Zcoin implementation bug enabled attacker to create over 500K Zcoins

When someone comes to play poker with chips, is it immoral to beat them and take their chips? No, they factored it in.

However, is it immoral to figure out a new collusion strategy and beat them?

Was it immoral to figure out a card counting strategy to beat casinos?

In other words, is it immoral to figure out new strategies in what is essentially an experimental game where participants assume there is risk?

In well established games like poker, which explicitly have gentlemen's agreements of "no collusion", it may be immoral.

But in a new experimental system such as a cryptocurrency whose software may be buggy, is taking advantage of the bugs really immoral?

When is it "buyer beware" and "a fool and his gold are soon parted"?

Isn't there any threshold for taking the money of a risktaker?

One reason is security - if cryptography isn't done in constant time then there is the potential for timing attacks. This is why BitCoinJ ditched BouncyCastle for their own JNI wrapper around BitCoin's libsecp256k1.

There is a rust client for Ethereum, called Parity - they do FFI calls to libsecp256k1. Similarly rust-crypto vendors most of its crypto in C that it calls through FFI. Similarly go-ethereum also uses libsecp256k1. However, I know that Tendermint uses Ed25519 instead of secp256k1, and in turn they use NaCl which does not involve FFI.

Mining for Ethereum is done on a GPU, so the miner code is necessarily written in OpenCL or CUDA.

There are a few blockchains written in functional language but they are new to the scene. There were a couple of Haskell Ethereum clients but they appear to be abandoned. I know kadena[1] and cardano[2] are written in Haskell. There is also Aeternity[3], which is the only currency I know of written in Erlang.

In the early days Charles Hoskinson apparently wanted Ethereum to be written in Scala. I don't think any of the core devs know Scala, but then again Charles Hoskinson was booted from the project so his language choice was dropped.

Synereo was to be written in Scala, but the founders (the CEO and the CTO) split in December. The CEO doesn't want Synereo to make a blockchain anymore, he wants to make some kind of escrow for ponzi schemes. I hear from the devs they want to code the thing in javascript. The CTO is making something called RChain; I heard he wants to use some pi-calculus interpreter he wrote in C90 back when he worked at Miter corporation in the 90s, but maybe he's ditching that.

From job postings I can see MaidSafe is looking for Rust programmers. MaidSafe has been in R&D for a decade, so they must have had yet another pivot recently.

To be frank, while there are functional programmers in the scene, these guys are struggling to establish themselves. There's a lot more talent in procedural programming which is why so much code is written in those languages. I'm not 100% that functional code is going to have fewer bugs which result in financial exploits.

[1] http://kadena.io/ [2] https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/ [3] https://github.com/aeternity

    error[E0308]: mismatched types
     --> src/main.rs:5:6
      |
    5 |   if x = 1 {
      |      ^^^^^ expected bool, found ()  
      |
      = note: expected type `bool`
      = note:    found type `()`
    
    error: aborting due to previous error
    
    error: Could not compile `playground`.
    
    To learn more, run the command again with --verbose.