What would happen if a PoW based crypto-currency were to upset its current miners so much that a large portion of them band together and retaliate in some way? There are a number of possible outcomes depending on the specifics of the retaliation, and I’ll go over some of the top discussed strategies below.

Miners Quit

Lets say that 90% of miners just quit mining the chain in question all together. They either light their mining rigs on fire and go find a new hobby/profession/business or, more likely, they find other useful (but slightly less profitable) work to do with their hardware…

TL;DR

• If you over-estimate the block base fee, you will still only pay the base fee for the block you are included in, no matter how much you overestimate by.
• This rather small and subtle change in Ethereum gas pricing makes it so one of the most common points of frustration for new Ethereum users almost entirely goes away.

A User Story

Imagine you are a novice Ethereum user. You just installed the Coinbase wallet and you submit your first Uniswap trade transaction. Coinbase wallet tells you that your transaction should confirm within a few minutes and you patiently wait. …

TL;DR: Answer

Yes, you should live in fear, but not because of EIP-1559. There exist today 51% mining attacks that are self-reinforcing, meaning it is profitable for people to join the attacker once they have started. EIP-1559 51% attacks are not self-reinforcing, it is always more profitable to defect from the attacker than it is to join them.

EIP-1559 Synopsis

Skip this section if you know what EIP-1559 is.

EIP-1559 is a proposed change to the way Ethereum handles gas pricing such that every block has a fixed block-wide ETH fee per gas (base fee) that automatically adjusts up/down based on current block space…

Imagine a blockchain like Ethereum where we didn’t have to worry about pesky problems like state bloat, and block validation speed. You would submit a transaction and as long as you bribe the miner enough to include the transaction in a block, it will get included. There is no competition for space with other users of the platform, everybody gets block space!

Too Much Gas Guzzling

Now lets imagine in that world miners are only demanding 1 nanoeth per gas, and Ethereum is hugely popular. At 1 nanoeth per gas everyone wants in all the time. …

3-way Constant Product

A 3-way Constant Product market is created where constant = yes_balance * no_balance * invalid_balance.

The first liquidity provider buys 1000 complete sets from Augur and adds all shares to the CP market. This would result in constant = 1000000000 = 1000 * 1000 * 1000, and it would equate to a price of 0.33 for YES, 0.33 for NO, and 0.33 for INVALID.

The first trader believes that the odds for YES are higher than 33%, so they would buy 100 complete sets and trade NO to the CP market in exchange for YES shares. They would keep the…

The TL;DR

Funds are not safu!

The Summary

Anyone with ~40,000 MKR (about 20,000,000 USD) can steal all of the collateral in Maker DAO, both DAI and SAI, along with a good chunk of assets from Compound, Uniswap, and other Maker integrated systems (over 340,000,000 USD).

Maker DAO v2 (AKA Multi-Collateral DAI, AKA McDAI) was supposed to launch with safeguards (emergency shutdown and governance delay) against a hostile MKR holder stealing all collateral and potentially robbing a good chunk of Uniswap, Compound, and other systems integrated with Maker in the process. Instead, they decided not to.

The Bank

Maker DAO. It is the thing that makes…

The thing we ultimately want is a way to have some fungible token on Ethereum that implements ERC-777 (or, because we can’t have nice things, ERC-20) that can be redeemed by its holder for BTC. Let’s call this token BTC Fungible Token (BTC-FT). The simplest way to create BTC-FT is to have a user (Alice) put some amount of ETH into escrow along with a promise that if someone demands some amount of BTC, Alice will send the BTC to them or lose their escrow.

As an example, imagine that 1 BTC == 100 ETH, Alice would put 125 ETH…

Often times Engineers get distracted with new technology and go off the rails solving problems that no one actually has. At a previous job a question that was intentionally asked anytime someone proposed a new solution, or multiple times throughout the implementation process was, “What is the problem we are trying to solve?” This helps ensure we remain focused on solving actual problems rather than building solutions in need of a problem.

Enter distributed ledger technology. What is the problem we are trying to solve that requires a distributed ledger? The common answer to this question is “Censorship Resistance”. …