> the fact that they use a side chain with centralised validators is immaterial. The hack happened because private keys were stolen, which is just as much of a vulnerability if this happened entirely on the main ethereum chain where acquiring the various private keys required to create a legitimate multi-signature is just as possible.
No, you're wrong. The number of unique validators is at the heart of this hack, since these validators were also responsible for bridging money. If the chain had a decentralized validator set and the bridge used that same set, the hackers would have had to compromise 20-100 systems to execute the attack, which is very unlikely.
I'm also genuinely curious: why do those who criticize blockchain most stridently on HN also know the least about it? It seems like there is an echo chamber of people who hate blockchain, refuse to learn anything about it, and yet talk about it a lot.
I consider myself crypto sceptic. Sceptic in the sense that a community behind a technology should be eager to label flawed projects and claims as such, and seek to improve.
In crypto/web3 a diverse landscape of projects gets thrown into a single pot and then evaluated by both sides as if they all had the same properties. See "decentralization": It feels like any project in crypto can just benefit from claiming to be decentralized.
Axie's Ronan Network is demonstrably not decentralized. Tether, USDC are not decentralized. Any cross-chain bridge is not decentralized. CEX are not decentralized. Close to all NFT projects are not decentralized. I'd say that any smart contract implementing ERC20Burnable, Mint, or Ownable are not decentralized without extra measures, same goes for upgradable tokens.
If your are not decentralized, you also can't claim to be censorship proof or trustless.
If a decentralized community wants to iterate on a project, at some point it will have to make decisions that are not unanimously approved by the community. Chain protocols handle this by letting forks battle it out. Smart Contracts reach for DAOs, but most (all?) projects have a community leadership that are Owner and perform the upgrade. You could instead have the DAO contract own the main contract and autonomously upgrade once a majority is reached. Are any projects doing this?
I thought you were looking for a sincere response to your point about skeptics, but you're now labelling me as someone who doesn't understand the technology and using that label to discredit my point... but I do understand the technology, as is evidenced by my comment, which you echoed with your own.
You're building this conversation on the belief that the problem is technical, i.e: if the hack could have been prevented, then cryptocurrency is legitimate, and Axie Infinity is legitimate, and therefore the skeptics are wrong if you can prove that cryptocurrency could be used in a way to prevent this hack which you can. That's nonsense, though, because the cryptocurrency skeptics (myself included) are not arguing that there are not technical solutions to these hacks, of course there are, better private key protection is a remedy to private key compromise... but that's not the point, at all, and it's disingenuous for you to pretend you defeated the skeptics by pointing it out.
Do you know how Axie Infinity works? What it is? Axie Infinity is an insane scheme that is destined to fail and hurt a lot of people along the way. Cryptocurrency skeptics take issue with that predatory behaviour: these hacks are further example of the absurd levels of incompetency and fraud involved in the industry, they're not THE problem.
Saying "I'm genuinely curious" doesn't make you genuinely curious if you're not approaching this with a curious mind... it just makes you disingenuous. If you're genuinely curious, you'd at least ingest the key message and respond to it without jumping to an assumption that only you are smart enough to understand very simple technology.
Cryptocurrency is neat technology, in the same way sql is neat technology, nosql is neat technology, I think the technology of cryptocurrency is interesting, as do most cryptocurrency skeptics, which is entirely logically consistent because cryptocurrency skepticism is rooted in a disagreement with using a neat technology as the foundation of some half-baked predatory "financial revolution".
If you're going to reply to me, please first consider the awful predatory mechanics of Axie Infinity, and address that.
I don't know much about Axie Infinity, and it may well be terrible.
I was addressing your claim about the private keys. I think that criticisms of what people build with blockchain are entirely fair, and make for informative discussion. But too often, blockchain critics make overconfident technical claims that are simply wrong. This doesn't contribute anything to the discussion, and it's unfortunate that they detract from their other arguments with this misinformation.
In the worst case I've noticed that on HN it leads to a filter bubble mentality of blockchain critics who read each other's arrogant claims about blockchain technology because they feel it is beneath them to read about how the technology actually works.
I'm sorry to have lumped you in with them, but it is a common tendency.
No, you're wrong. The number of unique validators is at the heart of this hack, since these validators were also responsible for bridging money. If the chain had a decentralized validator set and the bridge used that same set, the hackers would have had to compromise 20-100 systems to execute the attack, which is very unlikely.
I'm also genuinely curious: why do those who criticize blockchain most stridently on HN also know the least about it? It seems like there is an echo chamber of people who hate blockchain, refuse to learn anything about it, and yet talk about it a lot.