdiversity.org/
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS
| will eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening.
|
| This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is delayed
| because the miners are against it. It seems very important to
| people who are thinking about doing projects with Etherium
| because it will be based on PoS. Hoenstly, I don't know
| anything about this.
|
| Here is my question(s) to the smart people on HN: Could
| miners or others with financial interest slow the switch to
| PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if that is
| happening?
| yokem55 wrote:
| No.
|
| The switch to POS is entirely a socially initiated hard
| fork being built by Eth holders, users and developers. The
| miners who don't want to play along are effectively being
| fired. And there is a lot of economic incentive to get that
| fork done - mining is a really expensive way to generate
| consensus on a blockchain. What miners earn via block
| rewards is coming out of the pockets of other eth holders
| because of the coin's inflation. Ethereum will be able to
| reduce it's issuance/inflation by roughly 10x in the
| switch.
|
| The starting point was launching the beacon chain back in
| December 2020, a separate chain designed to provide
| consensus and validation of mainnet ethereum in the
| (hopefully near) future, whose validating participants fund
| their deposits through what is just a normal contract on
| mainnet ethereum. From there that beacon chain has been
| refined and built into a protocol with multiple
| implementations, and had its stability monitored and
| tested.
|
| From here, it's just a matter of forking mainnet ethereum
| into using the beacon chain as its consensus provider and
| ignoring the miners. And that step is pretty deep into the
| final testing phases using ethereum's long running testnets
| to run through the 'merge' at it is called.
| carlosdp wrote:
| > This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is
| delayed because the miners are against it.
|
| They can say that all they want, there's 0 actual evidence
| of that. It's been delayed a bunch because it's an
| incredibly difficult thing to do for a network operating
| trillions of $ in transaction value.
|
| All indications are at the moment that it will happen
| around September, but definitely this year. The big test
| (doing the PoS switch on the most similar testnet) was
| completed successfully last week!
|
| > Could miners or others with financial interest slow the
| switch to PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if
| that is happening?
|
| There are theoretical ways, but in practice it's not all
| that practical, because ultimately what matters is the
| "fork" developers and users want to follow. There's a
| negative incentive for miners to do anything disruptive
| because it could have an effect on the value of the tokens
| they already hold.
|
| Additionally, Ethereum has a built-in "difficulty bomb",
| which basically ensures that a network upgrade happens at a
| certain cadence, which gives impetus for miners to follow
| new upgrades or no new ETH will be generated anyways past a
| certain point.
| DennisP wrote:
| Financial interests push heavily towards PoS. Ten percent
| of all ETH is already deposited in the PoS network
| (currently running in parallel), and can't be withdrawn
| before the merge happens. The development teams were
| granted staked ETH by the EF, and can't withdraw it before
| the merge happens. All ETH holders are likely to benefit
| from the PoS merge, which will reduce issuance to the point
| where the ETH supply will begin to shrink because 90% of
| the fees are burned.
| q-big wrote:
| Everybody who is insanely dissatisfied about the direction some
| blockchain develops into can drum up a following and do a hard
| fork of the blockchain if they desire.
| zaphar wrote:
| This is theoretically true and in practice false. It comes up
| every time and every time no one has an answer for what the
| little guy can in-practice actually do that will be
| successful.
| landemva wrote:
| There are several facets of 'success', and they compete
| with each other. If a user defines success as cheap
| transactions, there are blockchains for that.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The premise is that at some point one of these chains will
| win. Forking btc will be no more meaningful than forking usd.
| dale_glass wrote:
| It doesn't really solve the problem satisfactorily.
|
| Somebody still has to develop the software. The end result is
| a single download, produced by some form of authority. And
| typically there's one project, with one group controlling it.
|
| And miners are more or less the same everywhere, they want to
| make a profit.
|
| You can get somewhat better. You can find a dev group that
| aligns with your interests. Maybe you can even find a
| cryptocurrency where there are multiple independent
| implementations led by multiple groups with none being the
| clear winner.
|
| But that's an unstable situation. The dynamics of a dev team
| can shift as people come and go. Balance is easily broken, if
| a project loses steam, or one becomes the default and gains
| overwhelming popularity, and you're back to having a single
| group in effective control.
|
| You can migrate from one system to another, but any
| conversion has costs to it, both in terms of money and
| knowledge, attention and time resources.
|
| This libertarian utopia seems very much like some sort of
| bureaucratic hell to me. To exist in such a society without
| getting royally screwed you have to invest immense amounts of
| your time to pay attention to everything and correctly and
| prompty react to it. You go on vacation for a couple weeks,
| and oops, suddenly the dev team is changing the rules from
| under you.
