Verge got hacked! Yesterday, somebody found a way to attack the Verge blockchain, and spent at least 13 hours mining one block per second. As the maximalists say, “this is good for Bitcoin”.
Verge belongs to a group of tokens that seem excessively overvalued to me. I owned a little for a month or so before I realized I hated the wallet and felt my money was better put towards a more serious project. I missed the huge pump (about two weeks after I sold, natch). Such is the life of a cryptocurrency enthusiast.
My takeaway (which I say at risk of ending up on r/buttcoin...again…) is that was a good thing.
Why?
Because we need to discover which systems actually work and which don’t. That’s much better now with a total cryptocurrency market cap below $300 billion than when it is 10 or 20 times that, and major business is done on the blockchain.
Monero Fork
Apparently the Monero fork to prevent ASICS from dominating hash power resulted in four competing projects. It's probably best to avoid touching any of these new chains unless you know how to move your coins without being susceptible to a replay attack on the main chain. In case you've never heard that term, the concept is this: let's say you want to sell those "extra" tokens that you got because of a fork. If you make a mistake, your main chain coins are at risk for being stolen by somebody with not a lot of work. I'm not exactly sure how it would work on the Monero chain, since transactions are shielded, but "wait and see" is the best attitude.
If you absolutely must sell your forked Monero coins, realize you may lose everything if you screw it up.
Other Minority Positions
Many Steemians are (rightfully) angry about certain posters who shamelessly upvote their own posts, often making thousands of dollars a day in rewards that violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Steem blockchain. Are they stealing? Not exactly...but they do lower the value of rewards to the rest of us...even if individual losses are in the order of pennies.
Some have called for these people to be blocked by the witnesses. I tend to disagree with this. I look at these self promoters as canaries in the Steem goldmine; if we believe that censorship resistance is good (with the obvious caveats against breaking the law), then these sorts of people should be ridiculed, but not censored on the blockchain.
It’s a fact that there are those who will outright abuse any system they’re a part of. Decentralized blockchains try to address this, but it’s impossible to avoid it. Human beings are sinful creatures who are going to act irrationally (in an economic sense) at times. The best tonic to this is to create strong communities based on similar values, which becomes an analog to city states created in ancient times that were designed to protect from bandits and invaders.
Yes-Steem communities are the prototypes of internet city states. We’ll see how this unwinds over the next few years/decades, but I expect this all to be far more interesting than any of our wildest imaginations.
-Jeff
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