Were they on dexes or cexes? If centralized, don’t you get Tex reports? If not centralized, how will they ever know the extent of the trades?

Of course it's not completely gone. Chain analysis companies, which tax authorities consult, will have backup copies.

I'm talking about the record on optimistic.etherscan.io, which they tell you to point to as the definitive blockchain for Optimism. I am looking at my transaction history right now, and it does not show any history from then in the human-readable part of the site.

They recently updated it so you can download a CSV with history from before then (but otherwise no interoperability with the interfaces ETH clients expect).

You're probably looking at a client's local cache of transactions (which I have as well), which doesn't help, since they have limited info within a transaction, and depend on you going to (you guessed it) the etherscan endpoints to see the rest.

The extra 42 was just my little hack to get our bounty to appear higher on the list. Nice that it ended up seeing a record too though. :)

Isn't that the actual bug? That balances are kept at two places? What actually happens in SetBalance() if rcfg.UsingOVM ==true?

So... I guess what it boils down to is 'How does Optimism manage it's state trie'? I'd really enjoy a more in-depth explanation for this.

Okay... in a sense, yes, in hindsight, I should have planned for this. But there are a number of reasons I think this kind of response is too dismissive.

First of all, no matter how well you prepare, there is always going to be one level higher of system failure that you "should have planned for". In the npm-Linux-box-borking debacle, there were people insisting you should never have run npm except on fully disposable hardware with an instantly replaceable dev environment (which is the only thing that would have let you shrug it off).[B]

Got mugged walking home? Should have taken a safer route. Took a safe route? Should have walked with a friend. Still got mugged? Should have walked with two friends. For all n, should have walked with n+1 friends.

Second, it's painting with a tad broad of a brush to call me complacent on crypto. I've filed crypto taxes since 2017 and kept cost basis records from years before. I'm aware systems fail and (outside of this) have set appropriate backups and cached critical transactions to spreadhseets. Even here, even with nothing done by the Optimism team to correct their mistake, I'm not actually doomed, as I can file taxes based on an input-output analysis of my Optimism transactions as a good enough first pass, and correct later. The issue is unnecessary convenience.

In fact, as things stand today, I'm in exactly the "safe" position you thought I was -- "oh, it's there, you just have to query right". Indeed I do! Now that I've pulled the tx data from the alternate sources, I "just" have to yak-shave out a meaningful read of all the transactions. (Update: per sibling, you can download the transactions from a different tab but you still have to do some transformation.) But none of that takes away from the point that this is huge, avoidable inconvenience and flaky community relations.

Remember, even if I had cached them, I'd still be stuck having to manually import them into my crypto tax software, which is a failure from usability.

Third, there are reasons to expect optimistic.etherscan.io as a reliable source to point to.

1) When you set up e.g. Metamask, the Optimism site gives you exactly one URL to point to, with no alternatives or warning that one day it might be missing history. [A] The very fact that Metamask equates "nothing from that url" with "no transactions" means they were treating it as mission-critical.

2) The entire ETH community outside of Optimism relies upon etherscan.io for most of their own tooling ethereum projects. All sources for ETH projects say to connect there, as if it's inconceivable that there could be an outage or need for some fallback.

3) It would have been trivial to keep the transaction history up. There was already a server somewhere (etherscan-owned or otherwise) serving transaction history. All they had to do was configure it to be able to check transactions for being from before that switchover, and ping that (static) DB for a subset of them.

(Remember, this isn't, at least so far, an issue of cost: they do plan to get optimistic.etherscan.io back up as a reliable endpoint for the pre-upgrade txns, they just didn't think to upgrade a way that would facilitate such queries of already-existing immutable data.)

And, for the final kicker.

4) Optimism maintainers themselves didn't even think to locally cache all the transactions they'd need! (As in the one mentioned who only logged a proper subset of taxable events.) If the very people who live and breathe this stuff overlooked it, I think I can be forgiven for overlooking it, as they expect even casual users to join.

[A] https://metamask.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403700785691...

[B] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16438630

I mean they just disclosed a 1.6mil hack 40days ago.

I like polygon and unfortunately feel like hacks/stolen funds are part of the maturing process for blockchain projects but im not yet ready to say they are building a reputation for solid secure code.

Well on the same site ethernodes.org, the majority of Ethereum nodes are running on AWS at 45% [0]. Due to this announcement from AWS [1], it is going to become even more centralized.

So the claim of 'extremely decentralized network' is somewhat of a myth and a falsehood.

[0] https://ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/03/announcin...

> That's also a big plus for Bitcoin, because it's been around the longest and because it's so much simpler than more complex chains

I’ve always understood this on a basic level, but reading an entire exploit debrief with intricate technical details really hammered this point home for me.

