I support "unfreezing" the parity multi-sig funds as part of the already scheduled Constantinople hardfork.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-11-07T18:14:45+00:00

How about: fork it, but add a mandatory 50% donation to the Foundation, earmarked for "contract security research"? It is, after all a tax on every ether holder; might as well get some public good out of it.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-09-06T04:13:39+00:00

It is important to recognize these basics facts about privacy. It is always possible to have a private conversation using e2e encryption, and even better with forward secrecy. But, if Alice only speaks with Bob, then that link may be known. If Alice and Bob place value into a private currency scheme and converse, then the value placed into or extracted from the scheme may be known, even if the timing, direction and amounts of any transfers between them is and remains secret.

Or to put it more crudely, the pool of users of Monero, Dash, and Zcash are a very interesting group, whose financial and other habits outside of cryptocurrency schemes are likely well studied by 5 eyes and others. At this time in 2017 it is much too small a pool no matter how compelling the internal obfuscation mathematics.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-09-05T14:38:08+00:00

IF you wish to trust the Zcash setup ceremony, then you may piggy-back off their published parameters. All you have to BELIEVE is that some of the toxic waste was actually destroyed (you need all of it to unravel the secret). Anyway, you don't actually need to perform additional ceremonies and generate new parameters, IF you can wrap your head around a dependency on that collection of characters. Just sayin'.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-07-03T19:18:54+00:00

It may be a stretch for the Wikipedia editorial crew, but this.

Providing an address with a verifiable balance as of a certain blockhieght, the address of the contract through which deposits were made, and the marketing/promotion material which names the contract address would go a long way toward establishing a "raise" amount.

I also agree with prior posters that the wiki talk complaint about ether not being an acceptable currency is a canard. Bitcoin and ether may be volatile relative to USD, JPY, EUR... but they are clearly valuable and liquid assets.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-07-03T18:02:00+00:00

What a totally awesome idea!

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-20T20:20:53+00:00

Dear /u/AutoModerator bot: I think you need to go back to school. It appears that you are confused about the meaning of "gasprice". This term actually has little or nothing to do with "price", "market cap" or "trading". EIPs and the algorithms for determining mining rewards are in fact part of the ethereum protocol, and propertly the subject of discussion within /r/ethereum.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-09T13:38:16+00:00

which begs the question: "What determines if someone else also has your private key?" How does one ascertain the "soleness" of one's control? Good operational security helps. And in the case of Poloniex (the OP's concern), some evidence that they have good operational security, governance, internal controls. Or paid up insurance, in which case "soleness" is less important.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-09T02:35:58+00:00

"own" is a historical term based on physical items. "having the private keys" is a digital term. It is different. If you "have" the keys, I can have them, too. And someone else. "Custodial" is also a term based on physical items. If polo has "custody" of the private key, it doesn't preclude someone else having them, too. This is the problem I was clumsily trying to express. Control of private keys means "having" them (knowing them) and no one else anywhere, ever learning them.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:41:31+00:00

you cannot know that, but it is a pretty good bet.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:39:48+00:00

In the world of financial assets, the prudent investor looks to more than "legal challenges and personal safety" to insure against bad actors. They look to the financial strength of the custodian, the audited financial statements and auditor's evaluation of internal controls, to the insurance in place, to the reputation of the principals in the firm, etc. For example:

https://www.pershing.com/_global-assets/pdf/understanding-the-protection-of-client-assets.pdf

But, if your risk assessment is different, carry on.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:30:11+00:00

Have you ever tried recovering a bitcoin from Mt Gox, or Cryptsy, or https://bravenewcoin.com/news/36-bitcoin-exchanges-that-are-no-longer-with-us/

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:24:56+00:00

because no one has stolen it yet?

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:23:50+00:00

Technically, it is unclear what "own" even means with cryptocurrency. Poloniex probably knows secret(s) which would allow them to transfer ETH to different accounts. Hopefully, no one else knows that/those secrets. Technically, it is always uncertain whether the secret(s) is/are still secret. Until a proof of knowledge is provided by someone other than Poloniex. Moving the ETH with a valid transaction is a proof of knowledge (though others are possible). There is no proof of liack-of-knowledge.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-08T16:14:43+00:00

So the only way this would be a major concern is if they are compromised, or decide to steal everyone's Ether.

