The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me.
For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me.
I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.
My firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.
A few years ago I wrote some toy code to scan for raw texts stored on Ethereum. Some were interesting to read. See below (the way to read: expand "click to see more" -> "Input Data" -> "view input as" - select UTF8)
It would be $700 the link literally tells you that. And you could do it for much cheaper by just lower the gas cost. They used 900 gwei, you can get a transaction through most days for 90 gwei. Right now you could do it for 165 gwei.
This is a bit above my paygrade but I think this type of transaction doesn't depend on any state, so you can expect it to succeed even if it gets mined a few days after you submit it?
If so you could just set the gas price to 50 gwei and wait.
Hello Qiu Shifu, hello world.Do you know? We appeared to be cool and smart when we first met. The truth is, we are both childish and stupid (in a good way). We do not know each other for very long, but we get use to each other faster than light. We think alike. We have similar minds. We know what the other wants without much asking. We make fun of each other. We make fun of the blockchain. We make fun of the world. Yes, you and me are fun-making-massive-attacks terrorists. Who are you? I remember you elegantly spilled strawberry milk out of your mouth on a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing like my young sister. You asked me to conduct pyramid schemes with your twinkling big beautiful eyes. You encouraged me to travel to India and North Korea like a Hajid encouraging his fellows. You and me climbed up the tallest chimney in 798 factory trembling like a spring chicken. You woke me up and asked me to run with you and enjoyed Jian Bing Guo Zi for breakfast. You are so abnormal, and I enjoy doing all these with you. What are you? You are a very smart thinker and you are smart enough to do anything be it investing to marketing. You dreamt about being an artist and I think I will be your broker. You are always full of beautiful passion and dreams about the world and I wish they will all come true. No, they are coming true. You are so cute, and I think nothing else can be even as close to your cuteness.Your eyes are more beautiful than the most beautiful lakes. I do not only want to stand on the tip of your nose and dive into the water, I want to be the pisces that swim in the water forever, one fish in each of your eyes. Out of the water, I die. Here and now, on this Ethereum Block, I am ledgering on the network just to tell the entire world how lucky I am to have found the most astonishingly adorable woman since I am a very normal grown man with barely basic programming skills. You fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You re the on my top list, you are the objective of my objective, like an angel that rescued my stupid lonely soul in David Tao s songs; and at the same time like a cult religious leader running pyramid scheme that takes my ass for sacrafice and I can never say no, and instead I recklessly offer you my properties, passion and love. For every minute that I have been with you, it is full of happiness and joy. Can I have so more of this in the rest of my time? More minutes, more hours, more days, and even years? There is only one solution to that problem. You, be mine. O shifu
Proof-of-work was created precisely to prevent a Sybil attack, but while allowing an open network (i.e. not having to buy the token from the creators).
You need a form of scarcity to prevent a Sybil attack.
Solved cryptographic puzzles of an adjustable difficulty is one such form of scarcity.
Proof of work, it’s inefficiency, or it’s security implications on transactions more generally are not relevant to your comments on the vulnerability of their coin faucet or the veracity of their claims.
They related these two points by saying that either it’s hackable, or there’s something weird going on under the hood, and that proof of stake alleviates these issues. Idk if I agree or disagree but it seemed straightforward and relevant what they were asserting.
There were three concepts being conflated in the comment I originally replied to: Sybil attacks, double spending prevention mechanisms like Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, and exactly-once delivery to members of a group (i.e. what a coin faucet does and the creepy biometric privacy destroying Orb thing TFA reacts to). TFA discusses an identification problem, and how this particular solution is creepy and privacy-destroying.
A Sybil attack is a single or a small number of entities counterfeiting multiple peer identities so as to compromise a disproportionate share of the system. The actual network of communicating nodes that have copies of the distributed ledger (whether they be participant wallets, miners, validators, stakers, or any other kind of node), and the append-only list or tree of wallet-to-wallet transactions (i.e. the distributed ledger) are distinct, and may be what's tripping up some.
Within that distributed ledger, proof of work or proof of stake aren't what prevents the Sybils from using your (or others') identities on a cryptocurrency's network without your private key. Transaction signatures alone are the mechanism that prevents impersonation. Sybils can flood a cryptocurrency network with transactions with fake signatures all they want, but the transactions would be invalidated the moment that any node appending to the distributed ledger attempts to verify those transactions against its copy of the blockchain or ledger. In Bitcoin's case, the wallet address is the public key for that wallet, and the transaction signature is easily verified by using the source wallet (the one that has a balance) address as the public key for signature verification. (The wallet address is a hash of the public key, and I'm oversimplifying.)
