Actually... the account model is much easier to use to get an accurate view of all balances than the UTXO model. As for rollbacks, Bitcoin had one in 2010 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident) and a chain fork in 2013 (https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork) both decided by those who could make the decision... and accepted by a majority of nodes, same as with the ETH hard fork
I'm not so sure about understandability at protocol level, I do believe Ethereum to be straightforward but then again I've followed its progress over the years
The traceability of very much part of design of most blockchains, starting with Bitcoin. The whitepaper makes this clear in section "10) Privacy" and the article quotes half of the relevant text.
The remaining half states: "As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner"
Unlike Bitcoin, account based blockchains make this extra measure of privacy harder as the receiving and sending address is one and the same, however there's no limit to how many accounts one can have, so anonymity is still possible as long as acquiring the coins doesn't reveal your identity.
Those who sign up for cryptocurrency service providers (who are required by law to perform AML/KYC checks - and do so with the consent of their customers) trade away the privacy (of some of their) transactions for the benefits (most commonly, yield and ease of use) said services offer. This is not different from use cases of cash money, where getting cash money from an ATM or most money transmitters will reveal your identity, and while one is free to make in person transactions and remain "anonymous", if one wants to have a bank account or invest legally, then some level of KYC will be in place.
The article indeed asks the wrong question. DeFi can't operate legally without KYC/AML and customers know it. Your comment on the other hand seems to me to be making an error in believing DeFi users don't know this.
The "bug" is that some developers think of matching function signatures as some form of authN / authZ.
A few years back I wrote https://medium.com/coinmonks/lashing-out-at-a-spank-channel-... about a similar hack where a contract "trusted" a given (user input) contract based on nothing other than verifying a function signature. This latest hack was smarter but ultimately it still exploited a 4 bytes hash "security" feature...
>Another aspect of this is 51% attacks are recoverable for PoW, but are a permanent takeover condition for PoS networks. If a single entity ever accumulates more than half the tokens on a PoS network, they are unassailable.
This is not true. PoS has many design flavours and the one Ethereum is planning on implementing includes random selection of validators and the amount staked has no influence on the inclusion or the vote "weight".
Also with PoS an attacker will always incur economic losses similar to having your mining rig burning down if you were to try to foce a bad block through. In PoW networks attackers can keep on mixing attacks with producing normal blocks and remain profitable
I wonder if the self-deprecation might be a corporate branding thing? In Portugal a couple of years back there was a "marketing war" where one retailer's message went something like: "smart people buy with us" while Lidl's ads expressed something like "you don't have to be smart to buy at Lidl".
Most of what I know I picked up by looking at AMM vendor websites and papers as well as attending industry conferences and talking with the people there.
Look all cryptos are extremely volatile because the real market liquidity is an order of magnitude less than most people think it is, and the way automated market makers work force all exchanges to keep their prices "in sync" to avoid arbitrage like we had in the early days when it was possible to buy for 50$ in one exchange and sell for 100$ in another..
On the plus side, atm BTC is up ~8% in the last year and about ~22% since the beginning of the month.
Source: me a blockchain dev, former CTO of a crypto exchange that raised 30M in an ICO.
For now the combo of a Rust backend with native TypeScript support means that type safety can be expected (but not enforced) and disabling access to net and system by default does improve on Node's behaviour and reduces the risk of importing a module that takes over the host system.
This is tempting... but now my question is: what will Deno do or have that will make those who've invested years in Node consider switching?