| tromp wrote:
| A properly decentralized project has multiple
| implementations, and a formal process for changing the
| consensus model. This requires the equivalent of an RFC
| (Request for Comments, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal in
| case of Bitcoin) to be written, motivating and detailing
| the changes, followed by months long discussion to see if
| there is overwhelming support for, and few downsides to,
| the changes. Meanwhile, the changes need to be implemented
| on all existing clients with extensive documentation and
| tests and be exercised on test-nets to see if all goes
| well. Finally, a supermajority of miners as well as
| economic nodes (such as exchanges) need to be convinced the
| changes are for the better, and then an activation can be
| planned on main-net that could take several more months to
| lock in first. Chains where this process can be bypassed or
| severely shortened don't deserve to be called
| decentralized.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > a supermajority of miners as well as economic nodes
| (such as exchanges)
|
| Is there a formal way of defining this?
|
| Maybe it's possible to at least define "a supermajority
| X% of miners, weighted by blocks mined in the last Y
| days" (for values X and Y that have previously reached a
| consensus), but counting economic nodes in a way that is
| Sybil-proof and globally consistent, seems like it's just
| pushing the consensus problem somewhere else.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I think you are underselling the difficulty, especially if
| the goal is to out-compete the original chain, versus
| creating yet another worthless chain.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Yanis Varoufakis recently called crypto currencies "oligarchic"
| which is very fitting. Quote:
|
| "I do not believe that the... 'oligarchic,' by definition,
| cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is ever going to replace
| [conventional currency]. It shouldn't, it can't, and it would
| be a nightmare if it did."
|
| Full interview in which he also discusses his proposal for
| cryptocurrencies run by central banks and why that's (according
| to him) the way to go:
| https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-27/Gold-and-Bitcoin-won-t...
| boc wrote:
| There's not really a word for it that I'm aware of, but
| Crypto IMO is best described as an "Initialarchy", or rule by
| the first people on the scene. Since almost every crypto
| project starts with dirt cheap prices, the first people who
| create or invest end up controlling the entire project given
| that they have millions of coins or access to the devs.
|
| Being first to the next hot project is almost all the matters
| in the Crypto world.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Your analysis seems correct in theory -- but in practice, in
| terms of "the things that actually affect people," you're
| overwhelmingly missing that group that is in "3" that's easily
| number one -- which is the whales who control the price?
| Melatonic wrote:
| This is assuming the developers are willing to act in the way
| you are describing but with our ability to audit their work I
| am not convinced that will necessarily happen.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| > Tor is now the largest network provider in Bitcoin; just about
| 55% of Bitcoin nodes were addressable only via Tor (as of March
| 2022). A malicious Tor exit node can modify or drop traffic.
|
| I'm not sure if I understand this criticism. Is it not true that
| if something is ONLY available via Tor, then exit nodes are NOT
| used at all when accessing it, and all of the traffic is
| encrypted with Tor's encryption layer?
| sweetbitter wrote:
| You are correct, the researchers just did not realize this.
| ezoe wrote:
| The article doesn't say the research pointed out that many users
| aren't decentralized at all.
|
| They don't run full-node. They relies on somebody else's SaaS.
| sweetbitter wrote:
| > Tor is now the largest network provider in Bitcoin; just about
| 55% of Bitcoin nodes were addressable only via Tor (as of March
| 2022). A malicious Tor exit node can modify or drop traffic.
|
| Tor's onion services are end-to-end encrypted and do not use exit
| nodes.
| rdl wrote:
| This is great research and if anything understates the case for
| alarm; Bitcoin is one of the more-decentralized projects, and PoW
| generally has some incentives for diverse hosting (if not network
| layer). PoS systems often end up on AWS specifically, and
| sometimes depend on some of the more niche AWS services -- an
| outage (engineered or accidental) in those could cause easy
| degradation and facilitate takeover.
| latchkey wrote:
| Actually, no. It isn't that great. A lot of people are
| correcting specific points here in the comments.
|
| > More than one in five Bitcoin nodes are running an old
| version of the Bitcoin core client that is known to be
| vulnerable.
|
| This is brought out as an issue, but it really doesn't matter.
| Being a large decentralized systems means that having nodes
| which are at all sorts of different versions, can still work.
| This is like saying that everyone has to be at the same web
| browser version for websites to work.
|
| The thing that matters is that the nodes that are used for
| forming blocks (ie: the nodes the pools are running), are
| updated.
| manytree wrote:
| Honestly there's a lot of valid points to be made here but the
| actual report reads as if their intention was to prove
| blockchains are insecure and centralized.
