The practical abuse of Binance was also on full display when, in an unprecedented move, the exchange froze 12 Billion TRX and voted itself into becoming the highest-ranked Super Representative on the TRX (Tron) network. Brickhouse Trading Ltd offers Futures, Options, Dual Investment and Range Bound products to users in South Africa in its capacity as a Juristic Representative of FiveWest OTC Desk (Pty) Limited (Authorised FSP 51619), an authorised financial services provider in South Africa. Mike Schmidt: Does it feel like this is moving towards experimenting and figuring out one solution, and that all implementations and node-runners and going to use that solution, even if it’s a combination of techniques; or is this more something that different implementations may have different combinations of keys and different algorithms for reputation, and maybe even users would be able to configure that; which direction do you see that going? This is a very easy way to solve fast jamming, but the issue is that it has an impact on normal users as well, because if you’re a normal user, you try to make payments, you have a lot of failures before you actually get to the recipient, you will have paid upfront fees for failures that you may think are not your fault, not something you should be paying for.

So, that’s why I think the first step is to get those mechanisms deployed, make them easy to tweak so that we can actually really test this and see how it behaves. Mark Erhardt: I guess you could sell that or share that, but it’s not clear to me why any other peer or network participant should trust you to have accurate information. So, it would sort of become a, "He said, she said" situation where, sure, people could have these lists or could claim that certain nodes are better, or make a personal opinion listing of what the best nodes are, but there is no incentive or reason why other peers should trust in. So, the downside of this approach is that this sort of scheme is open to a long-term attack, where people just build up a reputation and then, at some point, attack and take a lot of resources and jam. So, they basically allow heavy users, sort of regular customers, access to more resources, and that will basically ensure that the peers that your node always interacts with and continues to have a good relationship with, continue to be able to send, even if a new user that hasn’t established themselves starts taking a lot of resources.

And even then, if they do jam, it’s no worse than what they could have done if we hadn’t reserved some of the resources for our regular customers in the first place. But that comes with the cost of first behaving well for a long time and paying a bunch of fees towards building up the reputation. But the harder thing to fix was the slow jamming issue, where you send an HTLC that takes a lot of liquidity, or a few HTLCs that take a lot of liquidity, and you just hold them for a very long time. So this is more of a UX issue, but on the technology side, it’s somewhat easy to fix. They are known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). According to the officials, 40% of the Ukraine's military suppliers are willing to accept cryptocurrencies without converting them into euros or dollars. Bitcoin can be used to pay for things (just like if you were paying with dollars or pesos when using an app like Apple Pay), an investment (speculating that the future value of the network will be greater than it is today), a store of value, and to send or receive money (especially powerful if sending money across international borders, youtu.be which using today’s traditional systems requires a lot of friction).

It takes what we've learned from Bitcoin and makes a complete project that can function, in fact is functioning in real life. This way, we can let this run on the network for a while, evaluate how it works in real life, and once it’s in implementation, that way we can also start doing some research on regtest where we simulate networks where attackers are trying different kinds of behaviors and see how the local reputation algorithms work with those type of attacks. And then we’ll have a better idea of whether anyone can do their own thing and still be protected, or if it’s better that everyone applies the same reputation algorithm to make it work. We’re going to be able to deploy those in shadow mode to collect data, I think, in a few months on nodes on the network, and then I hope that researchers pick that up and try to attack those algorithms by stimulating some attacker behavior.