David Stancel
Cryptocurrency Expert, Advisor, Lecturer, Author, & exCTO @ Fumbi
Workshop
David Stancel
A tamper-proof, shared digital append-only ledger that records transactions grouped into blocks in a decentralized peer-to-peer network. The permanent recording of transactions in the Blockchain stores permanently the history of asset exchanges that take place between the peers.
Updating the ledger (usually) requires solving Byzantine Agreements (hash) with economically incentivized participation, secured by cryptography
1. Nová tranzakcia je odoslaná do siete
2. Každý uzol v sieti zbiera tranzakcie do bloku
3. Pri každom kole /bloku/ náhodne vybraný uzol získa právo určiť "pravdu"
4. Ďalšie uzle v sieti akceptujú blok iba za definovaných podmienok (ak má validné podpisy a tranzakcie)
5. Akceptáciu bloku vyjadrujú zahrnutím jeho hashu do svojich ďalších blokov
Short range attack – attacker waits until merchant accepts payment as confirmed, than double- spends it by bribing validators to reorganize the chain
Long range attack – attacker with enough power can rebuild the chain as he choses, with the ability to build a blockchain however he desires
Coin accumulation – protocols which rely on the age of coins, where attacker could try to accumulate enough old coins to be able to reach a majority in voting
Denial of service – flooding nodes so that they can no longer relay transactions
Sybil attack – flooding the network with bad nodes that isolate good ones
Selfish mining – secretly building on a chain and publish it selectively in order to waste competitors resources
There are two major ways of controlling the network:
1. Controlling the information flow between peers
2. Controlling the computational power of the network – remember that decisions are based on consensus/majority.
An adversary that controls more than half of the network's computing power can effectively control the entire network.
While controlling the network, the attacker can:
However, the attacker cannot:
A denial of service (DoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic.
---> overloading a network/computer with requests above the capacity that the network/computer can handle.
In Blockchain, this can be achieved by sending lots of junk data to a node. The nodes under attack will not be able to process normal transactions.
a (bitcoin) node/peer:
--> a malicious user gains control over a node's access to information in the peer-to-peer network.
Three prerequisites:
If the above criteria are met then:
The Bitcoin network spans the globe --> nodes are in different time zones.
Time is extremely important --> determines the validity of new blocks.
When establishing new connections, the protocol forces nodes to exchange their system time.
Each node maintains a counter, which represents the median network time of its peers. The counter reverts to system time, if the median differs from it by more than 70 minutes.
By announcing inaccurate timestamps when connecting to a node, an attacker can alter a node's network time counter and deceive it into accepting an alternate blockchain.
--> increase the chances of a successful double-spend.
- process of sending thousands of nano-value transactions, in order to fill the blocks to the maximum size.
This will create delays to other legitimate transactions, thus delaying the whole network and increasing confirmation time for all transactions.
A flood attack is performed very easily, with the attacker just sending thousands of transactions to himself.
However, it is expensive to sustain for a long time, due to transaction fees.
The computing power of honest miners is wasted.
--> selfish miners increase the impact of their own mining power on the network and enjoy additional power and profits.
Selfish mining increases transaction confirmation times, because transactions confirmed by the selfish miner in private, are not broadcast to the public immediately.
Selfish mining also increases the threat of double spending, as both honest and selfish miners can add mutually exclusive transactions to the private and public chains.
May be possible with 1/3 of network (33% attack).
Zerocoin operates, roughly, as follows:
Zcash is a new blockchain that also aims at true cryptographic anonymity.
The principle is similar to Zerocoin, but the cryptography used is the current state-of- the-art, an evolution of zero-knowledge proof constructions, called zk-SNARKs.
It offers both so-called transparent transactions (t-addresses) like Bitcoin, and true anonymous transactions (z-addresses).
Transactions using z-addresses are hiding the source, destination and amount involved in the transaction, but they are still verifiable.
Processing Power - the more processing power your computer has, the more transactions it can process.
- mostly for verifying transactions using:
In theory, Bitcoin is able to verify approximately 4,000 transactions per second on an average CPU.In reality we cannot hope to scale beyond 200 transactions per second
Storage - Maintaining a full bitcoin node means storing every single transaction ever recorded on the blockchain.
In 2023, around 400Gb space and an additional 5Gb per month.
