Emerging Technologies | Alessandro Perilli

You can’t overcome the 90–9–1 rule

peris — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 08:36:07 +0000

User participation often more or less follows a 90–9–1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

…
The problem is that the overall system is not representative of average web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from. This can cause trouble for several reasons:

Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the “netroots,” it will almost certainly lose because such candidates’ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building internet access services.
Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

…
How to Overcome Participation Inequality

You can’t.

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Tokens worth more than $2.5M USD are lost forever in attempted transfers to exchanges

peris — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:03:13 +0000

The METoken contract knows that Faucet has a balance, but the only way that it can transfer that balance is if it receives a transfer call from the address of the contract.

Somehow we need to make the Faucet contract call the transfer function in METoken. If you’re wondering what to do next, don’t. There is no solution to this problem.

The MET sent to Faucet is stuck, forever.

Only the Faucet contract can transfer it, and the Faucet contract doesn’t have code to call the transfer function of an ERC20 token contract.

Perhaps you anticipated this problem. Most likely, you didn’t. In fact, neither did hundreds of Ethereum users who accidentally transferred various tokens to contracts that didn’t have any ERC20 capability.

According to some estimates, tokens worth more than roughly $ 2.5 million USD (at the time of writing) have gotten “stuck” like this and are lost forever.

One of the ways that users of ERC20 tokens can inadvertently lose their tokens in a transfer, is when they attempt to transfer to an exchange or another service.

They copy an Ethereum address from the website of an exchange, thinking they can simply send tokens to it.
However, many exchanges publish receiving addresses that are actually contracts! These contracts are only meant to receive ether, not ERC20 tokens, most often sweeping all funds sent to them to “cold storage” or another centralized wallet.

Despite the many warnings saying “do not send tokens to this address,” lots of tokens are lost this way.

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Writing smart contracts in Ethereum is like aerospace engineering

peris — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 22:09:21 +0000

Smart contract code is unforgiving. Every bug can lead to monetary loss. You should not treat smart contract programming the same way as general-purpose programming. Writing DApps in Solidity is not like creating a web widget in JavaScript. Rather, you should apply rigorous engineering and software development methodologies, as you would in aerospace engineering or ... Read more

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For every mistake made in the Ethereum world, all participants get a little richer

peris — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 13:16:27 +0000

Sending a transaction to the wrong address will probably burn the ether sent, rendering it forever inaccessible (unspendable), since most addresses do not have a known private key and therefore no signature can be generated to spend it. It is assumed that validation of the address happens at the user interface level. In fact, there ... Read more

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Cryptocurrency is a security defense mechanism of a (permissionless) blockchain, not the main feature

peris — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 12:17:41 +0000

Because there is no central authority controlling who can participate, decentralized consensus systems must defend against Sybil attacks, in which the attacker creates a majority of seemingly independent participants which are secretly under his control. The defense is to ensure that the reward for a successful Sybil attack is less than the cost of mounting it. Thus participation in a permissionless blockchain must be expensive, so miners must be reimbursed for their costly efforts. There is no central authority capable of collecting funds from users and distributing them to the miners in proportion to these efforts. Thus miners’ reimbursement must be generated organically by the blockchain itself; a permissionless blockchain needs a cryptocurrency to be secure.

Because miners’ opex and capex costs cannot be paid in the blockchain’s cryptocurrency, exchanges are required to enable the rewards for mining to be converted into fiat currency to pay these costs. Someone needs to be on the other side of these sell orders. The only reason to be on the buy side of these orders is the belief that “number go up”. Thus the exchanges need to attract speculators in order to perform their function.

Thus a permissionless blockchain requires a cryptocurrency to function, and this cryptocurrency requires speculation to function.

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A clear and simple explanation of why Ethereum needs transactions validation and gas fees

peris — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 14:18:24 +0000

Turing proved that you cannot predict whether a program will terminate by simulating it on a computer. In simple terms, we cannot predict the path of a program without running it.

Turing-complete systems can run in “infinite loops,” a term used (in oversimplification) to describe a program that does not terminate.