|
| That is true for a lot of them, but true Nakamoto consensus is
| not quite as fragile as they suggest it is.
|
| They don't provide an analysis of the true cost of launching a
| 51% attack.
|
| Their assertions about the security risk of "altering the
| software that nodes run" fail to mention how this is a voluntary
| process which all node operators choose to undergo. If a
| consensus emerges on the network or a subset of the network that
| the changes are problematic, these dissenting node operators can
| choose to hard fork. There will be few supporters of an obviously
| malicious attack in the network, so it would be unable to gain
| traction.
|
| Their point about the number of entities in control of Bitcoin is
| technically correct, because of the way that pooling works in
| Bitcoin: many nodes send any propfs they find to one node, and
| that one node writes to the blockchain. So, there is a definite
| concentration of power. There are some in depth game theoretical
| analyses of why this is unlikely to become a problem but in
| general it is easy to imagine that, for instance, the US treasury
| would not want to destroy trust in the USD.
|
| Interestingly, Chia, a new proof of work blockchain which
| launched a year ago, developed by Bram Cohen, has a unique and
| innovative solution to pooling which does not result in
| concentration of power: individual node operators submit proofs
| to the network, not to the pool, and the pool receives a fraction
| of the reward for minting a new block. Chia also has more full
| nodes than any oher blockchain, including Bitcoin. At this point
| it's relatively unknown however.
| latchkey wrote:
| > _They don't provide an analysis of the true cost of launching
| a 51% attack._
|
| Andreas Antonopoulos has done this many times already.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM (one of my
| favorites and only a couple minutes long)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZTGmTjqXEU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-La8gyNVCI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDZVW4hri2g
| ntbnt wrote:
| From the first link: "Bitcoin has achieved a level of
| comput[ational power] that no single nation state can
| overthrow it through computation alone. The effort to do so
| would require a massive covert operation of chip fabrication.
| Then, the coordinated assault would give them over the next
| block for 10 minutes, until we kick those bastards off the
| network... they would be revealed, they would have lost
| billions of dollars doing this, and all they would have got
| was a double spend"
| ahtihn wrote:
| How are you going to "kick them off the network"? There's
| no way to tell where the hashpower is coming from.
| manytree wrote:
| Yeah it's a pretty glib answer. Not clear at all how you
| kick them off the network.
|
| Perhaps he's conflating some kind of protocol exploit
| that could be patched against with a 51% attack.
| vngzs wrote:
| The subtext of the DARPA funding makes me think the purpose of
| this paper is to analyze whether governments can disrupt,
| block, or compromise cryptocurrencies. The conclusions make
| some more sense in that light. Still, I think they fail to
| address several mitigating factors for each of the issues,
| which weakens the overall message:
|
| (1) Mining pools are not even remotely static. In fact, they
| gain/lose marketshare _very_ quickly, and when problems are
| discovered, miners actually move. Therefore, it would have to
| be shown that these pools can be disrupted _clandestinely_ ,
| otherwise an attempted takeover/51% attack would just cause a
| rebalancing of the pools. To better understand this, it's good
| to visualize it; here's a graph of changes to miner pool
| distribution over time: [0]
|
| (2) 51% attacks permit double-spend, but many guarantees
| persist in the light of 51% attacks - nobody can invent coins
| they don't have with a 51% attack; they can just undo
| transactions that were assumed to be settled [1].
|
| (3) Software centralization and the implied lack of
| immutability is subject to the voting influences of node
| operators; maintainers can't just do whatever they want (in
| other words, backdoors would probably need to be bugdoors, else
| they would not be deployed and therefore _de facto_ rejected).
| Taking Bitcoin as an example, many BIPs have been withdrawn or
| rejected, either early in the development process or later by
| the community refusing to adopt releases they don 't support:
| [2]. And you can see this process at work in the block size
| debates and ultimate resolution [3].
|
| ISP centrality and the vulnerability of the network to
| malicious Tor exit nodes is the most interesting point to me.
| Miners can go switch pools, and node operators can band
| together & refuse to update to new software that does things
| they disagree with. But can node operators/miners switch ISPs
| quickly and easily? Not really. There's virtually no free
| market competition among ISPs, so people can't freely switch
| ISPs if theirs starts inserting arbitrary latency into Bitcoin
| traffic. We probably need some ways to operate nodes/miners
| that are less sensitive to corrupt ISP disruption.
|
| Encrypting BTC P2P traffic and developing strategies for
| operating nodes/miners behind anti-censorship software like
| ShadowSocks should be high-priority.
