4 ms·

Parity's Wallet Bug Is Not Alone

91 points by scarhill 9y ago

dibbsonline 9y ago
I don't always get mobile visitors, but when I do I use 750k images.
- frik 9y ago
  ...and the pics don't add anything to the text at all. He probably just wanted to share his holiday photos.
- el33th40r 9y ago
  Fixed, thanks.
Animats 9y ago
The article points out that the database community discovered that application programmers can't handle too much power. That's why databases have things like atomic transactions. Those are hard to do in the general case, but all SQL database systems now do it. Blockchain contracts for real money need at least the assurance level of database transactions. The DAO attack involved causing a transaction to happen only in part; one part happened, then the transaction aborted. That needs to be prohibited by the underlying system. As with database transactions, either everything goes right and the transaction commits, or something goes wrong and the data is unchanged.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  In summary, the block chain is great for use as a ledger. But forgetting that the wheel is not only not reinvented, but the market or industry or hype chain has not yet advanced to appreciation of wheels, is potentially a costly error.
  - amygdyl 9y ago
    For that matter bitcoin is not exactly a fast cheap transaction system, is it? This is how I explained to myself why I found it so hard to first get a understanding of what it was about : nobody wanted to say what it is.
foepys 9y ago
And again, an interesting story about crypto currencies ends with a fight of egos instead of concentrating on the technical details. Why do those crypto enthusiasts almost always have to throw dirt at each other? Especially when it's completely out of place like in this blog post.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- codeflo 9y ago
  I don't any cryptocurrencies, but my perception observing the field somewhat casually is that these kinds of discussion sometimes only appear to be about technical details on the surface level. In reality, one or more of people involved can personally lose a huge amount of money if a certain policy is or isn't adopted. For example, it's usually understood that the inventors of any particular cryptocurrency hold a large sum of "pre-mined" money, but somewhat taboo to state it because the appearance of a benevolent dev team that acts in the best interest of the community has to be maintained.
  - amygdyl 9y ago
    It is so indistinguishable from how street junkies fight to continue one another when one has made a mark, the realisation of this clarified the matter for me finally. I was made homeless result of a fraud and got to be robbed and conned plenty enough to be not mistaken I'm seeing the exact same behavior.
- bhaak 9y ago
  Considering that you have similar behaviors in open source communities even if only technical details are discussed, it's not surprising it gets even worse if you add money to the mix. Many people seem to get irrational if they fear to lose their virtual money. For that matter, I always look closely how people act when the price dips due to some insignificant drama. You can assess beforehand if you want to throw money towards a project depending on those people. Because when the next real crisis hits, and believe me, in cryptocurrencies there's always a next one, those people won't act better in a real crisis.
ithought 9y ago
It's amazing BitGo whould shrug off Emin's help when he helped fix their software. Emin's super smart, ignoring his offer to serve as a technical advisor is ridiculous. And then BitGo goes on to be partially responsible for a $320,000,000 loss (current value) that almost destroyed BitFinex. It's just sad that so much fighting and ego has prevented technical collaboration. I'm a supporter of the Core devs but Emin is a genius who should be respected.
- petertodd 9y ago
  > It's just sad that so much fighting and ego has prevented technical collaboration. I'm a supporter of the Core devs but Emin is a genius who should be respected. Emin has a bad track record of lying about his work. For example, he claimed in the announcement(1) for his Teechan payment channel scheme that it could do 2480 transactions per second, but neglected to mention that it achieved that by failing to actually write those transactions to disk and storing them in RAM only. If your computer crashes, you can lose money in Teechan. This is not unlike advertising the high performance figures achieved by making a new RAM-only database, without advertising the fact that you achieved them by storing everything in RAM. Similarly, Emin's announcement and paper also gave the impression that payment channels weren't currently possible to implement on Bitcoin without segwit, when in payment channels with similar properties to Teechan have been possible to implement for multiple years now via BIP65. Oddly, BIP65 is cited in the Teechan paper, but for an unrelated reason. Then there's how Emin's PR around that announcement presented Teechan as something that could be implemented right away as a replacement for segwit via Intel SGX, without mentioning that Intel required SGX users to get licenses to use it in production, and Teechan didn't have one. I could go on, but that's just a single project... The sad thing is Emin is often right and can do good work, but with a track record like that it's no surprise that people aren't interested in working with him. 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20161223143716/http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/12/22/scaling-bitcoin-with-secure-hardware/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161223143716/http://hackingdis...
  - el33th40r 9y ago
    That's classy, trying to hijack the top comment to spread lies, ad hominems and smears. >For example, he claimed in the announcement(1) for his Teechan payment channel scheme that it could do 2480 transactions per second, but neglected to mention that it achieved that by failing to actually write those transactions to disk and storing them in RAM only. First of all, our actual deployments showed that Teechan can do more than 30,000 tx/sec across the Atlantic, in fully fault tolerant mode. Second, the Teechan paper made clear exactly how we reported the initial, unoptimized numbers, which is precisely why you're here writing these bogus critiques. >Emin's announcement and paper also gave the impression that payment channels weren't currently possible to implement on Bitcoin without segwit We learned after publication that there are rumors of a "Lightning Network" implementation without Segwit. Unless you can point to a protocol specification, however, these remain unbacked and uncharacterized assertions, of the kind "I believe I can fly." >Then there's how Emin's PR around that announcement presented Teechan as something that could be implemented right away as a replacement for segwit via Intel SGX, without mentioning that Intel required SGX users to get licenses to use it in production, and Teechan didn't have one. This is HN, and I usually try to be more diplomatic, but this is stupid. First, Teechan is a protocol, it isn't tied to SGX. We are working with HSM vendors to deploy it on non-Intel hardware. Second, Teechan does NOT require the users to obtain licenses, it just needs to be signed by an entity. Third, Peter Todd has no idea about the nature and scope of academic work and how it differs from industrial deployments, which explains why he feels so threatened as to indulge in personal smears. I could go on, but tearing down a known Bitcoin troll is pointless.
e79 9y ago
Great article. I recently wrote a tool to help find bugs like this: https://ericrafaloff.com/introducing-the-solidity-function-profiler/ https://ericrafaloff.com/introducing-the-solidity-function-p...
coolbreeze 9y ago
Great read.

