> For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry.
This is Zooko's triangle and was squared by blockchains. Namecoin (2011), BNS (the Blockstack Name System, 2014), and now a bunch of other fully-decentralized naming systems can give you unique usernames. Recently, Ethereum tried launching ENS and ran into some security issues and will likely re-launch soon.
Has squatting gotten worse on Namecoin? Squatting is fairly hard to handle in decentralized naming systems in general. Namecoin got a lot of squatting issues mostly because of the pricing function (price of names dropped over x years, and now it's almost free to register names). Here is another paper from WEIS'15 that studied squatting in Namecoin: http://randomwalker.info/publications/namespaces.pdf
Love the ZeroNet project! Been following them for a year and they've made great progress. One thing that's concerning is the use of Namecoin for registering domains.
Little known fact: A single miner has close to 65% or more mining power on Namecoin. Reported in this USENIX ATC'16 paper: https://www.usenix.org/node/196209. Due to this reason some other projects have stopped using Namecoin.
I'm curious what the ZeroNet developers think about this issue and how has their experience been so far with Namecoin.
So it impacts the DAO and potentially impacts other deployed contracts (we don't know yet).
It's an issue with Solidity because it doesn't even do static analysis to give the programmar a warning.
It's not that programmers actively avoid doing this or are explicitly warned to not do it. When real money is at stake the language design needs to be a lot more careful.
Agreed the original article does a great job. However, without the "sensational" title and simpler explanation people were not paying proper attention to this.
The original article discussed a bunch of other things as well -- everyone should read it to understand the details.
But why can't tech people be the top management? Google has never had a suit as CEO. Don't think their VPs are suits either. But it's true for most of the business world.
Let me put this another way: are hackers inherently not suitable for top-management jobs, and there will always be suits managing them?