|
| [0]: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2879848/
|
| [1]: "Even a 51% attacker cannot propose a block that takes
| away your ETH, because such a block would violate the protocol
| rules and so it would get rejected by the network. Even if 99%
| of the hashpower or stake wants to take away your ETH, everyone
| running a node would just follow the chain with the remaining
| 1%, because only its blocks follow the protocol rules. More
| generally, if you have an application on Ethereum, then a 51%
| attack could censor or revert it for some time, but what comes
| out at the end is a consistent state." - Vitalik,
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/rwojtk/ama_we_are...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Improvement_Proposals#...
|
| [3]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
| Melatonic wrote:
| I think this is the answer - everyone is saying that DARPA is
| biased and government funded and thus trying to steer people
| away from Crypto - but I think this is a good read. If a few
| big ISP control a huge portion of the traffic (normally big
| competing entities) and we know that many (maybe most) big
| ISP's are subservient to the governments they run under then
| it follows that a government could potentially majorly
| disrupt/control cryptocurrencies.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yup, I've come to realize that the word(s)
| "centralized/decentralized" are doing way too much heavy-lifting
| in these discussions, and that examining the details is very
| important.
|
| When you use one of these words, you have to immediately ask --
| "the power to do WHAT, exactly?" As in, compare to the question
| e.g. "Is Tesla centralized w/r/t Elon Musk?" You can't
| meaningfully answer the question with yes or no, and this gets
| even more complicated with many things in crypto, especially with
| (the extremely stupidly named) "Smart Contract" as a part of the
| game.
| avnigo wrote:
| I found it interesting reading the blog post, but delving into
| the report, some areas didn't seem as straightforward.
|
| I expect to get some flak for saying this, and I don't mean to be
| cynical, but it's interesting how the table on p. 9 of the report
| lists Solana with a relatively high Nakamoto coefficient (19 to
| Bitcoin's 4), given the recent events with Solana [0].
|
| From p. 1 of the report, emphasis my own:
|
| > Trail of Bits also operates a center of excellence for
| blockchain security. Notable projects include audits of Algorand,
| Bitcoin SV, Chainlink, Compound, Cosmos, Ethereum 2.0, MakerDAO,
| Matic, Polkadot, _Solana_ , Uniswap, Web3, and Zcash.
|
| Some of those notable projects are fervently anti-bitcoin, so
| while some criticisms and concerns may appear to be valid at a
| first glance, I don't think it can be said to be without bias.
|
| [0]: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/06/19/solana-defi-
| platfor...
| woodruffw wrote:
| Trail of Bits has no pro- or anti- position when it comes to
| various cryptocurrency projects. Moreover, this research was
| entirely funded by DARPA, and was not assisted by any project.
| Finally, the results only address decentralization, and not the
| myriad other ways in which these schemes can be economically,
| politically, or cryptographically unsound.
|
| FD: My employer.
| latchkey wrote:
| > FD: My employer.
|
| Oh, that's interesting.
|
| Did you write this blog post too?
|
| You've been pretty anti-crypto in previous comments here.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Did you write this blog post too?
|
| No. I also did not work on the research in the post.
|
| My positions on cryptocurrencies don't necessarily reflect
| my employer's opinions. I don't work on cryptocurrencies,
| have no professional or hobbyist interest in them, and have
| neither direct nor derived financial positions in/against
| them.
| latchkey wrote:
| How come the paper doesn't provide similar disclosures
| for the list of preparers?
| etherael wrote:
| There are very good reasons to be fervently anti-BTC given its
| history since 2017.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| That was Solend, not Solana. The concern was just that a
| liquidation of that scale would significantly move the market.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I am always impressed with Trail of Bits work.
| m00dy wrote:
| >>Key Findings
|
| >>The number of entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain is
| relatively low: four for Bitcoin, two for Ethereum, and less than
| a dozen for most proof-of-stake networks.
|
| then why we haven't seen a Bitcoin hack before ? Maybe it is the
| most secured system.
| danamit wrote:
| They are talking here about mining pools I suppose since the
| biggest 4 mining pools account for more than 50% of validated
| blocks.
|
| Also the word is "disrupt" so it means some time of chaos, the
| mining pools never tried to disrupt Bitcoin because they have
| no incentive to do so.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| That assumes they are economically motivated. As we've seen
| in recent attacks on other coins, if its a possibility for
| someone to burn the system down out of spite/malice then the
| economic incentive doesn't matter.
| danamit wrote:
| 1. If half of Bitcoin users (hashrate-wise) wanted to
| disrupt the network out of malice ignoring their economic
| wellbeing, say a movement similar to GME/WSB, then they can
| disrupt it.
