Ethereum is Doomed
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Ethereum is Doomed
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Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#2The programming classic "Mythical Man Month" had a chapter for the "second system effect". Its where developers put lots of complicated features in to the second system in a series. Its a pattern for failure.
In this case, Ethereum developers built a much more complicated cryptocurrency by making it Turing complete - to the extent of writing their own new computer language and virtual machine to run it.
They skipped over the halfway step of declaring parameters in the payment transactions, that open source enterprise library code, e.g. Java, could execute for for required behavior. No. They made the new code itself a user-contributed and immutable! part of the system.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#3> They created a situation in which bugs would be expected to arise in an environment in which bugs are legally exploitable. That is hacker heaven.
Every single system has this problem. You think banks aren't hacked?
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#4Software is almost always flawed to a certain extent.
The problem with Ethereum is that you can't push a fix to your contract.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#5Software is almost always flawed to a certain extent. The problem with Ethereum is that you can't push a fix to your contract.
You absolutely can if you're not too proud to imagine you'll need to upfront.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#6> They created a situation in which bugs would be expected to arise in an environment in which bugs are legally exploitable. That is hacker heaven. Every single system has this problem. You think banks aren't hacked?
What _legally_ exploitable bank bugs have you heard of? Keyword there being legally.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#7> They created a situation in which bugs would be expected to arise in an environment in which bugs are legally exploitable. That is hacker heaven. Every single system has this problem. You think banks aren't hacked?
Banks aren't legally exploitable.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#8Having a little bit of trouble parsing how the attack worked -- so when a transfer happens, the destination account gets to run a command; they then ran a command that called the source's send-ether command, which ran because it was still in 'we owe destination account money' mode because the full initial contract had not concluded?
Then at some point it terminates itself before emptying the source account (and thereby causing a rollback that would cascade back?)
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#9Ethereum isn't doomed. I don't think it will ever have as much backing as Bitcoin because of institutional buy-in; but the world needs programmable smart contracts. Some rich soon-to-be-dead billionaire tech nerds want to be able to do something every year without worrying about a judge taking that away from them. Individual will is what cryptocurrencies are about. Bitcoin in terms of international payments and store-of-value; and Ethereum in terms of contracts and computing.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#10Having a little bit of trouble parsing how the attack worked -- so when a transfer happens, the destination account gets to run a command; they then ran a command that called the source's send-ether command, which ran because it was still in 'we owe destination account money' mode because the full initial contract had not concluded? Then at some point it terminates itself before emptying the source account (and there…
My understanding is that it looks essentially like this:
send(theEther, childDao)
deduct(theEther, tokenHolder)