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Weird to premise an article on the assertion that blockchain devs suffer from a lack of...adversarial thinking? "How will this technology be used to harass and

Weird to premise an article on the assertion that blockchain devs suffer from a lack of...adversarial thinking? "How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?" is a question that security engineers ask every single day! > there is very little privacy available once your crypto wallet address is known, because every transaction is publicly visible, and attempts to obscure them often easily unobscured with chain analysis tools Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. (Granted, chain analysis could help correlate addresses, but doing so requires a vastly larger effort and success is not guaranteed.) > immutable social network content is horrifying given what people post themselves. Imagine if the cringy posts by a twelve-year-old were guaranteed to be available in perpetuity as soon as they were saved Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. This is a fundamental principle, and the alternative is surely more dystopian. Norms must change to accommodate what is a technological fact; the reason they haven't changed yet is because most social technology is still centralized. But people already understand that you can't un-send an email, for example. Why should the rest of the internet be different?

marstall 5y ago
> Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. From what I know, the would require an extra transaction, and additional fees? At least on ETH. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- xvector 5y ago
  ethereum, yes, bitcoin, no if you need privacy just use Monero
- gregors 5y ago
  Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets exist for Eth. https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c87f7 https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c8...
KarlKemp 5y ago
> Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. The world isn't quite that apodictic. While the worst case may not change, its likelihood can. Information has always had a half-life that people had a general idea of, and that they considered in their decision-making. An effort specifically aimed at creating immutable, perpetual records will hurt both the people who fail to adjust, who will more likely see damaging old stuff coming up than expected, as well as the people who do change their habits, who are forced to restrict their openness and thereby lose whatever utility they used to derive from the previous, more liberal ability to share content. The mechanism is identical to a change from traffic laws being enforced by cops, where some slack in the system was unavoidable, expected, and sometimes compensated for with higher fines (where the risk of being caught is too low), to some automated system where every single traffic violation is recorded and fined.
breadbreadbread 5y ago
For a technology that is supposedly comes from a privacy and security philosophy, blockchain evangelists and devs DO suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking. It has cornered the market in fraud and manipulation, just look at all of the pump and dump and phishing scams that are perfectly tailored to its design. Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack. Anything that involves, say: social engineering, is fair game. After all it is YOUR fault if YOU leak personal information that can be used to destroy YOUR life. If that ends up in the blockchain its not MY fault, I cant do anything... what do you want me to do? change it? punish someone? oops sorry I cant! Ultimately this form of thinking is the logical conclusion of "personal responsibility" arguments. Why criticize the system when you can instead pretend the problem is the individual? Crypto doesnt have philosophical issues, you are using the wrong wallet. It isnt MY fault that someone made an NFT containing your home address and bitcoin wallet ID, YOU trusted your information with the wrong service. The ultimate scapegoat is blaming the end-user. At some point you need to take the L and at least admit these are oversights. Blockchain tech has been around for over a decade and it's had plenty of time to solve these problems but instead it has dug its heels in and said "no all of this is by design and good actually"
- epolanski 5y ago
  At this point all of these companies building all of these services on the blockchain are really proving that people want trust based simple services. Two banks in Italy have launched a crypto buying and custodying services, the customers can't even access their crypto, nor they even want to. And it is doing well. Yet another proof no one cares about blockchain solutions and tgat the problems they solve do not exist.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  > Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack. I wonder where that Man in the Middle attack thing is coming from? Dan mentioned it in his recent video, so he must have picked it up somewhere. If you Google the term + blockchain, you'll mostly find some discussion about potential attack vectors regarding wallets. It's not a term used in academic blockchain literature as far as I aware. It's not used in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Man in the middle has a specific meaning, and I don't see how describing blockchain's main purpose as preventing this kind of attack makes a terrible amount of sense. Ultimately, what you critique is simply an inherent part of the system. These are not oversights. These are basic consequences of the whole approach. To say "blockchain evangelists suffer a deficiency in not addressing them" is merely saying "there should be no blockchain evangelists".
magicjosh 5y ago
I appreciated the perspective of the article. The author is coming from more of a front-end perspective. Bitcoin is a beautiful castle, but you have to climb up through the toilet. What do you think about this statement instead - "blockchain devs suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking regarding the frontend interface".