|
| 2. We can go into lower levels and find a number of ISPs
| specially level 1 ones being able to disrupt the Bitcoin
| network. Some other single points of failure I can imagine
| are common routers firmware.
|
| Can Bitcoin never be disrupted? no, does it have mechanisms
| in place that make it unlikely to be disrupted? yes.
| m00dy wrote:
| it is nothing about incentive. Let's say a mining pool wants
| to disrupt the bitcoin network, do you think that pool will
| keep its hashrate ? I don't think so.
| danamit wrote:
| Disrupt is creating chaos short term, I don't imagine it to
| last more than 1 hour, but that's enough to call it
| disrupt.
| frabert wrote:
| From the report,
|
| > Even though these Nakamoto coefficients are relatively low,
| some might argue that exploiting them to attack a blockchain
| would be prohibitively expensive. While this may be true for
| individuals, the actors incentivized to perpetrate these
| attacks include operators of competing currencies and nation-
| states who have the requisite resources. Perverse incentives
| can exist with blockchains in the same way that the relative
| values of fiat currencies can be manipulated.
| mypastself wrote:
| Competing currencies are unlikely to profit from Bitcoin's
| downfall in this scenario, given how much the entire space
| relies on its reputation.
|
| Nation-states, on the other hand, are the more credible
| threat. Just because none of them has yet found it a big
| enough threat to expend the required resources, doesn't mean
| it can't happen.
|
| I feel like the more Bitcoin is used for its original
| intended purpose rather than merely speculation, the more
| likely it is to be attacked by such actors.
| bhaak wrote:
| I think it's more complex than the report poses it.
|
| It's not as if those mentioned entities always have complete
| control over their mining hardware as those entities include
| pool miners.
|
| I think there's more that prevents an attack than just being
| "prohibitively expensive".
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It really isn't, but that debate will quickly end up in a
| discussion about the definition of 'secure'.
|
| My take; people and organizations / exchanges have lost
| billions. Maybe not on the blockchain itself, but a system is
| only as strong as its weakest link, and the whole Bitcoin /
| cryptocurrency system has a lot of weak links and little
| backups.
|
| I mean if my bank goes bankrupt the money I have in their
| savings accounts is reimbursed. If my bank card gets stolen to
| the point where they can withdraw money from it - or if I'm
| made to withdraw money at gunpoint - I'll get the money back.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| What the article is missing is the incentive structure.
|
| For example: "The number of entities sufficient to disrupt a
| blockchain is relatively low: four for Bitcoin".
|
| This probably refers to the 4 largest mining pools.
|
| Yes, they could temporarily annoy some people by not processing
| their transactions. But it would come at a giant cost to them.
| They would be out of business quickly as miners can switch to a
| different pool in minutes.
|
| That is like saying the US economy is brittle because if Walmart,
| Apple, Amazon and ExxonMobil would just send everybody home and
| set their premises on fire, there would be a problem.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| But those companies only exist because the US regulatory
| framework allows them to exist as long as they follow the
| rules. If the CEO of Walmart sent out an email saying that
| everyone was fired and that all stores should be demolished, he
| would be fired by the board of directors within hours. Also
| other executives would respond to the email telling everyone to
| ignore the previous email while they see if the CEO was hacked.
|
| The entire point of crypto is to bypass the regulatory
| framework. In some cases that may make for a more robust system
| in some cases it may not.
| djschnei wrote:
| Completely agree. It's impossible to inspect any aspect of
| Bitcoin's design without considering its incentive structures.
| They _are_ the innovation in my mind. Every blockchain
| /crypto/Dao/<insert buzz word> forgoes one of Bitcoin's
| perfectly balanced incentive structures in favor of some
| "innovation" (speed, programability, founder/VC enrichment)
| which _always_ inevitably leads to centralization and
| exploitable risk somewhere in the system.
|
| Every time it happens it hardens my opinion that a L1 should be
| like the foundation of a building - it should have one job (be
| hard money), it should be simply and elegantly designed, it
| shouldn't have any cracks (a.k.a misaligned incentive
| structures), it should evolve very slowly if at all, and it
| should be designed to be built on top of. L1 exists to anchor
| L1+N to the real world and that's it.
| simiones wrote:
| Bitcoin is a terrible foundation to build transaction
| processing on, since it is extraordinarily slow - it would
| fail to handle the needs of even a small village.
|
| The "solution" of slapping something like LN on top of it is
| "let's completely forgo all of Bitcoin's guarantees and build
| something else; while still being hurt by Bitcoin's
| cripplingly slow speed when creating our network".