91 points by scarhill 9y ago

dibbsonline 9y ago

I don't always get mobile visitors, but when I do I use 750k images.

frik 9y ago
...and the pics don't add anything to the text at all. He probably just wanted to share his holiday photos.
el33th40r 9y ago
Fixed, thanks.

Animats 9y ago

The article points out that the database community discovered that application programmers can't handle too much power. That's why databases have things like atomic transactions. Those are hard to do in the general case, but all SQL database systems now do it. Blockchain contracts for real money need at least the assurance level of database transactions. The DAO attack involved causing a transaction to happen only in part; one part happened, then the transaction aborted. That needs to be prohibited by the underlying system. As with database transactions, either everything goes right and the transaction commits, or something goes wrong and the data is unchanged.

amygdyl 9y ago
In summary, the block chain is great for use as a ledger. But forgetting that the wheel is not only not reinvented, but the market or industry or hype chain has not yet advanced to appreciation of wheels, is potentially a costly error.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  For that matter bitcoin is not exactly a fast cheap transaction system, is it? This is how I explained to myself why I found it so hard to first get a understanding of what it was about : nobody wanted to say what it is.

foepys 9y ago

And again, an interesting story about crypto currencies ends with a fight of egos instead of concentrating on the technical details. Why do those crypto enthusiasts almost always have to throw dirt at each other? Especially when it's completely out of place like in this blog post.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
codeflo 9y ago
I don't any cryptocurrencies, but my perception observing the field somewhat casually is that these kinds of discussion sometimes only appear to be about technical details on the surface level. In reality, one or more of people involved can personally lose a huge amount of money if a certain policy is or isn't adopted. For example, it's usually understood that the inventors of any particular cryptocurrency hold a large sum of "pre-mined" money, but somewhat taboo to state it because the appearance of a benevolent dev team that acts in the best interest of the community has to be maintained.
- amygdyl 9y ago
  It is so indistinguishable from how street junkies fight to continue one another when one has made a mark, the realisation of this clarified the matter for me finally. I was made homeless result of a fraud and got to be robbed and conned plenty enough to be not mistaken I'm seeing the exact same behavior.
bhaak 9y ago
Considering that you have similar behaviors in open source communities even if only technical details are discussed, it's not surprising it gets even worse if you add money to the mix. Many people seem to get irrational if they fear to lose their virtual money. For that matter, I always look closely how people act when the price dips due to some insignificant drama. You can assess beforehand if you want to throw money towards a project depending on those people. Because when the next real crisis hits, and believe me, in cryptocurrencies there's always a next one, those people won't act better in a real crisis.

