3 ms·

Right so this is where smart contracts come into play. There are crypto wallets that are based on smart contracts which encode logic that allow people to "recov

Right so this is where smart contracts come into play. There are crypto wallets that are based on smart contracts which encode logic that allow people to "recover" their wallets if they lose their key by having some N of a selected group of trusted friends sign off on switching it to a new key. That is why this was impractical before: we didn't have a neutral/decentralized layer to remediate practical issues like this.

teucris 5y ago
Does that really justify an entire blockchain infrastructure? This is possibly a hot take, but I can’t help but feel like key recovery as you describe could be implemented on its own, e.g. like horcrux[0] 0: https://github.com/corvus-ch/horcrux https://github.com/corvus-ch/horcrux
- carlosdp 5y ago
  Yes, because otherwise you are still trusting a centralized third party, which has incentives to lock you in to an ecosystem =/
  - teucris 5y ago
    Huh? What part of something like a horcrux relies on a centralized third party?
    - carlosdp 5y ago
      Oh well for this specific scheme, an MPC, it offers less flexibility. What if I want to remove one of my friends from my trusted guardians? What if I want to swap one out? You can also design other schemes, like a time-lock one that says if none of the guardians are reachable (say they all lost their keys too, bad luck), you can recover it with some other secret key as long as none of the guardians reject it in 90 days, or something like that. There are groups trying MPCs for this, but I think smart contract wallets will be far superior in user experience in the long run. You can even put in like bank-level protections, completely decentralized. For example, you could impose a daily spending limit, so even if you were compromised, you didn't lose everything and had time to lock the wallet. You could also restrict transactions to a set of whitelisted contracts, a list possibly maintained by a DAO. The possibilities are endless, it's turing complete code!
this_user 5y ago
Smart contracts are something that can never work, because it is predicated on our ability to write correct code. Empirically, we know that is not going to happen, which means you need some sort of disaster recovery mechanism, which will end up being some centralised entity that has a sufficient level of permissions to override the contracts, thereby losing the primary selling point. Or you try to solve this with even more technological complexity, but that will only increase the fragility of the entire system and will paradoxically end up having the opposite effect of what is intended.
- carlosdp 5y ago
  This is a bananas statement, there is literally billions of $ transacted safely and successfully on smart contracts every day. Gnosis Safes (a multi-sig smart contract wallet) secure $96b in assets today and hasn't had a single security incident.
- q-big 5y ago
  > Smart contracts are something that can never work, because it is predicated on our ability to write correct code. Laws are of similarly bad quality (in my opinion of even much worse quality than software), we just have at least centuries more experience how to deal with crappy laws than with crappy software.
ok123456 5y ago
Sybil attack as a service: SaaS 3.0

teucris 5y ago

Does that really justify an entire blockchain infrastructure? This is possibly a hot take, but I can’t help but feel like key recovery as you describe could be implemented on its own, e.g. like horcrux[0] 0: https://github.com/corvus-ch/horcrux https://github.com/corvus-ch/horcrux

carlosdp 5y ago
Yes, because otherwise you are still trusting a centralized third party, which has incentives to lock you in to an ecosystem =/
- teucris 5y ago
  Huh? What part of something like a horcrux relies on a centralized third party?
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    Oh well for this specific scheme, an MPC, it offers less flexibility. What if I want to remove one of my friends from my trusted guardians? What if I want to swap one out? You can also design other schemes, like a time-lock one that says if none of the guardians are reachable (say they all lost their keys too, bad luck), you can recover it with some other secret key as long as none of the guardians reject it in 90 days, or something like that. There are groups trying MPCs for this, but I think smart contract wallets will be far superior in user experience in the long run. You can even put in like bank-level protections, completely decentralized. For example, you could impose a daily spending limit, so even if you were compromised, you didn't lose everything and had time to lock the wallet. You could also restrict transactions to a set of whitelisted contracts, a list possibly maintained by a DAO. The possibilities are endless, it's turing complete code!

this_user 5y ago

Smart contracts are something that can never work, because it is predicated on our ability to write correct code. Empirically, we know that is not going to happen, which means you need some sort of disaster recovery mechanism, which will end up being some centralised entity that has a sufficient level of permissions to override the contracts, thereby losing the primary selling point. Or you try to solve this with even more technological complexity, but that will only increase the fragility of the entire system and will paradoxically end up having the opposite effect of what is intended.

carlosdp 5y ago
This is a bananas statement, there is literally billions of $ transacted safely and successfully on smart contracts every day. Gnosis Safes (a multi-sig smart contract wallet) secure $96b in assets today and hasn't had a single security incident.
q-big 5y ago
> Smart contracts are something that can never work, because it is predicated on our ability to write correct code. Laws are of similarly bad quality (in my opinion of even much worse quality than software), we just have at least centuries more experience how to deal with crappy laws than with crappy software.

ok123456 5y ago

Sybil attack as a service: SaaS 3.0