|
| Also, the incentive structures being discussed are only
| meaningful as long as the miners believe that Bitcoin will
| keep increasing in value. If it looks like BTC is dying, they
| have every reason to try to squeeze the last few drops of
| value from it by running an attack on it and running away
| with what real money they can extract.
| louloulou wrote:
| Fedwire is a terrible foundation to build transaction
| processing on, since it is extraordinarily slow - it would
| fail to handle the needs of even a small village.
|
| The "solution" of slapping something like banks on top of
| it is "let's completely forgo all of the Fed's guarantees
| and build something else; while still being hurt by
| Fedwire's cripplingly slow speed when creating our
| network".
|
| Also, the incentive structures being discussed are only
| meaningful as long as the Banks believe that the Fed will
| keep increasing the money supply. If it looks like USD is
| dying, they have every reason to try to squeeze the last
| few drops of value from it by running an attack on it and
| running away with what real money they can extract.
| tromp wrote:
| > simply and elegantly designed
|
| I don't think Bitcoin qualifies as such. Sure, projects like
| Ethereum are far more complex, but there are projects that
| significantly improve on Bitcoin in simplicity and elegance.
| Bitcoin script in particular is not that simple and full of
| warts.
| djschnei wrote:
| Which projects are simply designed _to be hard money_?
| tromp wrote:
| That depends on what do you mean by hard money. A capped
| supply?
| jrm4 wrote:
| I think _by definition_ it does, which is to say, its
| popularity proves it. I just think there 's a hindsight
| thing going on.
|
| I liken Bitcoin to e.g. the Model T or the first grey brick
| cellphones. It changes everything forever because it works
| very well, but also is quickly improved upon and thus
| eventually won't be that popular.
| djschnei wrote:
| No other system/project anchors a digital currency to the
| physical world as effectively as Bitcoin. But I do agree,
| eventually L2+ will be much more _popular_ , in so far as
| much more people will interact with them. That's kind of
| the idea. L2s will still always rely on L1 for its anchor
| to the physical world (and thus physics).
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar with L1 and L2 as presented here. Do these
| both refer to the Bitcoin blockchain?
|
| If so, no. I strongly predict Bitcoin, both the
| blockchain and the currency will nearly, if not fully,
| "die," as the Model T and grey phone have. Ethereum is
| already much better at it's _core_ , and it's not hard to
| think even Ethereum will be improved upon.
|
| In the long run, literally all bitcoin has is history and
| name recognition. Like the Model T, you will see it
| revered like something in a museum, and also just about
| nobody will actually use it.
| tomputer wrote:
| > Ethereum is already much better at it's core
|
| What you and many others seem to overlook is first mover
| advantage, network effects and most important: trust.
| Bitcoin is not Yahoo or Facebook, it is not a company
| product which has to improve and break things all the
| time.
|
| In the long run Bitcoin is a store of value. That
| requires trust, which takes time. To gain trust over time
| it has to move slow and steady because there can be no
| mistakes.
|
| When it comes to money and trust it is almost impossible
| to get a second chance (see Terra UST). Just one mistake
| could result in everyone distrusting Bitcoin.
| jrm4 wrote:
| What I think others overlook is that _in practice_ (and
| despite what the retconners are trying to say about
| bitcoin is gold or some nonsense) -- is that Bitcoin was
| NOT designed to be a blockchain platform. It was designed
| to be fungible currency. And it 's an excellent proof-of-
| concept...but with severe flaws that will kill it,
| especially in light of the fact that we're talking about
| *open source software, which begs to be forked, and
| effectively has been.
|
| Your argument strikes me as very odd -- you seem to
| suggest that nothing can beat Bitcoin in theory, but
| Ethereum is already beating it in practice.
| tomputer wrote:
| > Your argument strikes me as very odd -- you seem to
| suggest that nothing can beat Bitcoin in theory, but
| Ethereum is already beating it in practice.
|
| In theory everything is possible. I do not follow the
| beating really. They can both exist with different use
| cases.
|
| Bitcoin wants to be digital gold (and money) and Ethereum
| wants to be a smart contract world computer running
| dapps. They solve different problems.
| jrm4 wrote:
| But Ethereum is a technically superior option for _both_
| cases. It does what Bitcoin can 't do, but it also does
| what Bitcoin does _better,_ and has a roadmap to
| improvement beyond that. Bitcoin is still wildly slow and
| destroys the environment, and Ethereum is on track to
| mostly not do that, to say nothing of "post-Eth"
| projects like Pulsechain.
|
| Now, I'm sure Bitcoin will enjoy name recognition for
| some time, but in my experience, always bet on the tech.
| etherael wrote:
| It would be easier even than that, observe what happened in
| 2017. Bitfinex said they would allocate the BTC ticker to the
| present BTC chain _no matter what the hash power indicated was
| the actual canonical chain_ and that was the end of it.
|
| Contrary to popular belief, miners aren't choosing anything
| when it comes to BTC. They're rubber stamping the decisions of
| the BTC core developers, who are blessed by the exchanges such
| as Bitfinex, and they are collecting fees on that rubber stamp.
