Topic: Theymos: What the fuck is up with BFL and TradeFortress? - page 5. (Read 14312 times)

Considering that Ripple is a layer of additional trust and debt over the conventional financial system which is precisely based on trust and debt, it's not strange at all to find much hate for it inside the Bitcoin community.

At the end of the day, Bitcoin was designed to put to an end the need to rely on intrinsecally flawed, trust based systems.

These same flaws exist in the conventional financial system. At least in Ripple, you get to choose precisely who you will trust and, by default, trust no one. If you had to make something perfect to make it better, there would never be any progress.

There are two major and fundamnetal flaws in the Ripple system: trust and debt, and those flaws will be exploited endlessly.

http://www.hrmorning.com/would-you-trade-your-password-for-a-candy-bar/

Sadly, we see amoral people using zero day exploits to empty people's Bitcoin wallets. Is that a flaw in Bitcoin?

Because people fall for "delete wallet.DAT", right?

Sure they would have. If it didn't do it automatically, you would just have had to trick them into enabling it. There's no reason to think that would have been any more difficult than tricking them into trusting you.

No, the design of the system is bad. If it didn't automatically trade IOUs for you, then nobody would have lost any BTC.Bit stamp.

It wasn't entirely within the Ripple system. He approached people outside the Ripple system and used mechanisms outside Ripple to convince them to do things. And it wasn't Ripple itself that was compromised, it was just the accounts of the people who did what he told them to do. He told people to tell Ripple to consider a worthless asset as equal in value to a valuable asset, and Ripple did exactly what they told it to do. He used social engineering to induce people to tell a system to do dumb things, then the system did dumb things, and then he blamed it on the system rather than on himself.

Actually apples and oranges do share similar characteristics. Just saying...

That's not comparable at all, it's rather apples and oranges.  You're comparing a Bitcoin third party to Ripple, not Bitcoin to Ripple.  If you were able to show that wealth was lost from the Bitcoin code itself that would be a comparable analogy.  What TF did was entirely within the Ripple system, unless you have an analogy where Bitcoin itself was compromised, your argument falls apart.  

I agree that what he did was possibly stupid and definitely risked people losing money.

But this thread was accusing him of scamming - which isn't the case.

And the risk already existed - my view is, in part, that it was better he did it WITHOUT trying to scam people than someone did it in a more subtle way causing significant loss.  The issue's been around (and been commented on) since ripple was first promoted in the alt-currencies forum.  There was no sign of any attempt to fix it - or even an acknowledgement that there was a problem.  So I tend to think this episode will end up doing way more good than harm - the good being both a much greater general awareness of the flaw/risk with ripple trust and hopefully a bit more urgency from the ripple team to do something about it.  The bad seems to be a loss of 1 BTC or so plus maybe a further 10 BTC from someone who insisted on losing it to prove a point that we already all knew (point proven - hope it was worth 10 BTC).

That's fair.
Now can you just comment those simple facts ?

1 - TF wants to prove ripple is a scam platform - which I agree with.
2 - He goes all out on the forum.
3 - Some people still remain dubious.
4 - To prove those dubious people wrong, he decides to make a 'social experiment'
5 - He posts an offer in the newbie section to demonstrate the ripple flaws.
6 - Newbies who might not ever heard of ripple before loose BTC.
7 - Previous dubious people are convinced. But They of course, wouldn't have fallen for TF offer.

TLDR: Randow newbies paid so that TF can prove dubious people who beleived in Ripple wrong.
I sincerly would have no problem if the random newbies were the same as the Ripple defenders.

But they're not.

I think he did a pretty good job of achieving the emboldened.

I pointed out that particular issue ages ago - explaining that just because I (ripple) trust A and B doesn't mean I'm fine with debt from one being exchanged for debt from the other.  That just got ignored - seems his approach had more success in highlighting the issue.

And are you seriously claiming that the ability to ripple debts is a "microscopic design feature" of ripple?  I thought that was pretty much the whole point of it (either that or making profit by selling XRPs).  And the way it currently works is horribly broken.

To take your gun analogy it's as if you'd designed a gun where if you pointed it in the general direction of someone it automatically fired without the trigger needing to be pulled.  And the safety catch was proprietary and not available to the public - only an inner circle got one of those.

