Absolute trash article.
Ethereum is Doomed
51–60 of 217 posts
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#52> 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.
This exploit wasn't legal either. It was blatantly fraud. I've asked a lawyer for their opinion and it was a very simple question to answer. Contracts are never entirely literal and usually there are implied clauses in contracts. There is a very simple test called the "officious bystander": if there had been a neutral bystander who had asked "should we allow anyone to take $50 million dollars without our consent" then unless both parties would've said "of course!" then it isn't considered to be a clause of the contract and it is just simply fraud. The developers of theDAO wouldn't have said "of course" so it's fraud.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#53"I thought again about my early plan of a new language or writing-system of reason, which could serve as a communication tool for all different nations... If we had such an universal tool, we could discuss the problems of the metaphysical or the questions of ethics in the same way as the problems and questions of mathematics or geometry. That was my aim: Every misunderstanding should be nothing more than a miscalculation (...), easily corrected by the grammatical laws of that new language. Thus, in the case of a controversial discussion, two philosophers could sit down at a table and just calculating, like two mathematicians, they could say, 'Let us check it up ...'" --Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#54Earlier 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.
No, it was fraud. I asked a lawyer, and the stealing of $50 million would not be considered a clause of the contract (it doesn't pass the officious bystander test). As much as programmers might try to remove lawyers and courts from our lives, they are vital to actually doing things with other people where you might have a difference of opinion on what a particular agreement means.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From The DAO Terms: The terms of The DAO Creation are set forth in the smart contract code existing on the Ethereum blockchain at 0xbb9bc244d798123fde783fcc1c72d3bb8c189413. Nothing in this explanation of terms or in any other document or communication may modify or add any additional obligations or guarantees beyond those set forth in The DAO’s code. Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered f…
It's fraud. It doesn't pass the officious bystander test.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#56> 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.
Jeremy Clarkson published his bank account details in his column to back up his assertion that you can send money to a bank account but not withdraw any. However apparently anybody can set up an automatic payment from any account to any other account...
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#57> 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?
As other comments say, legality and hard failure are big differentiators here, and in fact the specific language you used invokes a really key point. Emphasis added: >You think banks aren't hacked ? There has been a lot of general description of the individual or group that performed the splitting as an "attacker" or "hacker", but the very nature of the system in question subverts the conceptual foundation of "attack…
It was definitely fraud. Either it was a contract, in which case "taking $50 million without anyone's consent" doesn't pass the officious bystander test. Otherwise it wasn't a contract, so the default is still fraud (though in that case, the DAO would be the thing being defrauded rather than the investors).
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#58Ethereum 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…
Ethereum is doomed, and not just because it's based on a poor design. It's doomed because it just shot its credibility to shreds by protecting a single, uniquely privileged contract. Forking proves that the ethereum network cannot be trusted as the neutral contract arbitrator it was designed to be. The idea of smart contracts is an interesting one, and perhaps another project will come along and do it better. But Eth…
Based on a poor design? according to who? It's the most advanced blockchain out there by far and wide! This was a single contract with a flaw, it's like saying the whole internet is doomed because some website got a SQL injection.
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#59I 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 thing that advertises itself as being like Ethereum but without the Turing completeness.
It is meant to be able to do more computation based stuff than Bitcoin, but without being Turing complete.
However, they seem to have confused the halting problem not being computable with Godel's second incompleteness theorem? (They might have corrected this since I saw when they published something with this.)
Re: Ethereum is Doomed
#60I 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.
This doesn't sound right to me. Contract law should not require turing completeness. First order logic should be more than sufficient. How does having a loop in contract law make any sense?