Privacy Coin Forks and Hacks
DUPLICATE POST. Feel free to read and comment, but no need to upvote!
Verge got hacked! Yesterday, somebody found a way to attack the Verge blockchain, and spent at least 13 hours mining one block per second. As the maximalists say, “this is good for Bitcoin”.
Verge belongs to a group of tokens that seem excessively overvalued to me. I owned a little for a month or so before I realized I hated the wallet and felt my money was better put towards a more serious project. I missed the huge pump (about two weeks after I sold, natch). Such is the life of a cryptocurrency enthusiast.
My takeaway (which I say at risk of ending up on r/buttcoin...again…) is that was a good thing.
Why?
Because we need to discover which systems actually work and which don’t. That’s much better now with a total cryptocurrency market cap below $300 billion than when it is 10 or 20 times that, and major business is done on the blockchain.
Monero Fork
Apparently the Monero fork to prevent ASICS from dominating hash power resulted in four competing projects. It's probably best to avoid touching any of these new chains unless you know how to move your coins without being susceptible to a replay attack on the main chain. In case you've never heard that term, the concept is this: let's say you want to sell those "extra" tokens that you got because of a fork. If you make a mistake, your main chain coins are at risk for being stolen by somebody with not a lot of work. I'm not exactly sure how it would work on the Monero chain, since transactions are shielded, but "wait and see" is the best attitude.
If you absolutely must sell your forked Monero coins, realize you may lose everything if you screw it up.
Other Minority Positions
Many Steemians are (rightfully) angry about certain posters who shamelessly upvote their own posts, often making thousands of dollars a day in rewards that violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Steem blockchain. Are they stealing? Not exactly...but they do lower the value of rewards to the rest of us...even if individual losses are in the order of pennies.
Some have called for these people to be blocked by the witnesses. I tend to disagree with this. I look at these self promoters as canaries in the Steem goldmine; if we believe that censorship resistance is good (with the obvious caveats against breaking the law), then these sorts of people should be ridiculed, but not censored on the blockchain.
It’s a fact that there are those who will outright abuse any system they’re a part of. Decentralized blockchains try to address this, but it’s impossible to avoid it. Human beings are sinful creatures who are going to act irrationally (in an economic sense) at times. The best tonic to this is to create strong communities based on similar values, which becomes an analog to city states created in ancient times that were designed to protect from bandits and invaders.
Yes-Steem communities are the prototypes of internet city states. We’ll see how this unwinds over the next few years/decades, but I expect this all to be far more interesting than any of our wildest imaginations.
-Jeff
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Security is probably my biggest issue with any financial instrument that is handled over a network, which pretty much means everything nowadays. Unless you're hoarding cash under the bed or stacking gold in the shed. Then, you're probably safe from the hackers, but not necessarily from the traditional analog robbers.
I'm glad that there is more or less global decentralization of the servers for Steemit and that there are protocols in place if one of the witness servers or more come under some kind of attack. I wish we could get rid of these phishing scams, though.
The thing you said about finding out things now while the market cap is relatively low compared to what it's going to be when more cash floods into crypto rings true. There will be so much more need for security as well as functionality at that point for the STEEM blockchain and everything associated with it.
Beep! Beep! @shadow3scalpel at your service. I am here to assist all military members on Steemit. This HumVee will be scouting posts from a list of Veterans that is maintained by @chairborne. If you are a Veteran and new to Steemit, and you have questions or want to join the Veterans community, reply to this comment. We got your six, unless you are in the rear with the gear. Ooh-Rah!
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Monero was forked? can someone tell me what is it mean? i hold some monero at bittrex is it mean something for me?
Hopefully we can learn some things from this hack that might keep us safe. You're right, better it happened now than later, when there's so much more money on the line.
As for self upvoting, some posts take a very long time to create with high quality content. Everybody's time in not free, much less cheap. So one day I hope to be able to upvote my own posts, hopefully with more than .02 plankton cash. 😂
Every cent counts!
It wass too long time for hacked.. This is good?
The verge hack was a little disappointing lately
Bad news that verge got hacked💀. But i appreciate your unrivaled writing and sharing your book about trading cryptocurrencies thats helpful for us. We can learn many important thing about trading.
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Uh, weird, duplicate post. Sorry folks, but thanks for the comments and will respond when I have time!
Did you use the wordpress plugin for this post? maybe something there fuck up
I think that's what happened, as I may have had this scheduled out but then changed it...not quite sure, so I'll continue to investigate before I blame anyone.