Y
HN Search
Hacker News Search
new
|
comments
|
top
|
jobs
asynchrony
searching PlanetScale…
1.
▲
2.
▲
3.
▲
4.
▲
5.
▲
6.
▲
10 ms
·
61.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Crypto assets are only valuable insofar as they can be exchanged for real world goods and services (mostly people seem to want US dollars). Purely crypto backed stable coins lack a stable relationship to the real world.
62.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I don't see how this won't result in rebuilding the current regulated banking system on top of an inefficient system bottlenecked by proof-of-work.
63.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
You’re describing a need for a standardized protocol not a blockchain.
64.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
When the price corrects back to $0.50 I predict many current zealots will change their tune.
65.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
It's perfectly decentralized. The Ethereum Foundation is just the centralized marketing and governance organization that also lobbied the SEC not to classify it as a security because of how decentralized it is.
66.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
What happens if a trade that is illegal under the law of the country of the seller/buyer/exchange? The courts would be completely powerless to undo the transaction. Again it seems to me the main and only attraction is evading regu
67.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
It would be more convincing, or at least easier to take this comment in good faith, if you were to provide some part of your understanding of the innovation rather than to simply name drop a token and a link to a blog.
68.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I think this was the original paper on the "selfish mining" strategy: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf
69.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Isn’t the sieve’s eventual shape just the list of prime numbers?
70.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Other than the sieve of Eratosthenes being a way to compute a finite list of primes I don't see the relationship here. Could you elaborate?
71.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Do I need a ledger? Do I need to other people to trust what I write on the ledger? Do I need to trust what other people write on the ledger? Is it possible to trust what is written on the ledger in relation to what I actually care about? I
72.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
In my mind the main contention is the difference between assets that exist entirely within the ledger (BTC, ETH, CryptoKitties) and assets that purport to reliably track some physical asset. Mathematical certainties about cryptographic secu
73.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I don't think there's that much disagreement over the effectiveness of blockchain for managing decentralized ledgers (cryptocurrencies). There's rather more contention about the applicability of blockchain to other spaces.
74.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
You could use Symbols or create a Symbol type (just an object with .toString method) to make the state IDs more manageable. It does amount to writing a memory manager similar to object pooling in a game engine. It's not that bad if the
75.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
So what's the advantage over using git?
76.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
What if say you bribe someone with access to the private keys to append a false entry?
77.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Personally I'm skeptical of all blockchain hype but as I have people in the industry close to me I try to keep an open mind and at least understand the technical and game theoretical aspects of the space. I can definitely agree that th
78.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I found this article related to the attack in that paper https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-bitcoin-mining-pool... While I'm not completely convinced that the countermeasure of "spy mining" complet
79.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
In my mind it's more like an acceptable upper bound on provability of immutable and eternal transactions on some distributed machine. The downside to unexpected exploits far outweighs the upside to unlimited flexibility. Bitcoin chose
80.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I wasn't claiming that it is not possible to analyze a program to detect known exploits. Rather that it is extremely probable that another exploit will be found after the last one has been patched, and it is impossible to prove otherwi
81.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
I'm familiar with the proof and the story. My point is that the claim that any particular program can be fully analyzed is equivalent to saying that all programs can be analyzed. Perhaps you're saying that it's possible to an
82.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
If it's possible to do a complete analysis of any particular program, shouldn't it follow that it's possible to do a complete analysis of all programs? If only a subset of all programs can be completely analyzed as particular
83.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
My understanding is more hand-wavy than formal, but would the combination of a total language and some limitation on the total number of instructions produce a provably predictable language?
84.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Based on the halting problem, a provably complete analysis of the behavior of some (most?) programs in a turing-complete language is impossible. To put it another way, it is impossible to be sure that there isn't another vulnerability
85.
▲
by
asynchrony
8y ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the nature of a turing machine (decentralized or not) to produce an endless series of "unforeseen" exploits?
86.
▲
by
asynchrony
9y ago
I think this is the idea behind proof-of-stake. I don't see how it mitigates the fact that while the cryptography may be secure, the humans handling the keys are less so.
87.
▲
by
asynchrony
9y ago
I have worked on factory floors before but honestly I don't see how it's relevant. Toyota and similarly competent manufacturers are are perfectly capable of using centralized databases to track the motion of parts around extremely
88.
▲
by
asynchrony
9y ago
It depends on the security of supplier X's private keys. I think there's a general conflation of the security of the cryptography with the security of the system overall.
89.
▲
by
asynchrony
9y ago
This is generally my main source of skepticism relating to blockchain solutions. The ledger is 100% trustable as long as it describes digital assets that are entirely confined within the distributed ledger, but a digital token doesn't
90.
▲
by
asynchrony
9y ago
Not inexpressible. Unprovable. There could be a set of correct programs that could never be proven correct by a type checker, for example.
More ›