Similarly your hammer analogy is incorrect.  You've designed a hammer where it's impossible to hit a nail (maintain extended trust to multiple people) without hitting your fingers (allow equal-value exchange of debt you've accepted even when that debt is NOT of equal value).  It's not about failure to understand how to use the tool - it's that, right now, the tool can't do what it's meant to do safely (If you have unused trust extended then you CAN'T stop it being used in exchange for existing debt you hold).  It's not that you CAN hit your finger - it's that it's impossible to avoid it.

If you're working on a solution to that problem don't fall into the tempting trap of just allowing assignment of value or weight to individual debtors - that would be a more subtly broken solution.  By that I mean a solution where if I trusted A and B and C I could assign a weight of 1 to A and 0.9 to B and 0.01 to C - and any ripples through me would apply the appropriate rates (so someone would have to give me 100 C BTC to get 1 A BTC or 10 B BTC to get 9 A BTC).  It's an obvious way to do it - but wrong.

I like the concept behind ripple.  I'm not so keen on some of the decisions made in your implementation.  Not just technical details like this one but basic things like trying to get sympathy/support by claiming to be open-source whilst not being open-source at all (I assume you realise that a vague promise of becoming open-source at an unspecified time in the future isn't the same thing as being open-source).  Any claims that you are open-source would be lies wouldn't they?

No.  TF hasn't even mentioned hammers.  You're confusing him with JK, who likes the hammer analogy.  Only in his take on things, all the noobs are tripping over each other so they could get more hammers to bash their thumbs with.  Very agreeable bunch.


Not the ripple we're talking about, that bitch is tied right up to Open Coin's hitchin' post.


WUT


Focus!

No. Everyone who joined his thread was told to, and did extend Ripple trust.  Please don't tell me the same people would just as willingly smash their thumbs with hammers or start blasting each other with guns.  You'll make me lose faith in humanity.

1.
Perhaps.  Though TF's argument would be more along these lines:  If you offer a hammer to someone, telling him to bash his thumb with it, which he then proceeds to do with unwarranted abandon, that person is not a carpenter, and thus could only suffer from a hammer.  Something like that, but i'm just guessing.

2.
Wait.  So he shouldn't teach through example & experience, and he shouldn't use pics?  What's he supposed to do?

3.
First, see (1).  Second, why should these innocents, who never asked for a hammer 'till one was shoved in their yet-unbloodied hands, want one?  The were perfectly content with using pushpins & stick-its 'till OpenCoin inc. came along and told them how cool & practical hammers are.  Surprise!


I just don't know how many times i can repeat the same thing:  No it is not.  If the people you speak of could be convinced, en masse, to start bashing their thumbs with the hammers you offer, I'd like to suggest that hammerin' life may not be the life for them.  Please keep them away from hammers, FFS!

edit: matching tags

Looks like you paid about $350:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1018222
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zczsg2012-07-07zeg2012-07-10ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

edit: and you got (correct me if I'm wrong), no more, no less, but exactly what you were to be given for the 50 BTC donation.

Basically TradeFortress is saying "HAMMERS ARE SCAMMERS" while telling everyone to hold out their fingers to prove it, and the dozens of newbies out of newbie jail with his paid signatures are repeating it. I really really really wish he'd stick to like 5 logical points and we could even make 5 threads for each one to keep things easy to follow, because Ripple is bigger than OpenCoin and it's much bigger than TradeFortress, and we really all should learn to get along without having to pay the forums for opportunities to libel to hide our ignorance of emerging technologies. The most sickening part is, he's acting the same way everyone in the non-bitcoin world acts about bitcoin and some bitcoiners here are hypocritically supporting it.

"Doesn't follow what I know and am used to? Can't figure out or just don't agree with how it works? SCAM!"

He's convincing people to hurt themselves with powerful technology as a way of arguing that people are too dumb to have that technology or the technology is bad because it enables people to hurt themselves. It's completely different from arguing that there should be better safeties or warnings.

For example, consider a hammer. A person can bash their thumb with a hammer. The Luddite argument is that because people can bash their thumb with a hammer, hammers are bad. Or, worse, convincing people to use hammers carelessly so you can show lots of pictures of black and blue thumbs to stop this scourge of evil hammers. It's not at all the same as arguing that because people can bash their thumbs with a hammer, people need to understand how to safely use hammers or that it might be worth investigating whether a hammer can be designed such that it's more difficult to hit your thumb.

No. I'm saying that technical criticism about insufficient safeties or warnings is in a completely different category from tricking people into doing things whose consequences they don't understand and that you know will cause harm.

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack." 
And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?