Are the stakes that huge for potential exploiters? It seems that exploits can write off a bunch of value from the exploited but, at least for big and quickly noticed exploits, it is hard to launder the gains into the ‘legitimate’ part of the ecosystem with big exchanges and suchlike.

> I use the term liberally as a euphemism for hacking these contracts and taking everything for yourself under the observation that company/community bug bounty systems are broken and undervalued for the value they provide.

hmm...

> ...because many people still don't understand that this is analogous and convertible to money in your bank account especially at these convenient amounts...

FWIW this project doesn't have its own token (this L2 uses ETH as its currency just like the base layer), so the bug bounty payout is denominated in actual USD.

>While we did our best to communicate this months in advance on our twitter, blog, discord, and documentation, it's hard to reach everyone and we totally agree that this is not ideal

That doesn't look like your best. Here's the blog you refer to[1]:

https://optimismpbc.medium.com/

Imagine I came to it around the time of the switchover. Which of those headlines looks like it's alerting me that my transaction history will be gone?

Here's the Optimistic ethereum site:

https://www.optimism.io/

Where is/was the blaring warning about missing transaction data?

Here's the Twitter page[1]:

https://twitter.com/optimismPBC

The only pinned tweet is a cute meme about the whitelist change, nothing to head off frustrated users wondering where transaction history went. (I don't know how to link a historical post in context but I can assure it was not evident on the Twitter feed why I was missing transaction history, and there are no such warnings before.)

The only reason I even got on the Optimism Discord is because none of these places had any information! And then, even when I went to the Discord, and go to #announcements, and look at what was being announced in the runup and release, the loss of transactions still isn't mentioned! [2]

Maintainers talk about the upgrade, to be sure, but not this implication of it.

So no, I don't know how can justify the claim that you made a serious effort to alert users.

[1] Linked from the community tab of https://www.optimism.io/

[2] https://discord.com/channels/667044843901681675/754090866435...

I would disagree, in my experience HN has been pretty anti-crypto for a long time, starting with Bitcoin's announcement thread [1].

Personally, I think people are just tired, as a proponent I'm tired of arguing the same stuff over and over again, I can imagine the other side of that too. At this point, time will decide who's right and wrong, I think that what anyone of us thinks doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

That's not even the most fundamental issue with LN though, it's not a fully thought out system. As LN node count increases the routing complexity increases exponentially, which is the classic problem of routing issues on large graphs that literally every networked system has. The internet solves this with some degree of human intervention to tip the scales to particular routes, which is something that the LN inherently can't (and shouldn't) do. There is some amount of optimization that could take place using common graph routing algorithms like OLSR or others but those represent foundational changes to the protocol which historically LN is allergic to for whatever reason and wouldn't entirely solve the problem in any case.

Simply put - it can't scale to that kind of throughput for a combination of cultural and technical reasons.

Even if that was something to care about, the entire economy works that way. I don't feel that it is a role of the state to whitelist what money can go into what economy, and even though it has assumed that role in the fiat system it is not successful.

So just go where the action is. Don't scam people yourself while you are at it.

But he said "sorry" (somewhat) politely and pulled the "we are fast growing startup"-card .. so you are obligated to forgive him?

It seems quite clear to me (as a third party to this) that the lack of communication w.r.t. this behavior was intentional. Trying to fix a mistake without having to admit having made it in the first place...

Civil discussion is going to collapse even further if bad actors don't stop with the dark patterns.

Exactly, CashApp/RobinHood/Coinbase/Kraken are all bitcoin L2. Centralized and trusted, but L2 nonetheless.

Good question, I don't have an answer for you unfortunately. I have seen people talk about this in the Monero community though so at least they're aware of the issue.

As I said, that's just my opinion really. But Monero uses a dynamic block size. The hardware requirements will increase of course. But hardware becomes cheaper over time so the monetary cost of participation does not increase as quickly as LN where the cost of participation is capital directly.

>In an instance where an L2 is compromised, the potential impact is limited to the integrity of data that individual L2 was contributing to the overall platform.

I think distinction is only meaningful as long as L2s remain a niche curiosity while the majority of transaction volume resides on L1. If the L2 plan succeeds and almost all volume passes through an L2 and one of the major L2s has a bug like in this post, then a large fraction of all ETH could end in the hands of hackers.

The ledger would accurately reflect the moment that a bad actor lifted e.g. 5-10% of the ETH supply off an Arbitrum or StarkNet bridge. Technically the L1 is uncompromised but a lot of money would be "redistributed".

What kinds of transactions do not demand absolute integrity, but still make sense to use a blockchain for? (I don't know much about these sorts of things, I'm actually asking for examples)

execution node (ETH 1.0) diversity is important, but actually more important moving forward is the consensus (beacon chain, fka Ethereum 2.0) diversity. The crawled data here shows that Prysm has almost 2/3s of that: https://migalabs.es/crawler/dashboard

For a good recent/up-to-date summary of the differences, why it matters: https://ethereum.org/ms/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/cl...