If the network grows to the size of competing networks, storage requirements will skyrocket:
For 200 transactions per second (tps) – a reasonable target, given PayPal's current rate of 100 tps –nodes would require an additional storage space of 3Tb per year.
Bandwidth - Assuming that a bandwidth of 10Mbits/s is available, the rate with which nodes can receive transactions is limited to approximately 2,000 transactions per second.
+ each node is informed about every transaction multiple times and that other non-transaction messages are broadcasted over the network
If bandwidth is not enough, peers won’t be able to receive and validate transactions in time, making them unable to synchronize with the rest of the network.
In fact, of the 231 PoCs Gartner reported on, only 14 have moved into a limited scale live-in production environment, reflecting the immaturity of the market we’re seeing today.
The same report estimates only 10% of these projects will make it to a fully-scaled business model by 2020. Given this predicament, it’s no surprise seeing enterprises employing stricter vetting processes and restricting spending on DLT projects overall.
https://www.gartner.com/doc/3869368/blockchain-trials-industries-market-transition
https://etherisc.com/
EY's report on blockchain in Insurance:
https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY-blockhain-in-insurance/$FILE/EY-blockhain-in-insurance.pdf
IBM Insurance Blockchain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=Mhpe0d-nE7k
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/grid/trade-finance-placemat.pdf
September 2018, fifteen of the world’s largest banking and commodity companies announced the formation of komgo - a global blockchain-based trade financing platform.
Collaboration between: ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citi, Crédit Agricole Group, Gunvor, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, Macquarie, Mercuria, MUFG Bank, Natixis, Rabobank, Shell, SGS and Société Génerale
While using ETHEREUM, it will launch with two initial products: a KYC process and a Letters of Credit product.
https://media.consensys.net/enterprise-blockchain-for-trade-financing-c005ec8fa079
ECB, 2022:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2689~846e464fd8.en.pdf
Bank for International Settlement, 2023:
https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap136.pdf
IMF, 2023:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2023/06/16/Central-Bank-Digital-Currency-Adoption-A-Two-Sided-Model-534325
Delloite, 2020:
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/financial-services/Banking/lu-are-central-bank-digital-currencies.pdf
FED, 2023:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/money-and-payments-20220120.pdf
In March 2017 a group of 30 enterprises announced formation of Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, which has recently grown to more than 200 members, making it probably the largest blockchain consortium today.
EEA’s focus in bringing Ethereum to the enterprise environment, meaning moving from a public, permissionless to a private, permissioned setting, which means it will be easier to provide better support for privacy and performance. There are some plans to support anchoring on the public Ethereum network as a way to securely timestamp the chain state.
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In the fourth quarter of 2020 and first quarter of 2021, the gaming industry had two of its largest-ever initial public offerings (IPOs) in Unity Technologies and Roblox Corporation, both of which wrapped their corporate histories and ambitions in Metaverse-related narratives.
Start in the 1970s with text-based virtual worlds known as Multi-User Dungeons. MUDs were effectively a software-based version of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Using text-based commands that resembled human languages, players could interact with one another, explore a fictional world populated by non-playable characters and monsters, attain power-ups and knowledge, and eventually retrieve a magical chalice, defeat an evil wizard, or rescue a princess
Great leap came in 1986 with the release of the Commodore 64 online game Habitat, which was published by Lucasfilm, the production company founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas.
Habitat was described as “a multi-participant online virtual environment” and, in a reference to Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, “a cyberspace.”
“Citizens” of Habitat were in charge of the laws and expectations of their virtual world, and had to barter with each other for necessary resources and avoid being robbed or killed for their wares. This challenge led to periods of chaos, after which new rules, regulations, and authorities were established by the player community to maintain order
The 1990s saw no major “proto-Metaverse” games, but advances continued. That decade, millions of consumers took part in the first isometric 3D (also known as 2.5D) virtual worlds, which gave the illusion of three-dimensional space, but only allowed users to move across two axes.
Not long after, full 3D virtual worlds emerged. A number of games, such as 1994’s Web World and 1995’s Activeworlds, also empowered users to collaboratively build a visible virtual space in real time, rather than through asynchronous commands and votes
2007 - stock exchange was launched in Second Life
with the aim of helping Second Life–based companies raise capital using the platform’s Linden Dollars currency.
