Paradigm

There are a great many of them, you just can't see them in the dark forest. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

You will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

Nice explainer: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/03/the-cartoon-guide-to-perps Perps are extremely fun, and not great for your financial health in general. Very addictive PvP game though.

The trilemma is not a law of mathematics with binary outcomes. It's an attempt to describe certain tensions inherent in building blockchains. A great deal of work as been done on Ethereum to balance these tensions. Rollups increase throughput because they move execution off L1, while requiring proof on L1 that L2 executed correctly. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/01/almost-everything-you-need-to-know-ab…

Agreed that conceptual simplicity is always best, and the current Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST doesn't have provable guarantees yet (though seems to be working in practice). I'm excited to see slight modifications to the consensus/forkchoice algo that do have provable guarantees, like [Goldfish](https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/09/goldfish) from Paradigm Research.

You'd be surprised! Some of the best smart contract security folks in the space are pseudonymous and I imagine many organizations would work with them without needing to know their legal identity. One of those people is samczsun[1] who, amongst other things, famously prevented a potential ~$350m hack. [1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/team/samczsun/posts

Some of my favorite "Intro to Bitcoin" pieces - "Bitcoin For The Open Minded Skeptic" - https://www.paradigm.xyz/Bitcoin_For_The_Open_Minded_Skeptic.pdf "Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholder Letter" - https://www.microstrategy.com/content/dam/website-assets/collateral/bi…

Yes, but the signatures are what's keeping your funds secure, not the hash. To explain why, we need to talk about a type of nonstandard transaction people used to do as a sort of puzzle: hash-only outputs. This is a Bitcoin transaction whose outputs can only be spent by someone who knows the input that gives a particular SHA-256 output. Cute, right? Problem is, this is a proof of knowledge, not a proof of identity. Anyone else can replicate it once the problem is solved and the solution does not restrict itself to whoever is identified as the first solver. Which means that the only thing that keeps people from claiming THEY were the first to solve it is the Sybil-resistance that keeps the blockchain from being reorg'd. In Ethereum we call this the "dark forest" problem[0] - anything in the mempool that is not cryptographically locked down can and will be manipulated to the benefit of others. Smart contracts make it way more lucrative to scan the mempool for manipulable transactions, because instead of looking for the one guy solving old SHA-256 puzzles you now have potentially millions of arbitrage opportunities to find. But this isn't limited to Ethereum. It's whoever mines[1] the block wins. So if quantum computing breaks RSA, that turns all existing coins into SHA-256 puzzles on a blockchain whose users haven't internalized the maximal extent of transaction malleability. The only way to avoid having your coins stolen would be to coordinate with trustworthy miners to…

This essay scared me away from Ethereum, among other coins, for good: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

Here's a good explainer on the need for specialised hardware for zk-proof & encryption algos: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware#hardware-matters

Interesting, everstrike is a option market that sells a type of option they call an everlasting option. They say it was co-invented by non other than SBF: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/05/everlasting-options

Speaking of Ethereum, related: Ethereum is a Dark Forest (2020): https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

> transaction front running For anyone interested, see: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

Interesting coincidence, I was reading this paper after seeing it being quoted here: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

> Could be that the Wormhole team spotted the bug, patched it, but the attacker got to it before the patch could be rolled out. It's a dark forest. Many predators who are smarter, faster and better connected than you are silently watching, ready to exploit your mistakes and ignorance for their profit. Dark Forest -> https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

Agreed that it's a good idea from that perspective. It doesn't help that Coinbase listed ETH2 as a separate asset in their app to represent staked yield producing Ethereum. It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/

Link to company confirming payment: https://twitter.com/josephdelong/status/1431314816698916865 Link to researcher writeup: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/08/two-rights-might-make-a-wrong/

Miner extracted value. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/

Imagine my delight as a crypto cynic who only admires gold/stablecoin and had recently created a article just for hn (and thus the name) about this... and how stablecoins make sense But I had literally said that stripe should've actually ventured into and created their own cryptocurrency or something... Tada, I might be one of the happiest person thinking that I actually really predicted something by my own observations. here's the blog post: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to-fall-the-… By what I meant most crypto, I meant anything aside from stablecoin (like gold backed/usd backed) Now that being said, I am still a little critic as to I don't see any offical stripe message and I don't see a way on how it would be implemented? Like one of the things that I wished in my article was this idea that someone on twitter originally asked where currently if you had money in stripe and wanted to pay it anywhere else, you had to have it enter your bank which might take 14 days and then lets say you want to give it to someone else who has stripe(think anthropic), then they would get it back again after 14 days So someone basically asked to create something similar to a stripe card. I think that this blockchain is it, except I feel like that you could send money to anyone in a non kyc manner too via this which is again a plus point for sometimes where I feel like that in this world every transaction is usually tracked and as such…

https://www.paradigm.xyz/2023/06/intents Check this out

"The main thing we know about the QHL’s software is that it is large and complex enough to defeat a years-long “software archeology” effort directed at determining whether the nodes can be trusted (in the end, they cannot)." "cheap, effective sensor nodes lead to a government with the capacity for ubiquitous surveillance, which leads to a police state, which leads to societal collapse or worse." It feels helpful to reframe "can it be trusted?" as "who knows more about its emergent runtime behavior?" This makes it more obvious that there are answers that can't be found by staring at the source code. Vinge was likely aware of the unanticipated behavior of the Morris worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm) when he wrote Deepness. In the years since this book, we've seen more examples (stuxnet[1], ethereum[2]) of software with behavior unanticipated by -- and even weaponized against -- its creators. (I'm very interested in this subject, and research ways to prevent unanticipated runtime behavior. My approach can be summarized as, "keep software small and simple to stay out of dark forests[3].") [1] "accidentally spreading beyond its intended target" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event [3] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

I find the "dark forest" of Ethereum (https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/) fascinating rather than terrifying, though I might be scared if I put in a good chunk of money and risked losing it (which is why I don't plan to invest myself). There's an intellectual beauty in creating a world people can choose to join, where "code is law", developers construct castles out of air and pure logic, trying to write "correct-by-design" code, and others look for creative ways to exploit the letter of the contracts. It reminds me of the beauty of formally verifiable algorithms (sorting algorithm bugs, probing hashmaps, distributed systems), various models and tradeoffs for undefined behavior in C++ and LLVM and Rust, atomic memory orderings and using Loom to find bugs, or binary exploitation and vulnerability development. Though I haven't actually worked on any blockchain tech and don't plan to start. However I don't want a Web3 built around "pay-to-play" which rejects the idea that anyone can read, write, and publish without paying for the privilege. The web I want is closer to Gemini (a simple transfer protocol and a hypertext format built around user-chosen presentation), instead of HTML's complex element hierarchies often unreadable without CSS's author-dictated formatting, JS's drive-by code execution by design, or Ethereum's rejection of permissionless access.