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> No, you don't. This is egregiously wrong and is a blatant misunderstanding of distributed systems. In a typical cryptocurrency blockchain, it's the miners tha

> No, you don't. This is egregiously wrong and is a blatant misunderstanding of distributed systems. In a typical cryptocurrency blockchain, it's the miners that have control over which smart contracts you interact with. The match your rhetoric, this is a best an outrageous slight of hand playing with semantics, at worst you are the one not understanding how they work. /I/ have control which smart contracts I interact with - no one else. Number one, the miners cannot force me to interact with anything. It is a common source of confusion - miners cannot force invalid transactions, not even if 100% of them work together. The users of the chain (and their delegates, i.e. exchanges) make the rules, not the miners. The miners have a single job, for which they get paid: to order transactions. And with that job comes the the power to /not/ pick a transaction. Miners could possible /prevent/ me from interacting with a smart contract. A large point of blockchain design is to ensure that this will not happen in practice, i.e. the censoring miners are in the minority.

throwaway82652 5y ago
>this is a best an outrageous slight of hand playing with semantics, at worst you are the one not understanding how they work. It's neither. Sorry. This is literally how a distributed system works. There are always other people along the line that hold responsibility to keep the system running. That's the whole point of it being distributed. Nothing about this changes if you decide you want to run code on that system or use it to manage your finances. I don't want to talk about semantics either, this is usually the point where someone starts nit picking about the meaning of "distributed" versus "decentralized" or something like that. I don't care what term it is, use whichever you want. The limits are still the same. >/I/ have control which smart contracts I interact with - no one else. No, you don't. Again this is absurdly wrong. The blockchain controls which smart contracts you interact with, and the blockchain is controlled by its miners and its whales. >Number one, the miners cannot force me to interact with anything >miners cannot force invalid transactions, not even if 100% of them work together Actually they can, by blackmailing you and threatening to remove your transactions from the blockchain. You don't seem to understand what the point here is. If bad actors are intent on doing this they won't care if you lose other money in the process or if you have to destroy your keys to stop them. In some ways this type of distributed system is actually more vulnerable to these attacks than other systems. And of course there is always the classic $5 wrench attack, which no amount of blockchain engineering can stop: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ You're making the same mistake that a lot of system designers make. If you look at the system in a vacuum then yes those claims are true. In practice, they aren't true at all. >A large point of blockchain design is to ensure that this will not happen in practice No it isn't. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would continue to be the case, any more than you would expect a bank to do the same. The answer always comes back to the same thing.

throwaway82652 5y ago

>this is a best an outrageous slight of hand playing with semantics, at worst you are the one not understanding how they work. It's neither. Sorry. This is literally how a distributed system works. There are always other people along the line that hold responsibility to keep the system running. That's the whole point of it being distributed. Nothing about this changes if you decide you want to run code on that system or use it to manage your finances. I don't want to talk about semantics either, this is usually the point where someone starts nit picking about the meaning of "distributed" versus "decentralized" or something like that. I don't care what term it is, use whichever you want. The limits are still the same. >/I/ have control which smart contracts I interact with - no one else. No, you don't. Again this is absurdly wrong. The blockchain controls which smart contracts you interact with, and the blockchain is controlled by its miners and its whales. >Number one, the miners cannot force me to interact with anything >miners cannot force invalid transactions, not even if 100% of them work together Actually they can, by blackmailing you and threatening to remove your transactions from the blockchain. You don't seem to understand what the point here is. If bad actors are intent on doing this they won't care if you lose other money in the process or if you have to destroy your keys to stop them. In some ways this type of distributed system is actually more vulnerable to these attacks than other systems. And of course there is always the classic $5 wrench attack, which no amount of blockchain engineering can stop: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ You're making the same mistake that a lot of system designers make. If you look at the system in a vacuum then yes those claims are true. In practice, they aren't true at all. >A large point of blockchain design is to ensure that this will not happen in practice No it isn't. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this would continue to be the case, any more than you would expect a bank to do the same. The answer always comes back to the same thing.