And here's a good reference site as well promoting better client diversity before the merge: https://clientdiversity.org/

Yeah it would be great and more on brand for this forum to have neutrality

The actual communities for most projects and general crypto are obnoxious, and probably what has helped push or keep this community to negativity, i could see it flipping to neutral though, judging by the emails I get there are plenty builders and educated proponents here

But the negativity is well deserved

Look at how the crypto-sphere reacted at FEDs returning "stolen" coins to Bitfinex like all praise and "justice served". Only HNers actually raised "hey guys why do you even crypto if FEDs will decide who owns what".

It all ends up being Government-coin and they like it.

All an NFT is at heart a JSON blob like

{ Id: some unique namespaced string (aka, the part that is a non fungible token) Owner: reference to who currently owns it Payload: data that defines the content of the NFT }

You can put this in a database if you want, or use a block chain as your data storage. I expect many of those teams you mentioned are solving their NFT issues by moving their NFTs from block chains onto postgres tables, or putting them in databases from the start. The listed problems have somewhat straightforward solutions by doing so, and many companies have offered NFT marketplaces based on databases for years and years like the Steam marketplace for gaming. They work fine at scale, too. I expect that most popular digital ownership systems do not use a block chain as their back end, though I do not know what the top 10 are {apple, amazon, google, the us government?}. The most advanced team solving the listed problems is without doubt YouTube though.

What block chain NFTs have over database NFTs is hype. There's a lot of wealthy people with money tied up in crypto investments that want to be able to.

The other feature is that the audit history of changes to the Owner field is guaranteed to be public instead of optionally public, and that guarantee is what of questionable value when "crypto people don't deliver anything new" is mentioned.

----

If somebody's managed to make solve identity using a block chain that's quite interesting re: "unique physical access".

I'd expect the block chain to be uniquely incapable of guaranteeing unique access to anything, since access is based on knowing a password, and it's easy to make copies of a password. At best id expect a blockchain to guarantee limited access to people who know one at least one of a set of possible passwords, and a bouncer controls unique access by doing a separate identity checks.

Is this some facial scan? Dna +epigenetics check? Is it trivial to link all your accounts together? What kinds of attacks has it been tested against? Can your twin get in if he knows the right password and borrows your id? Can your spouse get in if you're in the hospital? Next of kin when you die?

Are you envisioning homogenous L2s, or those more specialized in nature? I envision the latter, which would mean the number that any individual entity is exposed to would be limited.

But your point does highlight the UX implications of too much fragmentation, and it’s a worthwhile consideration

zk rollups tend to inherit most of the security features of L1[1] but with some trade-offs.

The trade-off is basically scalability (and thus fees). If the L1 network is so highly congested that each transaction costs $100 or more in the future, a scalable zk rollup that achieves about the same level of security at the cost of < $0.001 may be worth these tradeoffs.

[1] - https://zksync.io/userdocs/security.html#security-overview

I suppose that’s fair. You could theoretically argue for some “integration” between an off-chain centralized database and on-chain wallet - but unless it were just an untrusted pointer, there would need to be some asset managed from a contract to serve as a “proof” of sorts.

If you’re questioning why people would prefer on-chain vs off-chain games, I wager there’s something appealing about the “decentralized” nature of the system that attracts people to on-chain games - and I put decentralized in quotes because it’s not always certain that’s a promise always delivered on, but it’s where the appeal is derived from.

Regarding your other notes - 1. Same theory applies though. One wallet is often seen as a primary wallet (hot) that manages public facing assets - e.g., registered ENS domain, an NFT, etc. 2. It’s certainly not required that all associations live on chain, but if you want core services and verification of ownership, it’s mostly on/chain or bust.

Look at it this way, if x = number of total users, routing nodes will grow O(log x), not O(c^x). The users can grow exponentially, the routing nodes won't because the marginal cost of processing an extra transaction from an end-user is very close to 0.

>> which LN is determined not to do.

What's the source of your opinion?

No it's not.

Even if everyone had channels with the same, single central node it would have more guarantees than Visa does. The single central node could not just decide to keep everyone's money, as participants have the option to create an L1 transaction to withdraw funds if node they have a channel with misbehaves.

I don't know what the third one entails, or whether a distributed ledger actually enables it without also having a centralized legal entity, but the other two seem like they already exist without a distributed ledger.

The limited edition art is really just tracking receipts - you can do that over email if you want and it really doesn't have to be public. Non digital art does fine with private receipt tracking. You can also have a dedicated database that charges art owners a maintenance fee, and tracks who the current owner of each art piece. Basically free tier AWS.