The function of Proof of Work is to mitigate double spending by the same identity, which is a different concept from a Sybil attack, and is not even a type of Sybil attack. That double spending would otherwise "fork" the distributed ledger, and cause two different parallel versions of the distributed ledger to exist - one in which the destination wallet A has the transacted coin, and another in which the destination wallet B has the transacted coin. The iterated game miners play in PoW makes it computationally infeasible for a single party to double spend without controlling more than 50% of mining (e.g. hashing) power in the communications network of participating nodes. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, spending the same Bitcoin wallet balance twice by signing two different transactions using the same wallet private key. That is not a Sybil attack because the double spend (i.e. both transactions) originate from the same wallet. Double spending by a single identity is irrelevant to TFA, and not what TFA is talking about.
TFA responds to a coin faucet proposal (Worldcoin's "Orb" mechanism) that uses a biometric challenge to verify that coins are distributed to flesh and blood humans only, and exactly once. They're mitigating an identity problem with coin faucets, not an integrity or double spending problem that Proof of Work mitigates. (And in a creepy, biometric privacy destroying way, we'll get to that later.)
Coin faucets can be used to give some value (e.g. a small amount of cryptocurrency) to as large a population as possible to enable, for example, developers to play around with the cryptocurrency and new users to try it out before buying in with their own money. The referenced coin faucet is proposed as a wealth (re?)distribution mechanism. Currently, coin faucets mitigate a single or small number of individuals from consuming all of their cryptocurrency by restricting IP addresses, browser cookies, wallet addresses, and other forms of identification. The "Worldcoin Orb" hardware device for that identification collects biometric information (i.e. facial recognition, eye recognition, etc.) centrally to ensure that only flesh and blood humans receive the initial grant of their cryptocurrency. One of the comments here previously mentioned that you might be able to just spoof the output phashes of these "Orb" devices to perform a Sybil attack on the coin faucet in TFA that uses biometric phashes.
Hopefully this helps explain why this type of Sybil attack is distinct from attacks on the proof of work or proof of stake mechanisms, such as owning 51% of the mining power on a POW network or all the validators on a POS network.
As an aside: An encoded, encrypted, or hashed version of your biometrics that can be used to identify you from those biometrics is still biometrics. As long as it is generated from the source material, and uniquely identifies an individual, it's still biometrics, and still creepy facial recognition, IMO.
Just wanted to say I really appreciate this long and thoughtful response - and sure you are probably proving the OP wrong, I just don't think that what they wrote was inconsistent, even if it turned out to be wrong.
In this case, there are 2 graphs/networks (3 if you count the "Orbs"), 3 different kinds of Sybil attacks, double spending, ECC signatures, and more. It's easy to lose track. I wrote it to check my own understanding.
As a former blockchain enthusiastic, I would say do spend some time (if you can afford) to play with it as a hobby, but that's pretty much it. There is a limit the "blockchain applications" can achieve. Many successful ones have a similar form of re-interpreting a hash, e.g. CryptoKitty or crypto zombie games and even the now shinny NFT. It can be fun to work on some blockchain projects, as many exercises are like clipping a duck's wings and then figuring out how to coax it into somehow climbing up a tree.
Also the blockchain space is a big echo chamber. There are lots of fallacies that the enthusiasts are blinded to. For instance, there is the illusion of validity, i.e. confusing the correct identification of a problem (e.g. abused of centralised power) with the correctness in a proposed solution (e.g. fully removing trust). But as long as one is aware of these, it's fun.
Probably start by building a smart contract to experience the limitations (and the WTFs). Then probably move on to study ZKP (which probably can have some real-world usage)
Possibly one business will come into being: quit-Facebook coaching. Probably won't be as big an industry as smoke-quitting or Alcoholics Anonymous but might still be profitable.
I have just started to learn differential privacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy), and am wondering if the following might be feasible in principle: on the browser level, instead of blocking the trackers, add a certain level of noise to the submitted data. This might form a truce between the end users and the trackers. Through statistics, the trackers might still be able to learn something about the end user group as a population; at the same time, each individual user's privacy isn't breached much more than they are completely offline. Admittedly this might be ridiculous and is just me under Dunning–Kruger effect as a beginner in this field.