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| That sounds like the right thing to do?
|
| Why would the hash power decide what is called BTC? If
| Dogecoin some day attracts more hashing power than Bitcoin,
| then Bitfinex is supposed to assign the BTC ticker to
| Dogecoin?
| jtc331 wrote:
| Hash power in the context of potential forks in the BTC
| chain, not a different coin.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| You're both already explaining the reasoning through your
| wording, "present BTC chain" and "potential forks". If
| you fork a project, even if yours becomes more popular,
| that doesn't mean you get to take over the original name.
| etherael wrote:
| > If you fork a project, even if yours becomes more
| popular, that doesn't mean you get to take over the
| original name.
|
| That's exactly what happened with BTC. And yet almost
| everybody calls it Bitcoin.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| BCH changed the blocksize and thus became incompatible
| with the original network. If you're claiming that the
| project that kept the blocksize the same and remained
| backwards compatible is the fork, then I'm done here and
| I wish you the best of luck.
| etherael wrote:
| It was the original plan to change the blocksize all
| along.
|
| _Satoshi said in 2009: "The existing Visa credit card
| network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per
| day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than
| that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost.
| It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're
| interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with
| extreme size."_
|
| Some latecoming BTC core devs cancelled that plan, with
| zero justification, changed the consensus mechanism for
| the chain from hashpower to fiat declaration by
| fraudulent centralised exchange running a pump and dump
| scam with fake money, and sabotaged the entire project in
| the process into complete uselessness, and to this day
| we're stuck with people who believe a fundamental
| financial revolution is going to take place on a chain
| that was forced to 4tx/second and get very angry,
| confused or surprised when you point out that such a
| change is clear and obvious sabotage.
|
| If you're claiming otherwise, then I'm done here and I
| wish you the best of luck.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I think you're missing some context about (what is now
| called) Bitcoin Cash.
|
| Look up the debate between big blockers and small blockers
| if you're interested in learning more; a quick summary,
| many people wanted larger block size so bitcoin could
| process more transactions.
|
| I believe several newer core developers staged a coup to
| prevent this from happening, despite several of the longer-
| term contributors being in favour of it. The original
| contributors (sans satoshi, who was mostly inactive at this
| point), had their access to the git repositories revoked.
|
| This video goes into a bit more detail
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvX0P1b5g) but basically
| the people opposing a larger blocksize had financial
| incentives.. a lot were in bed with a company called
| Blockstream which benefits from their development on
| sidechains (now the lightning network). Had the block-size
| been increased, Bitcoin would be much more useful as a
| means of exchange (more transactions would be processed,
| and they would be cheaper).
|
| This is where Bitcoin Cash is now, but it doesn't get the
| BTC ticker symbol because Bitfinex and other CEXes have a
| lot of influence as well.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| > Had the block-size been increased, Bitcoin would be
| much more useful as a means of exchange (more
| transactions would be processed, and they would be
| cheaper).
|
| Of course the flipside of this is that it would become
| very expensive to run a node. Bitcoin's blockchain is
| ~400 GB after 13 years. BCH has a 32x larger blocksize
| cap, so we can extrapolate that if anyone actually used
| that fork, it would grow a 12 TB blockchain over that
| same period. As a result running a node would become
| expensive and the network would become much less
| decentralized (the very thing people are complaining
| about in this thread!)
| etherael wrote:
| This would be true if the number being 32x'd was actually
| high, but that is not true. It was 1 megabyte. 32
| megabytes over ten minutes is not even 512kbps. Other
| chains that process much more throughput, as well as BCH
| itself, has been benchmarked on very modest hardware
| pushing that boundary and higher.
|
| Simple fact of the matter is that the whole justification
| for the permanent 1mb limit was an outright indefensible
| lie, pushed on idiots, and supported by censorship.
| Nothing more, and nothing less.
| barnbuilder wrote:
| You're completely right.
|
| Hashpower between chains is only relevant if they are
| compatible (same consensus rules), as the accumulated proof
| of work is used as an indicator of which chain should be
| followed. Once a chain hard forks to alter the consensus
| rules like Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc, there is no amount
| of additional hashpower that would make up for the
| incompatibility -- a node will simply ignore the invalid
| blocks.
