81–90 of 194 posts
Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.
Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.
It's always been like this. Be smug and aggressive when it goes right and cry for help when something goes wrong. The housing crisis was the same. Claim you got the thing that makes everybody rich and when everything went inevitably downhill, ask the "enemy" aka the regulator/government/police to bail you out.
Almost the majority of Wall Street refused the bailout money. Paulson almost force them. The bailout money eventually made a profit ($15B). One could argue that the return rate was low (0.6% annualized), but still, this is far different from what most people have believed till this day: i.e., US gov just gave taxpayer's money away to the banks to cover their ass.
Paulson also almost managed to save Lehman Brothers until British Gov said no to Barclay's role in the plan. (Wall Street banks would acquire LB's "good assets" while Barclay would buy their toxic ones as its gateway to become a more influential player in US market.). But even Lehman didn't reach out to Pualson to get itself saved. It's the other way around: Paulson was trying many ways to save Lehman because he knew when Lehman went down, market would panic and then even those banks in good shape would be affected.
Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.
> The California electric grid operator built a set of rules for generating, distributing and paying for electricity. Those rules were dumb and bad. If you read them carefully and greedily, you could get paid silly amounts of money for generating electricity, not because the electricity was worth that much but because you found a way to exploit the rules. JPMorgan read the rules carefully and greedily, and exploited the rules. It did this openly and honestly, in ways that were ridiculous but explicitly allowed by the rules. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fined it $410 million for doing this, and JPMorgan meekly paid up. What JPMorgan did was explicitly allowed by the rules, but that doesn't mean that it was allowed. Just because rules are dumb and you are smart, that doesn't always mean that you get to take advantage of them...
> The U.S. legal system has built up a pleasantly redundant system of safeguards so that investors usually get more or less what they expect. If you invest in a U.S. public company, you are in a sense signing up for a certificate of incorporation and bylaws, which are written in lawyerly language. But you also get a prospectus that explains the terms of your investment in relatively (relatively!) plain English. Also the terms of that investment -- how you vote, what duties the company owes you, what rights you have, etc. -- tend to be constrained by federal securities law, state law, stock exchange listing requirements, underwriter due diligence, public policy, custom and tradition. Even if you invest in a company whose bylaws say that the board of directors can sacrifice you to a demon on the first full moon of a leap year, it's unlikely that that term would be enforced. There is only so much leeway to depart from the standard terms.
> If you invest your Ether in a smart contract, you'd better be sure that the contract says (and does) what you think it says (and does). The contract is the thing itself, and the only thing that counts; explanations and expectations might be helpful but carry no weight. It is a world of bright lines and sharp edges; you can see why it would appeal to libertarians and techno-utopians, but it might be a bit unforgiving for a wider range of investors.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...
> Another decision he made when he had no idea of the bug shows how quirky and unforgiving code can be. “If the capital ‘T’ in line 666 had been a small ‘t,’ that would also have prevented the hack,” he says. Can someone familiar with this explain how something financially based can have a capitalization flaw? I would expect a smart contract language to have very strict type and variable linking. Humans make many mis…
That's primarily because Ethereum is pure amateur hour. When Bitcoin had built in checksums on addresses, Eth Dev's just said "watch where you send money". They ended up having to later add in a capitalization scheme to serve as a hash. I have no clue how they managed to fool so many people with poor and shoddy work. But they have so far. And they've fooled everyone that this is a 'hack' even after saying time and ag…
There are no address checksums in the Bitcoin blockchain; all contracts/scripts on the blockchain reference raw hashes. Only at the application level -- e.g. sending an address to a friend in an email -- does Bitcoin make use of checksums, since blockchain space is fairly precious/expensive.
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All obfuscation around a central controlling group that have the ability to reverse any transactions they don't like or negatively financially impact them, in other words.
Said "hacker" could even take Ethereum to a civil court and win a trial for changing the DAO's code: Ethereum long claimed that transactions were unrevokable and only contracts had value, causing tort to the hacker when rules were reversed... Given the number of people involved, it could even be juged as organized crime against one person...
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isn't it a bit disingenuous to say it was just the position of Ethereum founders? People wanted their money back. It's almost as if some recourse for actions done in bad faith is a useful tool to have as a society...
Of course, people also want to take back losing moves in chess. The whole point of Ethereum was that the code alone specified the contract.
Given that humans are imperfect, and could even potentially act in bad faith, isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause? I get the argument to not have one; that it's impossible to have favorites and central figures manipulate the system, but nothing is perfect.
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Of course, people also want to take back losing moves in chess. The whole point of Ethereum was that the code alone specified the contract.
But code is written by humans... have you ever seen code with no bugs? In 20 years of professional development I have not. Given that humans are imperfect, and could even potentially act in bad faith, isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause? I get the argument to not have one; that it's impossible to have favorites and central figures manipulate the system, but nothing is perfect.
This case feels so closely to the very interesting case of Aviva France[1], where a not "well-futureproofed" life insurance contract is making a person very rich by the day. Unfortunately for Aviva, their contracts are actually law in contrast to Ethereum where if the devs feel like it, they can do/revert anything. [1]: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/27/2120422/meet-the-man-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's always been like this. Be smug and aggressive when it goes right and cry for help when something goes wrong. The housing crisis was the same. Claim you got the thing that makes everybody rich and when everything went inevitably downhill, ask the "enemy" aka the regulator/government/police to bail you out.
It's been long time since I read Too Big To Fail, so what I recall could be wrong, but i don't think your statement about the 2008 bailout is entirely true if that book wasn't a lie. Almost the majority of Wall Street refused the bailout money. Paulson almost force them. The bailout money eventually made a profit ($15B). One could argue that the return rate was low (0.6% annualized), but still, this is far different…
http://www.reuters.com/article/barclays-lehman-idUSLDE62B258...
You can't trust anything in Too Big To Fail, unfortunately. Shame, it reads really well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But code is written by humans... have you ever seen code with no bugs? In 20 years of professional development I have not. Given that humans are imperfect, and could even potentially act in bad faith, isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause? I get the argument to not have one; that it's impossible to have favorites and central figures manipulate the system, but nothing is perfect.
https://github.com/seL4/seL4 https://www.mitls.org/
https://github.com/seL4/seL4/issues/36
It might be close... for miTLS I don't have access to the issues, but let's assume it's bug free now for sake of argument; it hasn't always been bug free, that is in earlier unproven releases.
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!" - Edsger Dijkstra