The fact that people are making Ponzi schemes and calling them Ponzi schemes tells you everything you need to know about the gullibility of the cryptocurrency community.
Thinking About Smart Contract Security
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Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#12What I think might be useful is something like the Rust borrow checker but it would be a currency ownership checker which would check for currency ownership at compile time.
That doesn't really apply here. The code and runtime is correct as in: no coins were generated or disappeared, nobody directly reassigned coins, etc. This was simply a logic error - the code followed the legal/known path all the time. Rust can be great for many things, but it can't tell you "this code does not do what you think you wanted".
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#13The fact that people are making Ponzi schemes and calling them Ponzi schemes tells you everything you need to know about the gullibility of the cryptocurrency community.
This is just a form of gambling. Post-modern Ponzi schemes are gambling games that some people enjoy. The people who play them aren't necessarily stupid, they value the entertainment more than the expected reward.
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#14The fact that people are making Ponzi schemes and calling them Ponzi schemes tells you everything you need to know about the gullibility of the cryptocurrency community.
If you know you're giving money to a ponzi scheme and see all the rules of it, is it really a ponzi scheme/gullibility? It sounds just as interesting as betting on sports / stockmarket / ...
People still play roulette or blackjack, even though they know they're guaranteed to lose in a long run / on average.
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#15If the intent of the DAO was to create a decentralized system that people could buy into so that they can vote/participate in investment opportunities presented by other members, then the big question I have is why was the system implemented in such a way as to hold all investment funds up front? Wouldn't a more secure implementation have allowed members to buy in for a nominal fee and keep their investment funds out…
It's a bit of a chicken and egg, where you don't know how much to request from the DAO, if it isn't funded. It's hard to have people softly commit (unless it is a guaranteed commitment), as they could always renege on their promise when it came time to provide money. Also, the vision seemed to be to create many VC funds to consider projects, which required an aggregation of capital.
An alternate way is having each investment opportunity publicize it, but that is a marketing challenge for each project, and may not raise the requisite amount (there may also be greater legal risks to soliciting capital from retail investors directly).
There are a lot of issues with the DAO (long before the hack), so I don't mean that as a justification for launching the current DAO, but rather a potential reasoning for that one aspect. (the bigger question is why didn't they do many proof of concepts + then restrict the amount of money collected with the first production version).
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#16> The reason for this fundamental conclusion is as follows. All instances of smart contract theft or loss – in fact, the very definition of smart contract theft or loss, is fundamentally about differences between implementation and intent. This is, I think, to its core the fundamental problem with any kind of rigid language in contracts. It's nice to see an acknowledgement of its existence, but disappointing to see n…
I agree broadly - and the current DAO was a terrible idea on many fronts, but I'll discuss one quibble in case it starts a broader discussion.
> You can't possibly create a smart contract to purchase a house, because at the end of the day the person that physically occupies the house is in the position of power.
It's likely that if something like this ever succeeded, there'd be many parties that would provide bridges between real world assets (dollars, a house, entry to an electronic lock) + real world contracts that might bridge to crypto contracts (so a trustee may hold a house under US law for a crypto title owned by others - similar to how a custodial bank holds financial assets on your behalf). You're right that the enforcement mechanism might be decoupled, but that doesn't make it worthless, as the trustee could still use the enforcement mechanism on the real world side. On the cryptocontract side, parts could be enforced like payments.
So why might crypto contracts be interesting in this case:
- There are too many parties involved and coordination costs are high (crypto contracts that millions of people collectively negotiate together)
- The adherents are international, and may prefer a standardized form of law accessible cheaply and easily to all
There are clearly an infinite number of risks - but this is just an example of how it might still be beneficial.
One other point. Everyone in this recent DAO hack discusses cryptocontracts as set in stone - and the be all, end all once published. Still, you could always inject in a party that adjudicates, but only in extreme scenarios (technically, they might have root access when a few parties with conflicting incentives agreed).
You might ask, doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of crypto contracts if third parties are involved - but there still may be value if the third party role is substantially diminished, or if previous forms of negotiation that never happened due to coordination cost now occur.
(the canonical Bitcoin example is escrow, where the two parties can verifiably escrow money which in the real world always required a third party actively involved, and a third party in the cryptocurrency world steps in only if there are issues that the two parties can't resolve and cannot take the money itself - 2 of 3 multisig).
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#17Ethereum/DAO would be much less of a tire fire embarassment if the management had taken some time to learn anything about the basics of contracts and
law, instead of making it up as they go and assuming the entirety of centuries of civilization has no clue what they were doing.
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#18Ethereum/DAO would be much less of a tire fire embarassment if the management had taken some time to learn anything about the basics of contracts and law, instead of making it up as they go and assuming the entirety of centuries of civilization has no clue what they were doing.
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Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#19Is there one, solid as in time tested example of a smart contract working? Sorry in advance for my total naivete
Any spend to a Bitcoin address. It's a small program that other computers can execute and validate the results of.
Re: Thinking About Smart Contract Security
#20> If, in a given case, implementation and intent are the same thing, then any instance of “theft” is in fact a donation, and any instance of “loss” is voluntary money-burning, economically equivalent to a proportional donation to the ETH token holder community by means of deflation.
Don't forget about contributions to the aesthetic as well. Some of the things that are occurring with these technologies will be literally mind blowing.