A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

>laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.

Laws against interracial marriage in the US were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony. But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed.

On the other hand, new laws have been created that force individuals to pay for the costs of other people's personal choices. If a person engages in rampant promiscuity for instance, and contracts a sexually transmitted disease, others are forced, at pain of imprisonment, to pay the costs of their medical care.

Just as laws prohibiting homosexuality were once popular, laws mandating that individuals pay the costs of others' medical care are very popular today. Popularity is not a measure of justice.

Occupational licensing is another area that has grown increasingly unjust. In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today it's over 25 percent. The growing restrictions on economic participation have harmed millions of people and exacerbated income inequality. [1]

Government spending meanwhile is increasingly creating a set of haves and have-nots. The majority of the wealthiest counties in the US are now suburbs of Washington DC. [2] The average Congressperson in the US makes well over ten times more once they become a lobbyist than they did while they were in office. [3] The pay gap between federal employees and workers in general continues to increase. [4]

The power of public servants continues to increase thanks to unionization and collective bargaining, resulting in this class of workers extracting more economic rent, while the quality of the public services suffers. [5]

And then we have privacy rights. The Snowden revelations showed us that society has never before been subject to such extensive surveillance of its private activities and interactions. This is an extreme systemic danger, and very likely has numerous malignant effects that are unknown, e.g. contributes to the centralisation of economic power, as a result of the information asymmetry it creates.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

[3] https://www.thenation.com/article/when-congressman-becomes-l...

[4] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-06...

[5] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...

The people who proceed anyway stand to benefit handsomely if they don't screw it up. So the game is simply: don't screw up.

It's hard, to be sure. But to say it's impossible is to overstate the issue. And even if it is impossible, it doesn't mean it will end in disaster 100% of the time.

As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Either because they have read those pamphlets and eye-roll, or because they haven't and figure you're a rambling extremist. It's literally equivalent to communists beginning propaganda pieces with "Attention all Comrades!"

That said, I disagree with you, so feel free to keep talking this way.

> ever progressing political system

Literally no one claims politics is monotonically improving. Unless Clinton has been singing Trump's praises recently, you're attacking a straw-man.

> the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing

Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic.

Seriously, even most early adopters don't understand what their crypto currency is doing. And certainly don't have any hope of understanding even a mildly complex contract. Code comprehension is difficult for trained software engineers!.

All of the serious proposals in this thread call for some sort of formal verification, which even most trained software engineers aren't currently capable of using.

And hell, if we learned anything form this, it's that even the ostensible experts don't have an air-tight understanding!

So, what? Instead of teaching every citizen how to read and interpret legislation and regulation, we'll just train them all as professional software engineers with formal methods expertise?!?! And even that's no silver bullet. Contracts can and will grow just as complex as e.g., current tax law. Because the underlying humans won't have changed!

In the long run, you're merely adding complexity. Now I have to understand software and also tax policy. Things get strictly worse.

> This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests

As opposed to manipulation by "whichever guy finds a bug in the cryptocurrency". You can argue that these are equivalently bad things (I'd disagree), but you'll be hard-pressed to convince most rational folks that "rando dude" is better. Stick to the devils you know and all that.

> limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.

I'll end my comment in the same way I started it: you're preaching to the choir.

Besides which, what're you going to do when it turns out the majority of people still don't agree with you about how society should be, and still control all the guns and natural resources? Because that's what will happen.

Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.

I never thought a legal definition would be clearer than every "common" definition I have read. It's like the author of every blog post I've seen titled "What is Ethereum?" has no idea what title they used.

I guess that just shows how hype makes it hard to get to the truth.

Cryptocurrencies are serving as bug bounties for their crypto primitives, but that only benefits other users of those primitives.