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

Post by return0 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #245

return0 wrote: post #194

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Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Some people don't trust a government elected by only half the population, for example. Some others may prefer to trust an elite of "enlightened hackers" than hordes of plebs. You might be right that governments are more evolved and have more history but that doesn't make them universally better.

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…

Post by ameister14 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

Cpoll wrote: post #288

ameister14 wrote: post #247

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>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).

Post by thinkmassive » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

canoebuilder wrote: post #150

lordnacho wrote: post #138

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> But a loss of unmarked cash is similarly instant. True, there isn't a global list of where every bank note is. I've already lost a tiny amount of BTC just by testing a bit with short keys. Can you imagine what the world would be like if every time you left your wallet for 10 seconds, it vanished?

Just in case lordnacho's meaning here isn't clear to anyone. testing a bit with short keys. He's put some bitcoin into wallets with keys/passwords that don't meet very high security standards. I've already lost a tiny amount of BTC He's then lost that bitcoin because there are programs running running around the clock to programatically empty any wallets with passwords that don't meet very high standards of security.…

Post by Jabanga » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 3:26 PM UTC

splintercell wrote: post #262

ameister14 wrote: post #247

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>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.…

> Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. The thing he's experiencing which makes him say that we are growing more and more unfair, that's exactly what you're experiencing when you say that we've grown more unfair than 60's. But let's really see how things are today, in the 60s, there was no Internet, so majority of the opinions were dominated by what was in the mass media, so that served as a Schelli…

Post by tboyd47 » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 3:33 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #246

adrianN wrote: post #74

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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…