It is trivial to create a program that runs a loop that never ends. But unintended never-ending loops can arise without warning, due to complex interactions between the starting conditions and the code.

In Ethereum, this poses a challenge: every participating node (client) must validate every transaction, running any smart contracts it calls. But as Turing proved, Ethereum can’t predict if a smart contract will terminate, or how long it will run, without actually running it (possibly running forever).

Whether by accident or on purpose, a smart contract can be created such that it runs forever when a node attempts to validate it. This is effectively a DoS attack.

And of course, between a program that takes a millisecond to validate and one that runs forever are an infinite range of nasty, resource-hogging, memory-bloating, CPU-overheating programs that simply waste resources.
In a world computer, a program that abuses resources gets to abuse the world’s resources.

How does Ethereum constrain the resources used by a smart contract if it cannot predict resource use in advance?

To answer this challenge, Ethereum introduces a metering mechanism called gas.

As the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) executes a smart contract, it carefully accounts for every instruction (computation, data access, etc.). Each instruction has a predetermined cost in units of gas.

When a transaction triggers the execution of a smart contract, it must include an amount of gas that sets the upper limit of what can be consumed running the smart contract.
The EVM will terminate execution if the amount of gas consumed by computation exceeds the gas available in the transaction.

Gas is the mechanism Ethereum uses to allow Turing-complete computation while limiting the resources that any program can consume.

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Real estate investments could become an income opportunity for everyone in a web3 tokenized economy

peris — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:10:03 +0000

Tokens could either be issued for existing real estate or for a real estate project under development.

Private homeowners could issue fractional tokens of an apartment they want to buy, which would allow them to raise funds without needing to go through a bank or take out a private loan. The token holders would be co-investors and could collect fractional rent in proportion to the amount of shares they hold.

People who were previously excluded from such investments for economic reasons could now invest in only a fraction of a whole unit, which would make the market more inclusive to those who have less economic means.

Rent collection is administered by the smart contract and ownership is more easily transferred. If, for example, another person buys 5 percent of the tokenized value of your apartment, proportional rent could be paid out on a monthly basis automatically by the smart contract.

In the case of a sale of the apartment at a future date, fractional token holders of that apartment could get their money back, which might also be automatically managed and enforced by the smart contract.

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Are fungible web3 tokens really fungible?

peris — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 01:13:29 +0000

Fungibility refers to the fact that units of money are equal. Every token of that currency must be treated equally, even if it has been used for illegal purposes by previous owners. This is to protect the rights of innocent recipients of those tokens, who might not have known of the illegal activities. Fungibility is ... Read more

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The time bomb is ticking for Bluetooth

peris — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 16:05:14 +0000

Everything points to Apple taking sound quality very seriously with the AirPods 3, and all of its modern-day audio products for that matter, and the recent launches of Lossless, Hi-Res Lossless and (in a slightly different way) Spatial Audio point to a real push towards higher audio quality. But there’s a catch, as far as I can see it – a bottle-neck that’s been preventing real qualitative leaps in the sound of wireless headphones essentially since wireless headphones came into being. I’m talking about Bluetooth, of course, which almost all wireless headphones, including AirPods, rely upon and which doesn’t have the data rate for hi-res or even lossless audio. I ask Geaves whether the use of Bluetooth is holding back his hardware and stifling sound quality.

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and… I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

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Virtual money is much older than cash

peris — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:27:20 +0000

The moment one casts matters on a broad historical scale, though, the first thing one learns is that there’s nothing new about virtual money. Actually, this was the original form of money. Credit system, tabs, even expense accounts, all existed long before cash. These things are as old as civilization itself. True, we also find that history tends to move back and forth between periods dominated by bullion—where it’s assumed that gold and silver are money—and periods where money is assumed to be an abstraction, a virtual unit of account. But historically, credit money comes first, and what we are witnessing today is a return of assumptions that would have been considered obvious common sense in, say, the Middle Ages—or even ancient Mesopotamia.

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