For 2) forever art already existed without any ledger. People store copies of pictures they like because they feel like it. Not being on a ledger doesn't mean Nyan cat will disappear. The ledger might attempt to guarantee that unpopular works stay available, but I don't think you can guarantee that any particular ledger will continue to be active "forever".

They could do a hard fork that prunes out the unpopular art to save on space, and migrate everyone to that one, leaving the old one unhosted. Long term, you're not going to force people to keep spending resources to maintain stuff that nobody cares about

>1) Creating limited editions of generative art.

I personally think that it's not really an interesting feature. Creating scarcity out of something that ought not to be scarce is just a way to infiltrate capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Hacker culture historically went completely against that (phreaking, breaking DRM etc...) but I concede that it's more of a philosophical/political argument than a technical one. I still find it utterly depressing.

I would also argue that there's usually a significant difference between ownership of a token on the blockchain and what the local IP laws says. IP law is messy and sometimes subjective, putting things on a blockchain can make things messier rather than simpler.

>2) "Forever" art like on-chain pixel and ASCII art.

So that one is interesting, but I would argue that it's only true if you consider that the blockchain is "forever". In order for that to be true it means that you have to believe that your blockchain of choice will be considered significant enough by a number of people across... well eternity really. This could be true for the "big" ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, although I'd say the scene is way too young to be sure of that. It's as good a bet as any I suppose.

But here's the thing. We already have "forever" digital "art": the source code of the Linux kernel. There are countless copies of it across the globe, and it'll remain archived for the foreseeable future.

My point here is that if something is significant enough it won't be difficult to convince a bunch of people across time and space to archive it. People do that for old videogames, music albums, usenet posts etc... And unlike the blockchain you can actually curate it, you don't have to archive the neighbor's sandwich picture collection. I'd argue that this curation power is a feature, and the fact that the blockchain just stores everything forever is a bug. It actually means that the bigger the blockchain grows, the less likely it is that people will want to store personal backups of it.

So I don't think the blockchain does anything novel here, and I don't think it does it better. Forcing arbitrary people to store arbitrary data forever regardless of value or interest is just wasteful.

>3) Frankenstein-like adaptations of traditional fintech constructs into a decentralized implementation, such as AMMs.

I think the oracle problem is really going to make "DeFi" a tough sell. There is, in fact, a lot of trust in our financial system, and being able to use a central authority (the justice system) to settle issues makes things a whole lot simpler and efficient.

In general I firmly believe that trust is usually a good thing that makes systems more efficient and this obstination of cryptopeople to get rid of it is more based on political ideology than pragmatism. Trust, but verify. But trust.

These all seem different though.

None function with anonymity by default and you can't sell or even transfer most of these memberships.

I wonder if part of the divide on the "utility" of NFTs involves "internet native" culture (assuming the reality of pseudonyms without need to pierce the veil and use a real name).

You've just outlined how the marginal cost that you originaly stated was near zero, is in fact quite a lot larger than zero (you can't open channels without locking up your node's Bitcoin). Also, each channel opening costs a Bitcoin L1 transaction fee (which is a lot larger than $0.01 and can only really grow from here).

Strictly better than gold is not true.

Gold can be traded without leaving an audit trail, and without a per transaction cost.

Does that answer anything I brought up?

You know, the whole "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"

We moved off the gold standard for a reason (and it's not all geopolitics...)

As a zkSNARK cryptographer, efficient cryptographic proofs are incredibly complex pieces of technology that still have a ways to go before they can match the speed of native execution. Both approaches have pros and cons.

Again, I think the act of "owning" it creates a much different relationship between the collector and that art than simply looking at it. They have skin in the game because they either spent money on the piece, or were able to mint it by being in the right place at the right time.

To be sure, a lot of the "advocacy" is exactly what you describe, where people are just trying to push their bags. But the advocacy I'm talking about is more about the social element of discussing the art with other people in the community.

The website is certainly a valid way to display a limited generative art collection, but it's a different experience. It means that the artist _can_ curate the collection and hide some of the rough edges of the algorithm... but then it loses some of its magic. NFTs have sort of enabled a new sub genre of generative art [1].

[1] https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2021/the-rise-of-long-form-ge...

> if youre not extracting a profit from people enjoying the art, why are you advocating for it? what is your skin in the game? if youre only advocating it to get rid of it by selling it, i dont think thats a genuine advocacy for the piece.

There's an emotional state associated with having paid money, sometimes a lot of money, for something which makes you want to get something in return. That something can be as simple as collective discussion of the art you bought, or propagation of its image into the real world through murals and commissioned derivatives.

It doesn't have to be a speculative interest in re-selling, though I agree that most people entering the space are exclusively interested in the latter.

that has 1 week of finality