| etherael wrote:
| We and a group of partners run a restaurant together. One
| day you decide to turn it into an apothecary for the
| dispensation of poisons, and keep the name and pretend that
| it's still a restaurant.
|
| Any mechanism which rubber stamps the above process as
| legitimate and collects a fee for doing so is corrupt,
| letalone over the objections of an enormous fragment of
| both customers and partners in the restaurant in question.
| Lack of objection or approval from those whom the change is
| in the interests of, or who are simply too ignorant to
| understand what is going on, don't change that.
|
| That is effectively what happened with BTC.
|
| The way that it was supposed to work would be that the
| hashpower would choose the canonical tip of the chain if
| there were two conflicting ideas about what the chain
| should actually be. BCH stuck to that ideal and through two
| contentious and many more peaceable forks proceeded
| according to it. BTC did not.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Yes they're incentivized not to, but when push comes to shove,
| they can basically choose their own form of "truth" and
| ignore/disrupt/revert transactions and others would need to
| fork the chain. It's not a given which would succeed.
|
| This has happened before
| djschnei wrote:
| Valid transactions are enforced by nodes, not miners (there
| are WAY more nodes than mining pools). All of a miner's
| incentives persuade them to mine on the longest chain, lest
| they lose out on potential profits. A group of nodes and
| miners can certainly fork if they please, but the network
| simply won't care. e.g. BCH/BTC
| JonathanBeuys wrote:
| No need to fork the chain. Miners can just switch pools.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Some issues with this report:
|
| > The challenge with using a blockchain is that one has to either
| (a) accept its immutability and trust that the programmers did
| not introduce a bug, or (b) permit upgradeable contracts or off-
| chain code that share the same trust issues as a centralized
| approach.
|
| This paints the issue as binary, although there is more to it.
| Look at the WETH contract in which we both (a) accept its
| immutability and trust there are no bugs, but also (c) can
| migrate to a fork at a later point if desired through social
| consensus. There is another option (d) which is a less developed
| area: governance models that are not entirely centralized, see
| Uniswap and Aave.
|
| > The number of entities sufficient to disrupt a blockchain is
| relatively low: four for Bitcoin, two for Ethereum, and less than
| a dozen for most proof-of-stake networks.
|
| The Nakamoto coefficient relates to validator pools colluding to
| form a 51% attack. In Ethereum PoS this count is a bit higher,
| around 25-35[1]. Important to note the extreme costs of these
| attacks, and the defense mechanisms of PoS. If enough validators
| collude to 51% attack a PoS chain, users can follow a fork and
| have the attackers coins burned. Attacker would have to
| continually re-purchase coins to re-attack the new soft forks.[2]
|
| > For a blockchain to be optimally distributed, there must be a
| so-called Sybil cost. There is currently no known way to
| implement Sybil costs in a permissionless blockchain like Bitcoin
| or Ethereum without employing a centralized trusted third party
| (TTP). Until a mechanism for enforcing Sybil costs without a TTP
| is discovered, it will be almost impossible for permissionless
| blockchains to achieve satisfactory decentralization.
|
| This is based on the Kwon paper which defines "full
| decentralization" as a set of specific numerical constraints, and
| demonstrates that it is theoretically impossible for any
| permissionless system currently known to mankind to satisfy these
| constraints. Kwon makes no claims about whether this degree of
| decentralization is "satisfactory" or even necessary for a
| blockchain. A system that is distributed across thousands of
| nodes and highly resistant to 51% attacks and collusion is likely
| enough for it to be considered "decentralized" for practical
| purposes.
|
| [1]
| https://shsr2001.github.io/beacondigest/notebooks/2021/07/19...
|
| [2] https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
| tyoma wrote:
| I would love to see a follow-up that addresses emergent
| centralization due to winner-take-all or winner-take-most
| dynamics. This is how we end up with monopolies/duopolies
| elsewhere in the tech sector, and I suspect the same would hold
| for blockchain.
| greyface- wrote:
| > The research to which this blog post refers was conducted by
| Trail of Bits based upon work supported by DARPA under Contract
| No. HR001120C0084
|
| More info: https://govtribe.com/award/federal-contract-
| award/definitive...
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > More than one in five Bitcoin nodes are running an old version
| of the Bitcoin core client that is known to be vulnerable.
|
| Patching software that is remotely accessible is a pretty basic
| security measure. I suppose the risk of a hacked node is fairly
| low, maybe about the same as a node that's run by a malicious
| owner. Although exploiting nodes would extend the reach if a
| malicious party.
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