marstall 5y ago

> Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. From what I know, the would require an extra transaction, and additional fees? At least on ETH. Correct me if I'm wrong.

xvector 5y ago
ethereum, yes, bitcoin, no if you need privacy just use Monero
gregors 5y ago
Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets exist for Eth. https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c87f7 https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c8...

KarlKemp 5y ago

> Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. The world isn't quite that apodictic. While the worst case may not change, its likelihood can. Information has always had a half-life that people had a general idea of, and that they considered in their decision-making. An effort specifically aimed at creating immutable, perpetual records will hurt both the people who fail to adjust, who will more likely see damaging old stuff coming up than expected, as well as the people who do change their habits, who are forced to restrict their openness and thereby lose whatever utility they used to derive from the previous, more liberal ability to share content. The mechanism is identical to a change from traffic laws being enforced by cops, where some slack in the system was unavoidable, expected, and sometimes compensated for with higher fines (where the risk of being caught is too low), to some automated system where every single traffic violation is recorded and fined.

breadbreadbread 5y ago

For a technology that is supposedly comes from a privacy and security philosophy, blockchain evangelists and devs DO suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking. It has cornered the market in fraud and manipulation, just look at all of the pump and dump and phishing scams that are perfectly tailored to its design. Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack. Anything that involves, say: social engineering, is fair game. After all it is YOUR fault if YOU leak personal information that can be used to destroy YOUR life. If that ends up in the blockchain its not MY fault, I cant do anything... what do you want me to do? change it? punish someone? oops sorry I cant! Ultimately this form of thinking is the logical conclusion of "personal responsibility" arguments. Why criticize the system when you can instead pretend the problem is the individual? Crypto doesnt have philosophical issues, you are using the wrong wallet. It isnt MY fault that someone made an NFT containing your home address and bitcoin wallet ID, YOU trusted your information with the wrong service. The ultimate scapegoat is blaming the end-user. At some point you need to take the L and at least admit these are oversights. Blockchain tech has been around for over a decade and it's had plenty of time to solve these problems but instead it has dug its heels in and said "no all of this is by design and good actually"

epolanski 5y ago
At this point all of these companies building all of these services on the blockchain are really proving that people want trust based simple services. Two banks in Italy have launched a crypto buying and custodying services, the customers can't even access their crypto, nor they even want to. And it is doing well. Yet another proof no one cares about blockchain solutions and tgat the problems they solve do not exist.
miracle2k 5y ago
> Blockchain is built from the ground up to prevent exactly one type of security vulnerability: man in the middle attacks. It is absolutely abysmal at protecting against any other form of attack. I wonder where that Man in the Middle attack thing is coming from? Dan mentioned it in his recent video, so he must have picked it up somewhere. If you Google the term + blockchain, you'll mostly find some discussion about potential attack vectors regarding wallets. It's not a term used in academic blockchain literature as far as I aware. It's not used in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Man in the middle has a specific meaning, and I don't see how describing blockchain's main purpose as preventing this kind of attack makes a terrible amount of sense. Ultimately, what you critique is simply an inherent part of the system. These are not oversights. These are basic consequences of the whole approach. To say "blockchain evangelists suffer a deficiency in not addressing them" is merely saying "there should be no blockchain evangelists".

magicjosh 5y ago

I appreciated the perspective of the article. The author is coming from more of a front-end perspective. Bitcoin is a beautiful castle, but you have to climb up through the toilet. What do you think about this statement instead - "blockchain devs suffer from a lack of adversarial thinking regarding the frontend interface".