4 years of research & dev. All has come / is coming :
- rich metadatas in transactions (done)
- token locking (done)
- native tokens almost on par with ADA ( on mainnet 05/03/2021 )
- Plutus & Marlowe ( smart contracts ). Testnet in March, mainnet early to late Q2, depending on testnet quality.
For people like me who haven't heard of this feature: https://docs.cardano.org/projects/cardano-node/en/latest/sta... It's true that this prevents an attacker from using current keys to perform a long-range attack but old keys can still be used for attacks.
"France has destroyed practically all of its forest in recent centuries." It's false, it's the opposite: over the period of 1000/1500 there was much less forest in France than today because wood was the only energy for heating.
Cardano was funded with an ICO in Japan, one of the most restrictive country about crypto-currencies. The amount was 64M$ which is not that much for developing a blockchain for 5 years with almost 100 researchers & devs. It's not a scam.
It's even more funny to leave a comment like this without even elaborating on the argument and not contributing to the overall discussion. Why would this blog post mention Cardano?
Because Cardano is what ETH might have been if done right. They did a tons of (actually scientific) research on the topics mentioned in this article but the author won't mention Cardano as it is his direct competition (even nicknamed Ethereum killer).
What does "actually scientific" and "real research" (mentioned by jki275) mean? I'm pretty sure most people doing research in the cryptocurrency space are trying to use the scientific method as much as they can.
To be fair, Vitalik didn't mention many research projects outside of Ethereum. I don't think he was intentionally ignoring Cardano, he just didn't need to reference them to make his points.
> Even if the attacker could find a strategy to generate an alternative chain with valid leader selection data, presenting this chain and its blocks generated at slots that are far ahead
of time would not result in a successful attack since those blocks far ahead of time would be rejected by the honest stakeholders and the final alternative chain would be shorter than the main chain.
At first glance, the attacker then needs to gain the keys for almost all of the bonded stake at some point in the past. This is obviously a stricter requirement than holding keys for 2/3+ of the stake at some point in the past, but still seems remotely plausible when targeting the small set of validators in the early bootstrapping period. Remember also that these early validators could be totally cashed out of the system and thus have actually have no disincentive not to sell their keys.
Actually, even controlling only 2/3+ of some past stake, the attacker can likely grind on the randomness beacon outputs (since they control all the shares) to ensure his controlled keys have near 100% of the slots in the next epoch. Then the long range fork would be of a similar or possibly even greater length than the honest fork.
