[pavlov]

Nice work, but honestly I'm not sure why they bother.

The article states that the purpose of these smart contracts is:

"Stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire"

That's an obvious scam. Anyone who gave real money to such a cause has already lost it. So why is the author giving away his time to help the scammers?

[daanavitch]

'Yield farming' has been very popular the past few months. Compound Finance was the first to kick off the hype by giving away their governance tokens to people that used their platform. You can compare it to Facebook giving you some of their stock by being an active user.

The end game of those governance tokens is for them to control the whole platform, so absolutely no changes can be made to the platform without being voted in by the token holders. All of this is enforced trustlessly on the blockchain through smart contracts. As a token holder you really own part of the platform.

This is a very powerful concept, so a lot of people are interested in buying those governance tokens outright. So what you can do is put your money in one of those platforms, receive governance tokens and sell them to people that want to buy them outright. You can make quite good money doing this.

Now a lot of projects popped up that basically had nothing to offer, yet people were still buying their governance tokens, meaning you could still make money by putting your money in there and selling those tokens to those people quick before those tokens became worthless, basically an advanced game of chicken.

So what I'm saying is not all of those 'stake your money and receive tokens' are outright scams. There are some very legitimate projects being built that give away governance tokens. Uniswap comes to mind, the most popular decentralized exchange, doing over half a billion in volume yearly. There's of course a lot more nuance and not everything works as it should yet, but there's a lot of interesting stuff being built every day.

[vvpan]

Half a billion daily you mean, hehe.

Glad to see informed comments, BTW.

[gambiting]

I just don't understand the entire article - who is this guy? What is he doing? Why is he doing it? What are the dozens of different acronyms in this article and what do they mean? Who owns the 9.6M dollars and where was it at the risk of going?

Maybe this is a good article for someone deep into crypto, but for myself, as a casual morning read - I have no idea what happened.

[superjan]

What I pieced together from the referenced “dark forest” article, ethereum cryptocurrency allows you to upload programs (smart contracts) that specify under what conditions cryptocurrency changes hands. If there are bugs in these programs, the money can be stolen. Fixing the bugs after the fact is only possible with new contracts, and there are bad actors constantly scanning the newly uploaded contracts, copy them while making themselves the beneficiary. This is fully automated. To bypass this they gave the contract directly to a miner, so it is only publicly visible after it is run/completed. I can imagine the appeal of working on this, it is really a specialized type of unpaid white hat security researcher.

[Paradigma11]

The money was in limbo due to a bug in a contract. There are contracts (monsters) that scan for such bugs and situations to profit from them. The guy tried to save the money from the monsters and failed.

The situation was worse since it happened already in the mempool where the pending transactions reside.

I am dabbling a bit in the Tezos currency and environment and find this 2 language projects interesting aimed to increase safety: https://github.com/metastatedev/juvix (alpha) and https://archetype-lang.org/ Not saying it might have helped in the concrete case.

[Kiro]

This is not the same article as https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ec...

Here they actually managed to save the funds.

[Octopodes]

Honestly I just read through it like it was a cyberpunk short story. His heart is pounding as he collaborates with super-hackers all over the world in an effort to rescue some desperate person's millions. All of the jargon was totally lost on me but gave it a certain flavor.

[brmgb]

My personal take on it is that between the anime avatar, the constant verbiage, the hero complex and the relectance to properly document things, it feels more like kids playing at finance than actual professional.

[rsync]

"Stake your tokens with us and you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire"

Forgive me - I thought that was tongue in cheek ? I thought the op was humorously paraphrasing some current, popular trend in ethereum contracts ?

No ? That's the actual function of these contracts ?

Can someone point me to one of these in the wild where I can see the actual pitch / advertisement ?

[falava]

> Can someone point me to one of these in the wild where I can see the actual pitch / advertisement ?

https://uniswap.org/blog/uni/

[vvpan]

And where do you see the "make you rich part"?

[nwah1]

I literally just saw someone advising people to liquidate their 401K to buy uniswap. Whether they explicitly say it is a get rich quick scheme or not, this is the message the marks are receiving.

[vvpan]

Wow. Did that person give an explanation why? I follow "blockchain world" fairly closely and I really fail to see much value to UNI. But I have seen people speak quiet exuberantly about it. I am wondering what their thesis is.

[falava]

"you could be the next cryptocurrency millionaire"

I don't see that as equal to "rich".

[pavlov]

That page's focus on ICO-style complex token allocation schemes rather than actual use cases is a giveaway.

[SiempreViernes]

For the glory? Because even chumps deserve justice? Because someone needs to defend the reputation of digicoins?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Two things: if digicoins have a deservedly bad reputation, maybe it shouldn't be defended. And: if this is defending their reputation I'd hate to see what attacking it looks like. I have never wanted less to be involved in cryptocurrency or been more skeptical of it's future than now having finished reading this article.

[mlang23]

Same here. Having read this article, I know why I never wanted to have anything to do with cryptocurrency. Its a scam all over the place.