> Solidity is like programming in JavaScript, except with your bank account accessible through the Document Object Model.
Such a beautiful, terrifying sentence.
Ethereum is Doomed
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#42The 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…
Is it a case of Second System Effect, or Build One to Throw Away? I don't have an opinion either way, but just pointing out that the very same pattern is also known as a successful one in some cases.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#43I didn't know the language was turing complete. Isn't this computing 101? If you want a secure thing then you must be able to reason about it statically. Making things turing complete means any non-trivial property of program correctness can not have a generic solution and so you've just opened yourself up to a world of hurt.
Well for one it costs you money to run the programs so if you want to run your program forever you can try that but it's a bit of a money pit.
I think the idea vehind TC is that now you could write in certain styles that do guarantee termination without sacrificing readability.
For example if you're working with just primitively recursive functions you can always guarantee termination
So the prerequisite for people investing is for the contract to be in a certain style, or something
EDIT: besides, even without TC you still need to check the contract for logic bugs. TC is a bit of a red herring for "due diligence is always needed"
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks aren't legally exploitable .
Was the hack legal? A system letting you in if you poke it just right doesn't mean you are legally allowed in. I fail to see how a bug in banking software would be any different to the bug in the DAO.
The banks pretty much state that their software is an approximate implementation of the contract not the real contract itself. They specify that the real contract is what their lawyers drew up as interpreted by a human judge considering hundreds of years of legal case law.
The DAO basically said screw the lawyers and case law and precedent bullshit, the contract is nothing more or less than the results of running this program on the Ethereum VM.
As the program executed a way to transfer 10s of millions of dollars and they specifically stated that the program was the contract, by The DAO no contract violation occurred, hence no hack.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#45What if they had used a language without the possibility of recursion and without loops? I'm being serious. Languages that disallow certain types of recursion, and disallow loops exist. You'd think they would've used something that actually allows for total functions that are guaranteed to terminate in a certain way, instead of a JavaScript clone...
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#46What if they had used a language without the possibility of recursion and without loops? I'm being serious. Languages that disallow certain types of recursion, and disallow loops exist. You'd think they would've used something that actually allows for total functions that are guaranteed to terminate in a certain way, instead of a JavaScript clone...
We want to allow recursion and loops. We want to be able to run arbitrary code.
We just need to be a little wiser about how we do it.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#47I'm getting a strong Accelerando deja-vu here.
(ref: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... )
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#48Here's a better explanation of the attack: http://vessenes.com/more-ethereum-attacks-race-to-empty-is-t... Ethereum is not doomed. But devs do need to be educated of this attack.
It is doomed, who would trust a contract now with real "money"? Unless you have a mathematically rigorous proof that the contract is trustworthy I sure wouldn't.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#49As expected, "Ethereum is turing-complete" turned out to be just a marketing meme (or a horrible idea at best), just like "Litecoin is silver", "Doge is community", and all the others.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#50I didn't know the language was turing complete. Isn't this computing 101? If you want a secure thing then you must be able to reason about it statically. Making things turing complete means any non-trivial property of program correctness can not have a generic solution and so you've just opened yourself up to a world of hurt.
The whole point of Ethereum is turing completeness. Ethereum without Turing completeness already exists and its called Bitcoin. While this implementation of The Dao has failed, Ethereum is the only blockchain where implementing The Dao is possible.
There is a huge canyon between "you can use this small set of ops" and "turing complete".