March 18
Comments migrated from WordPress:
Eric Manwill <ericmanwill@gmail.com> on 2016-06-15 09:53:57 wrote:
With the dependence of the Imperial economy on self-generated electronic contracts, fully-digital currency, etc. etc., I have to wonder how common it is for individuals or groups to search for and find security holes or low-level glitches somewhere in the software implementing all of this, which they could then exploit for fun and profit.
Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-06-19 16:36:56 wrote:
Fairly common, but less effective than you might think. It tends to mostly be a problem in less developed regions, and with the leading edge of innovation that hasn’t had much of a chance to have the bugs worked out of it yet.
That’s because the core protocols, languages, runtimes, etc., have two advantages where this sort of thing is concerned.
One of them is that they’re, well, a mature software environment . And when I say mature - well, the core ML runtime, the Banking & Credit Weave, IIP, and so forth, they’ve been around for longer than civilization has on Earth, at this point. They’ve got software architects older than Imhotep. Needless to say, it’s spent enough time out there that it is pretty damn solid.
The other one, of course, is that a lot of this stuff is also what the Transcend uses for its own internal architecture, so it’s had the advantage of a security review carried out by a god-brain that expects the crackers trying to get in to be other god-brains.
Jack Sexton <noxes.kaj@gmail.com> on 2016-06-18 10:57:34 wrote:
Pity etherium looks like it won’t survive the month, what with that scam draining their accounts as we speak. A month to save cryptocurrency Ethereum? • The Register
FaceDeer <derksenmobile@gmail.com> on 2016-06-18 22:58:33 wrote:
That is a drastic misunderstanding of what’s happened.
What happened was that someone published a smart contract running on Ethereum, called “TheDAO”, and a bunch of investors put money under its control. The plan was that TheDAO would act as a sort of venture capital fund and use the investors’ pooled money to support various projects. But there was a bug in TheDAO’s code that allowed a user to start withdrawing all of the money in it for himself. Only money that was invested in TheDAO was at risk of being stolen in this way. There’s no bug in Ethereum itself, just in this one smart contract.
It’s sort of like if someone found a bug in a particular bank’s website and used it to steal a bunch of money from that bank. It doesn’t mean that “websites won’t survive the month” or that “banks are a scam,” it means that this one particular bank screwed up bad. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of websites or banks.
March 19
Maybe take a look at hashgraph it’s relatively obscure but it’s in many ways superior to ethereum especially because it’s not proof of work and thus a whole hell of a lot cheaper and environmentally friendly
Hedera Hashgraph, commonly known as Hedera, is a distributed ledger which uses a variant of proof of stake to reach consensus. The native cryptocurrency of the Hedera Hashgraph system is HBAR.
Hashgraph was invented in the mid-2010s by the American computer scientist Leemon Baird. Baird is the co-founder and chief technical officer of Swirlds, a company that holds patents covering the hashgraph algorithm. Hashgraph were described as a continuation or successor to the blockchain concept, which...
https://hedera.com/
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March 20
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As I understand it (and granted, I haven’t worked with it personally), Hedera just provides a distributed ledger service, which while it’s useful, doesn’t include the smart-contract language/infra provided by Ethereum and its half-dozen similar systems.
(Which is a shame, really. I, for one, would like to see someone build a Turing-complete smart contract platform on top of hashgraph rather than blockchain, if only to have one that’s more performant.)
1 reply
March 28
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