Ethereum does to coding what wagering real money does to a friendly game of Poker<p>Expected value (EV) changes behavior significantly.<p>I'm skeptical too but didn't let that keep me from learning Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This dark forest is like having a red team looking at your code 24/7. I feel like I learned some novel things from it.
I'm curious whether you could eliminate or at least mitigate this "dark forest" environment with privacy preserving transactions?<p>There are privacy preserving smart contract schemes (see <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/543" rel="nofollow">https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/543</a> for one example) however to my knowledge few if any have ever been implemented/utilised at scale.<p>At least in theory this should eliminate or at least greatly mitigate the opportunity for MEV since the actions taken and the results are opaque. In reality however I'm not sure and I am absolutely not qualified to answer.
Discussed at the time:<p><i>Ethereum Is a Dark Forest</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24308588" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24308588</a> - Aug 2020 (447 comments)
Yeah this has been posted before, and the message is always the same: If you want to trade in ethereum, just remember that you're dealing with a technology created by psychopaths. The Dark Forest wasn't somewhere you went for a walk.
Is the benefit of Ethereum really larger than the value these intelligent people could be creating in non-crypto industries? I see the allure. They're super hard, super high-stakes problems. Is there really no other industry that provides this level of flow and excitement for these researchers?