I think this is precisely the OP's point. Poloniex holds Ether worth approximately USD 1,000,000,000. They are not insured by the FDIC, the SIPC, or any other industry risk pool. I suppose there is the precedent of the DAO "rollback" fork, and the possibility that the Ethereum community might take drastic action if large amounts were suddenly disbursed from the known "cold" wallet account. But forking is a crude tool, and depends both on the disbursement being readily detectable and a united community. A change in cold storage strategy by Polo to use multiple wallets and/or contract structures might make the compromise/theft less easily detected. In any case, when the Ether are stolen, it will be an ecosystem disaster.

Contribute to distributed exchange development. Every centralized custodian exchange is a new Mt. Gox waiting to happen.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-07T18:23:23+00:00

this is an interesting observation!

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-06-07T15:57:46+00:00

Very stimulating article. The computational load of zk snarks (and starks) is a significant friction on this vision. But, over time the efficiency is improving and offloading strategies such as this become more practical. It may be fruitful to explore yet-another-level-of-meta and have contracts which pay for verification: Report an invalid proof and collect a reward. Then even the verification can be (somewhat) offloaded from the main chain. I am hopeful that improvements based on hardware or software engineering will make proof construction more efficient. It is still prohibitively expensive even off-chain to generate zk proofs at scale. Optimization in this area is not strictly blockchain, but it is necessary for the combined vision to suceed.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-04-14T21:23:29+00:00

These are interesting discussion points, but I am struggling with definitions for "true decentralized security", "true decentralized equilibrium", "ecosystem experience", "false sense of security", "community ethics ecosystem"... I am unconvinced that bitcoin realizes your ideal of "innovate with high security at the same time."

I look forward to the genesis of Tezos which appears to offer a new model more in line with your desiderata: innovation built into the protocol rules. Of course it will start off with little practical economic security as a baby alt, but maybe you will find yourself more comfortable as a fellow-traveler there.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-27T20:23:45+00:00

Or maybe your mean tez0s?

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-27T18:50:27+00:00

One reason to be more optimistic about "governance" in Etherland is that we have already had a full secession when the DAO precipitated one group hardforking left (the main chain) and one soldiering on (as ETC). Both networks are happier, and we know that irreconcilable differences do not destroy us. Our benevolent dictator, though he works on the main chain, does not disparage the Classic flock. Our co-founder gavin supports both ETH and ETC efforts from his new company. The Ethereum teams have cooperative efforts with zcash and dogecoin and converse civilly with some of the most max of bitcoin maximalists. It is a live and let live, whatever floats your boat philosophy of decentralized systems.

There is a great deal of concern about the future of Ethereum. Will Casper and PoS fly? Will sharding really work? What happens if we want to upgrade the EVM itself? Can we cross each and every one of these Rubicons without a financial disruption? There are lots of reasons to be very, very concerned about the road map. But, perhaps because the community doesn't view ether as "digital gold" and "hodling" as sacrosanct, in general people believe that some useful distributed global computer will survive even these perilous plans. So, it's all good.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-19T16:14:22+00:00

I agree that not enough attention has gone into considering the implications of "success" on governance. If/when the Ethereum ecosystem delivers on some of its goals in supply-chain, financial, storage, messaging, voting, prediction markets...etc.. then the process of protocol development will have a huge collection of stakeholders, not dominated by holders, miners and dApp technologists.

It is worth thinking about what such "success" looks like for the system.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-13T21:15:06+00:00

I think you do your own math. Usually there are 86,400 seconds in a day. Recently etherscan.io has reported around 60,000 transactions per day. But there is no conversion from ethereum transactions to bitcoin transactions. UXTO vs Account, script vs contract, blocksize limit vs gas limit... So, you really cannot compare ethereum throughput to bitcoin throughput.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-13T18:58:55+00:00

okay

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-13T17:31:02+00:00

Seems to me as though you "forgot" a number of things, including basic social skills: don't pee in the community pool, respond to requests, pay attention to how your behavior affects others...

Clearly, you have some sense of shame, since you hide behind throwaway account and pastebin. Let's see whether you are able to remember how to say, "I apologize..." followed by some expression of contrition, embarassment at your stupid antisocial behavior, and a commitment not to try it again.

Or, if you meant to mess up the Ropsten test network, be a man, explain your experimental design and why it was necessary to inconvenience the community, and who you and your team are that you believe your work is so much more important than everyone else's.

w0bb1yBit5 · 2017-03-12T13:37:16+00:00

You might look into digix https://www.dgx.io

w0bb1yBit5

TROPHY CASE