ithought 9y ago

It's amazing BitGo whould shrug off Emin's help when he helped fix their software. Emin's super smart, ignoring his offer to serve as a technical advisor is ridiculous. And then BitGo goes on to be partially responsible for a $320,000,000 loss (current value) that almost destroyed BitFinex. It's just sad that so much fighting and ego has prevented technical collaboration. I'm a supporter of the Core devs but Emin is a genius who should be respected.

petertodd 9y ago
> It's just sad that so much fighting and ego has prevented technical collaboration. I'm a supporter of the Core devs but Emin is a genius who should be respected. Emin has a bad track record of lying about his work. For example, he claimed in the announcement(1) for his Teechan payment channel scheme that it could do 2480 transactions per second, but neglected to mention that it achieved that by failing to actually write those transactions to disk and storing them in RAM only. If your computer crashes, you can lose money in Teechan. This is not unlike advertising the high performance figures achieved by making a new RAM-only database, without advertising the fact that you achieved them by storing everything in RAM. Similarly, Emin's announcement and paper also gave the impression that payment channels weren't currently possible to implement on Bitcoin without segwit, when in payment channels with similar properties to Teechan have been possible to implement for multiple years now via BIP65. Oddly, BIP65 is cited in the Teechan paper, but for an unrelated reason. Then there's how Emin's PR around that announcement presented Teechan as something that could be implemented right away as a replacement for segwit via Intel SGX, without mentioning that Intel required SGX users to get licenses to use it in production, and Teechan didn't have one. I could go on, but that's just a single project... The sad thing is Emin is often right and can do good work, but with a track record like that it's no surprise that people aren't interested in working with him. 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20161223143716/http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/12/22/scaling-bitcoin-with-secure-hardware/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161223143716/http://hackingdis...
- el33th40r 9y ago
  That's classy, trying to hijack the top comment to spread lies, ad hominems and smears. >For example, he claimed in the announcement(1) for his Teechan payment channel scheme that it could do 2480 transactions per second, but neglected to mention that it achieved that by failing to actually write those transactions to disk and storing them in RAM only. First of all, our actual deployments showed that Teechan can do more than 30,000 tx/sec across the Atlantic, in fully fault tolerant mode. Second, the Teechan paper made clear exactly how we reported the initial, unoptimized numbers, which is precisely why you're here writing these bogus critiques. >Emin's announcement and paper also gave the impression that payment channels weren't currently possible to implement on Bitcoin without segwit We learned after publication that there are rumors of a "Lightning Network" implementation without Segwit. Unless you can point to a protocol specification, however, these remain unbacked and uncharacterized assertions, of the kind "I believe I can fly." >Then there's how Emin's PR around that announcement presented Teechan as something that could be implemented right away as a replacement for segwit via Intel SGX, without mentioning that Intel required SGX users to get licenses to use it in production, and Teechan didn't have one. This is HN, and I usually try to be more diplomatic, but this is stupid. First, Teechan is a protocol, it isn't tied to SGX. We are working with HSM vendors to deploy it on non-Intel hardware. Second, Teechan does NOT require the users to obtain licenses, it just needs to be signed by an entity. Third, Peter Todd has no idea about the nature and scope of academic work and how it differs from industrial deployments, which explains why he feels so threatened as to indulge in personal smears. I could go on, but tearing down a known Bitcoin troll is pointless.

e79 9y ago

Great article. I recently wrote a tool to help find bugs like this: https://ericrafaloff.com/introducing-the-solidity-function-profiler/ https://ericrafaloff.com/introducing-the-solidity-function-p...

coolbreeze 9y ago

Great read.