Why would this prove the necessity of regulations? This occurred within the realm of regulations, not in the wild west. FTX.US is a regulated entity in the US, and FTX Intl wasn't available to US customers. Doesn't this prove that calamity happens even despite the regulations
Note that the technical problems made it more complicated and messy to reproduce the build, but didn't outright prevent it. Mainly the executable binaries were reproducible, but other metadata in the disk image changed each time. https://github.com/zcash/mpc/issues/2
Even more recent changes have made this better too. The research in the paper only goes up to Apr. 2017 or so. Since then, the "recent zone" has been a) reduced from 5 days to 3 days, and b) more recent zone mixins are included. We haven't quantified what improvement that makes, but it should help.
This isn't a good explanation. The result of this research is actually that even if you opted in to privacy during mid 2016 to jan 2017, you wouldn't have gotten it.
Ethereum foundation is not the custodian of the network. This is a debatable point, since it's not perfectly clear what that would mean. Ethereum Foundation doesn't own the miners or the validating nodes on the network, and can't control who joins or what software they run. Like other development teams, they can propose and try to drum up support for upgrades, which they've been successful at so far.
Detractors of Ethereum would prefer to view the Foundation as having much greater influence over the network, since that would mean it's less centralized. Proponents of Ethereum on the other hand would say Ethereum Foundation's role is similar to that of Bitcoin Core, except the divisiveness hasn't set in yet (or in the case of Ethereum Classic, opposing factions split off before it got bad).
Do you think it would be possible to improve the EVM by adding E's notion of concurrency? One constraint would be the need to have deterministic scheduling, since every execution would need to be run identically by all validating nodes.
[edit] Incidentally, we pointed out several lessons from the ocap community in a commissioned report from Ethereum foundation back in 2015. Few of those suggestions were adopted at the EVM level or the higher levels though.
https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/mas...
Turing-completeness has very little to do with this.
- The bug causing the DAO debacle did not involve loops or jumps or weird machines or other behavior associated with Turing-machine complexity, but instead had to do with confusing behavior of storage and inter-contract communication.
- Ethereum is not really Turing complete, since it has bounded. It is procedural though.
- Many expensive errors in the cryptocurrency world (e.g. transactions with too many fees, exchanges sending malleable transactions, transaction malleability) didn't involve the smart contract system at all
- Decision-table based systems can hide bugs too. Is there any evidence that decision tables actually lead to fewer bugs, given the same amount of programmer time and attention?