Throughout the 2010s, bands of users collaborated in Minecraft to build cities as large as Los Angeles—roughly 500 square miles.
One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.
Fortnite’s social experiences -- its famous 2020 concert with Travis Scott. In that case, “players” converged on a much smaller portion of the map.
The title’s standard cap of 100 players per instance was halved, while many items and actions, such as building, are disabled, thereby further reducing the workload. While Epic Games can rightly say that more than 12.5 million people attended this live concert, these attendees were split across 250,000 separate copies (meaning, they watched 250,000 versions of Scott) of the event that didn’t even start at the same time.
EVE Online stands apart from games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite because all users are part of one singular and persistent realm.
Over the course of an average day in 2021, over 350 million people participated in a battle royale game—just one genre of high CCU game—and billions were able to do so. In 2016, only 350 million people in the world owned the equipment needed to render a rich 3D virtual world. At its peak in 2021, Roblox had 225 million monthly users
Roblox and Minecraft are among the most popular games in the world, their reach is modest when considered in the broadest terms. These two supposed titans have 30–55 million daily active users, a fraction of the global internet population of 4.5–5 billion. In effect, they are still at the ICQ stage of virtual words
Concurrency is one of the foundational problems for the Metaverse, and for a fundamental reason: it leads to exponential increases in how much data must be processed, rendered, and synchronized per unit of time.
Microsfot Flight Simulator -the most realistic and expansive consumer-grade simulation in history. Its map is over 500,000,000 square kilometers—just like the “real” planet earth—and includes two trillion uniquely rendered trees (not two trillion copy-and-pasted trees, or two trillion trees made up of a few dozen varieties), 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly every road, mountain, city, and airport across the world.
Microsfot Flight Simulator -the most realistic and expansive consumer-grade simulation in history. Its map is over 500,000,000 square kilometers—just like the “real” planet earth—and includes two trillion uniquely rendered trees (not two trillion copy-and-pasted trees, or two trillion trees made up of a few dozen varieties), 1.5 billion buildings, and nearly every road, mountain, city, and airport across the world.
Microsoft Flight Simulator aspires for every town to not just differ from one another, but to exist as they do in real life. And it doesn’t want to store 100 types of clouds and then tell a device which cloud to render and with what coloring; rather, it wants to say exactly what that cloud should look like.
By the end of 2021, Adopt Me!’s virtual world had been visited more than 30 billion times—more than fifteen times the average number of global tourism visits in 2019.
Furthermore, developers on Roblox, many of whom are also small teams with fewer than 30 members, have received more than $1 billion in payments from the platform.
By the end of 2021, Roblox had become the most valuable gaming company outside of China, worth nearly 50% more than storied gaming giants Activision Blizzard and Nintendo.
1. The Streaming Book by Matthew Ball, freely online
2. The Metaverse Book, and Blog by Matthew Ball
3. Virtual Economy by L'Atelier
First, ETH is turned into “wrapped ETH” (WETH), which is simply an ERC20 wrapping around ETH. This “tokenizes” ETH so it can be used like any other ERC20 token.
Next, WETH is turned into “pooled ETH” (PETH), which means it joins a large pool of Ethereum that is the collateral for all Dai created.
Once you have PETH, you can create a “collateralized debt position” (CDP), which locks up your PETH and allows you to draw Dai against your collateral, which is PETH.
As you draw out Dai, the ratio of debt in the CDP increases. There is a debt limit that sets a maximum amount of Dai you can draw against your CDP.
Once you have Dai, you can spend or trade it freely like any other ERC20 token.
If Dai < $1 USD, CDP owners can pay down their debt at a cheaper price!
fe. CDP with $1000 in ETH --> draw out 500 Dai
to close the position --> pay back 500 Dai (paying debt destroys Dai).
--> demand for Dai increases its price, until it approaches $1 USD.
If Dai stays below $1, CDP owners continue to pay down debt and remove Dai from the system.
--> When Dai goes above $1 USD, Dai is created to feed the demand. It is this push and pull, creation and destruction, supply and demand which ensures that Dai always matches the $1 USD peg.
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By David Stancel
NBS
Cryptocurrency Expert, Advisor, Lecturer, Author, & exCTO @ Fumbi