Mitigating the negative externalities and existential risks posed by miner-extractable value (MEV) to smart-contract blockchains.
issues/conflicts
Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme
Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud.
Facebook does not understand the marketplace of ideas | Financial Times
But unregulated markets for goods have been shown not to work; and it turns out that unregulated markets for ideas don’t either.
Source: Facebook does not understand the marketplace of ideas | Financial Times
Top Trends in Blockchain Technology; inching towards Web 3.0 – Avivah Litan
In sum, the blockchain back end shouldn’t matter to users – just like the Internet’s DNS or TCP/IP protocols don’t matter to web users. All web users care about is their web-based applications. All Blockchain users need to care about is their decentralized applications.Make no mistake: The days of seamless blockchain interoperability at the ‘atomic’ level are not here yet. Nor are the days of cross chain functionality where a single smart contract can update multiple blockchain platforms using a single process. We won’t see these needed functions go mainstream for at least two years.But the good news is we are seeing some very promising developments that will help move us closer to this end state, as highlighted in our recently published Hype Cycle for Blockchain Technology 2019.source: Hype Cycle for Blockchain Technology, 2019
Source: Top Trends in Blockchain Technology; inching towards Web 3.0 – Avivah Litan
Top Ten Obstacles along Distributed Ledgers Path to Adoption – IEEE Journals & Magazine
This article presents the top ten obstacles towards the adoption of distributed ledgers, ranging from identifying the right ledger to use for the right use case to developing scalable consensus protocols that provide some meaningful notion of public verifiability.
Source: Top Ten Obstacles along Distributed Ledgers Path to Adoption – IEEE Journals & Magazine
Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped by Katharina Pistor – Project Syndicate
After years of disregarding privacy, exploiting user data, and failing to control its platform, Facebook has now unveiled a cryptocurrency and payment system that could take down the entire global economy. Governments must intervene before a company that “moves fast and breaks things” ends up breaking everything.
Source: Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped by Katharina Pistor – Project Syndicate
TILTing 2019 – exploring the journey of crypto-assets across the EU financial legal framework
At TILTing 2019 the Lab presented a study on the legal instruments that are, as of today, applicable to blockchain-based digital assets under European law, and the relative enforcement challenges. The broader question to be tackled is whether and how regulators deal with such challenges, and what are the interests at stake. http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/05/tilting-perspectives-2019-report-2.html
Control as Liability
Generally, unintended consequences of laws, discouraging entire categories of activity when one wanted to only surgically forbid a few specific things, are considered to be a bad thing. Here though, I would argue that the forced shift in developers’ mindsets, from “I want to control more things just in case” to “I want to control fewer things just in case”, also has many positive consequences. Voluntarily giving up control, and voluntarily taking steps to deprive oneself of the ability to do mischief, does not come naturally to many people, and while ideologically-driven decentralization-maximizing projects exist today, it’s not at all obvious at first glance that such services will continue to dominate as the industry mainstreams. What this trend in regulation does, however, is that it gives a big nudge in favor of those applications that are willing to take the centralization-minimizing, user-sovereignty-maximizing “can’t be evil” route.Hence, even though these regulatory changes are arguably not pro-freedom, at least if one is concerned with the freedom of application developers, and the transformation of the internet into a subject of political focus is bound to have many negative knock-on effects, the particular trend of control becoming a liability is in a strange way even more pro-cypherpunk (even if not intentionally!) than policies of maximizing total freedom for application developers would have been. Though the present-day regulatory landscape is very far from an optimal one from the point of view of almost anyone’s preferences, it has unintentionally dealt the movement for minimizing unneeded centralization and maximizing users’ control of their own assets, private keys and data a surprisingly strong hand to execute on its vision. And it would be highly beneficial to the movement to take advantage of it.
Source: Control as Liability
What a Bitcoin ‘Reorg’ Is and What Binance Has to Do With It – CoinDesk
“If you bribe 51 percent of the miners, they will change the ledger for you. [This] tells you just how little irreversibility there is in PoW coins,” tweeted Cornell University professor and researcher in blockchain consensus protocols Emin Gün Sirer.A 51% attack on the blockchain network is not a new attack vector for PoW blockchains. However, as highlighted by Gün Sirer, it’s also not really an attack vector. On very special instances, the majority of self-interested miners on PoW blockchains have voluntarily agreed to alter a transaction history to undo critical situations.While the situation isn’t entirely the same, in the past, blockchain networks have seen their histories altered in the wake of critical moments. This happened on the ethereum blockchain back in 2016 when over $60 million worth of coins were siphoned off from the now-defunct smart contract The DAO. It also happened on the vericoin blockchain back in 2014 after $8 million worth of coins were hacked.While controversial, both decisions were supported by the primary developer community who launched system-wide upgrades or hard forks to enable otherwise infeasible amendments to the blockchain transaction history.Yet those choices weren’t without their repercussions; the resulting ethereum fork resulted in two distinct chains, ethereum and ethereum classic, respectively.A resounding noStill, many in the bitcoin community took to social media to deride the idea as both infeasible as well against the philosophical underpinnings of the technology.In Binance’s particular case, prominent members of the bitcoin community point out that bitcoin being the world’s largest blockchain is a particularly unique case with a reputation to uphold.“Talk of forking or reorganizing the blockchain is close to heresy,” tweeted billionaire bitcoin investor Michael Novogratz. “When the ethereum community did it the project was like 5 months old. A baby. Bitcoin now has $100bn market cap and is a legitimate store of wealth.”It would also be unfair according to Adam Back – CEO of bitcoin development startup Blockstream – given that the latest Binance hack is nowhere near as severe as previous hacks suffered on the bitcoin blockchain.“A Bitcoin reorg is just not happening, and I doubt any Bitcoin industry, miners nor developers considered it either. Recall 2014 $473mil, 2016 bitfinex hack $72mil, 2019 binance $40mil etc. #NotHappening,” tweeted Back.
Source: What a Bitcoin ‘Reorg’ Is and What Binance Has to Do With It – CoinDesk
‘A Loan Shark Situation’: MakerDAO Is Leaving Crypto Borrowers With Rising Bills – CoinDesk
An ethereum protocol for programmatic lending, MakerDAO emerged as a clear market leader in part for its rock-bottom interest rates of 0.5 percent.But the code behind MakerDAO requires interest rates to do more than extract business from borrowers, it’s a technological necessity for keeping its DAI stablecoin worth $1.With interest rates rising to 19.5 percent, and DAI still worth below $1, some early borrowers are angry, feeling as though they were misled.Describing the project’s marketing tactics as akin to digital “loan sharks,” they argue their experience with decentralized finance has been worse than with traditional banking.
Source: ‘A Loan Shark Situation’: MakerDAO Is Leaving Crypto Borrowers With Rising Bills – CoinDesk