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

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

#281

Post by draw_down »

ckastner wrote: post #130

> Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized that there was no way to reverse the thefts, yet many more wallets were vulnerable. Time was of the essence, so they saw only one available option: hack the remaining wallets before the attacker did. > By exploiting the same vulnerability, the white-hats hacked…

Right, people seemed a little too relieved that that happened. Sure it's better than "bad guys" getting the money, but will the white hats swoop in next time?

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

#282

Post by cesarb »

lmm wrote: post #176
brongondwana wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your logic doesn't add up. Attackers are only willing spend $90k if there's a 90 percent chance they can exploit a bug in the contract to extract the entire $100k value. Clearly if TWO hackers both spend $90k and only one extracts the value, the other one has lost their entire $90k - unless there's a way to be sure you are the one who will win that, your expected return on the $90k is only $50k if there are two parti…

People here love to extol the virtues of cash, but most decent law-abiding folk prefer to keep their assets in safer forms for precisely that reason.

Assuming by "safer form" you mean a bank account (since that's what "most folk" use instead of physical cash), it's hard to know how safer it is. In the early 90s, my country's government froze almost all the money on everybody's bank accounts with no warning; obviously, whatever physical cash you had in hand wasn't affected by the freeze (though it lost its value fast, due to the inflation).

On the other hand, recently another country changed its note design, and made the older design no longer valid. Whatever physical cash you had in hand instantly lost its value, while whatever value you had in bank accounts was automatically converted.

As you can see, sometimes cash is safer, sometimes bank accounts are safer.

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

#283

Post by shanusmagnus »

crispyambulance wrote: post #246
adrianN wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? We already have contracts that require highly paid humans to judge whether they've been broken or not. To me at least Etherium was dead the moment they chose to fork because they felt a contract was "hacked".

Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law". That's OK for now as the _real_ money being put into crypto-currency is understood to be a speculative thrill-ride. People who put actual _real_ money into this stuff know it could vaporize at any time for completely insane reasons. Its basically a bunch of people playing with funny money and having loud arguments about abs…

> If, somehow, this stuff is to make it into the real world [...] it will have to be VERY different from what it is now.

Either that, or the nature of expectations in the real world will have to change, kind of like they did in the 90s when, after a few technological iterations, real people decided that shopping online was not so batshit crazy after all; or like people did in the late aughts when they decided that sharing every damn thing they were doing, and taking pictures of their tacos, was how one conducted oneself socially.

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

#284

Post by kcanini »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
jacquesm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However a smart contract between you or me may execute, a court can still order me to give you money, Just like that judge that ordered the DAO hack to be reversed? > or order me to enter into a different smart contract. No, a judge will never order anybody to enter into a different smart contract just like they don't order people into regular contracts today. > And if I don't comply, they will eventually hold me i…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's also worth pointing out that from the point of view of judges, people losing money on ETH are really losing abstract Internet points. Even if it all happened in the same jurisdiction, would a judge be willing to consider that a theft has happened?

Considering that the US government has decreed that Bitcoin is an asset and capital gains taxes are due when they are sold/spent, I'm inclined to answer yes.

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

#285

Post by richardknop »

bmon wrote: post #152
richardknop wrote: post #146

So many Ethereum related posts on front page every day lately. Is this some sort of marketing campaign or the sudden increase is just because of the hack?

It's a hot topic right now just like when Bitcoin was first booming. Although today and yesterday especially so because of this hack.

But Ethereum is not booming. Isn't it a consensus that it is mostly speculative and most of these ICOs are money grabs and no working products ever get released other than prototypes to raise money?

Yes the price has increased by 4000% in couple of months this year but most reasonable people agree it is a pure speculation / gambling.

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

#286

Post by bsaul »

jacquesm wrote: post #201
bsaul wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so the scope of smart contract in your definition can only cover areas not already governed by traditional regulatory system / laws. Imho that doesn't cover a lot. or laws will have to be adapted to grant values to them. But then it isn't much different from today's contracts.

> so the scope of smart contract in your definition can only cover areas not already governed by traditional regulatory system / laws. Correct, if you don't need a smart contract using one won't give you any advantages. > Imho that doesn't cover a lot. We're going to have to disagree on that. > or laws will have to be adapted to grant values to them. Absent a global government I don't see how that could be done. > Bu…

not a lawyer, but i don't think you need a global government to have legislation covering contracts between two companies from different countries. I suppose the contract decides which juridiction will apply in case of trouble.

But if i understand your point, you see smart contracts just as some kind of tool that could be used in place of regular ones, whenever all the corner cases can be determined in advance and coded against, right ?

In which case we could have state decide which type of smart contract are legal under their juridiction and which aren't. If that's what you mean, that could be interesting indeed. I don't see how that would be applicable in practice : everything can be hacked or tricked, or fall apart, and human always are needed at some point in any autonomous system i know of.

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

#287

Post by sciyoshi »

Jabanga wrote: post #179
dullgiulio wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?

Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The t…

Under growing complexity, average understanding will decrease and tend to become centralized. How many people really understand the dynamics of Bitcoin's current scaling debate? In that scenario, you have a return to manipulation by special interests (in this case, "important" nodes like miners, exchanges, and wallets).

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

#288

Post by Cpoll »

ameister14 wrote: post #247
Jabanga wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The t…

>Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations. In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing.…

> In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing.

In "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman argued the opposite: In the 1800s, people would watch hours-long political debates for amusement and were much more politically literate (the book is more about the negative effects of telecommunication - most people know it as the inspiration for the famous Orwell vs. Huxley infographic).

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

#289

Post by harryh »

meepmorp wrote: post #280
harryh wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Oh come on. It absolutely is an empirical choice. Crypto-currencies have a very short history and that history is CHOCK FULL of people losing their money due to various forms of incompetence and graft. Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. Please…

>Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses. While I agree with your overall point, I think you're glossing over the historical instabilities in the banking system. Bank runs, failures, and physical robberies were pretty common until comparatively recently (in the US, at least - the 19th century was chock full of them).

Even in the dark days before the FDIC losses in US banks were rarer than what we see in cryptocurrencies today.
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