I'm not trying to be mean here, but this is your chance to learn now so I say seize it if you find the passion! It might be daunting because the parent commenter is referencing several vast and technical fields, but it's very doable and my preferred way of learning is to start with what is immediately in front of me so I can gain somewhat of an understanding and then dig in every time I don't understand something again (depth first search).
The parent commenter is referencing several fields:
This is a type of peer-to-peer strategic attack. So you could postulate that this broadly falls under the category of "common p2p network attacks and vulnerabilities". Google that!
This is a type of software pattern for making sure a signal (usually bad) doesn't keep recurring and its blast radius is contained.
> Now you're basically trying to devise a heuristic of what every single attack might look like in terms of transaction volume increase. If you're wrong, the bridge will freeze right when a lot of people want to use it. Plus, you also need to build a price oracle now.
This is blockchain specific, but you can definitely deep dive into how blockchains work to get to a point where you understand the concept of a "bridge", "price oracle", etc.
All this said, some people are more breadth-first-search learners, so, if you find yourself in a situation where this is overwhelming but you still want to know, you can always start teaching yourself fundamentals that lead to these areas. I'm roughly breaking down the stack for you here:
First stack:
* intro to programming (and getting deep into programming in general)
* understanding the basics of an CRUD database app (client-server systems)
* understanding multiple services (microservices and systems architecture)
* distributed systems (consensus algos, time drift + vector clocks, etc.)
* specialization in understanding the blockchain data structure
* specialization in understanding p2p systems and their faults
> This is blockchain specific, but you can definitely deep dive into how blockchains work to get to a point where you understand the concept of a "bridge", "price oracle", etc.
Circuit breakers based on price/volume/volatility is standard finance tech.
Win/lose/draw on blockchain long-term, in between the generally scamminess some of us are trying to figure out if we can create lasting utility/value in the space. Honest answer: we don’t know!
With that said smart-contract programming is (at least for now) an in-demand skill set.
The company I work for is interested in developing that skill set because such people are in short supply. A background in conventional distributed systems is very helpful, but anyone with a solid grounding in CS fundamentals can pick it up. It’s a different execution cost model and it’s an adversarial environment, so one needs to keep their wits about them, but it’s learnable like anything.
If you want to know more: ben@rocinanteresearch.net
Sybil attacks are common problems in many blockchain related problems. Especially for governance and “sources of truth” such as price oracles. Just google it.
