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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

#321

Post by throwawayjava »

Jabanga wrote: post #315
throwawayjava wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> political process If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship. If you can implement people's political preferences in your contract language, and your contract language is used for political or governmen…

>If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship. Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the reasoning behind this. Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a subst…

> I don't understand the reasoning behind this.

> Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world?

They don't. The can -- and almost certainly will -- remain primarily a speculative investment vehicle for technophile speculators and occasional currency for black markets. Maybe, even probably, crypto-currencies will turn out to be useful technological tool for some non-speculative businesses as well.

However, you claimed:

>>> Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity... This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests

I'm simply responding to that claim.

> Why can't they have an impact by raising the cost of legal enforcement of over-reaching tax mandates and regulatory restrictions

Because -- believe it or not -- some people actually approve of some or all of those mandates and regulations.

This idea that regulation and taxation is an objective negative result of a broken process is impressive self-delusion.

Not everyone shares you political preferences or beliefs. Your political beliefs are not objective moral truth.

So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?

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

#322

Post by dsacco »

tptacek wrote: post #304
dsacco wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are not sufficient conditions for a one-time pad. The entire pad, not just some "seed" has to be random. Well that seems a bit pedantic, but yes, you're right. The difficulty I was focusing on however is the randomness itself, not how far it has to be extended. Ostensibly once you've incorporated a non-deterministic seed (which is necessarily external) into your process, you can extend it to the pad itself. T…

I'm not sure I follow this, but if you're "extending" randomness from an externally-provided "seed" of random data, what you're doing is encrypting with a stream cipher, not a one-time pad. I might be just misunderstanding you though.

Yeah that's a comparison I drew down-thread as well (w/r/t a stream cipher). "Seed" was a poor choice of terminology on my part there - the point I was trying to convey is that you'll need a non-deterministic source, which is necessarily outside of software. I used the term "seed" as a shorthand for that (as if it were a stream cipher), but strictly speaking as you say that's not correct, as you'll be taking the random data directly as a key.

So no, you're not misunderstanding - I just communicated poorly!

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

#323

Post by Jabanga »

ceejayoz wrote: post #252
Jabanga wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. I should clarify that I mean that the societies in the advanced world have grown more unfair over the last 120 years. >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 homosexua…

> 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. Come on, that's just blatantly false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_constitutio... > But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed. No,…

The bans in question are on the state itself, recognizing such marriages. Unlike anti-miscegenation laws, there is no criminal sanction for those who enter a relationship that they consider marriage.

>No, they were struck down by the Supreme Court, and only in 2003!

Strictly speaking, that's a law against sodomy, not homosexuality. But I can agree that such laws can be construed as anti-homosexual, given that any sex practice between individuals of the same sex could fall under the sodomy category.

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

#324

Post by Jabanga »

throwawayjava wrote: post #321
Jabanga wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship. Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the reasoning behind this. Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a subst…

> I don't understand the reasoning behind this. > Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world? They don't. The can -- and almost certainly will -- remain primarily a speculative investment vehicle for technophile speculators and occasional currency for black markets. Maybe, even probably, crypto-currencies will turn out to be useful technological to…

>Because -- believe it or not -- some people actually approve of some or all of those mandates and regulations.

How does people approving of these mandates/regulations (which I dispute, but let's go with it) invalidate my claim?

If the cost of enforcement increases, regardless of the popularity of the law in question, it stands to reason such laws would become less common and/or less effective.

>So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?

Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective? If that's your opinion, we should agree to disagree. Time will tell who is right.

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

#325

Post by Jabanga »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #317
justadeveloper2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can. My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.

When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.

We will not benefit from fewer people working..

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

#326

Post by mholmes680 »

I know very little of Ethereum aside from the articles that pop up here, but I'm trying to compare this event to my existing currency. I have cash under my bed, i have it in 10+ accounts in financial institutions, and most of it is insured by the FDIC... so I've reduced my risk profile greatly.

Does ethereum/ether allow me offline wallets? Can i have multiple accounts/wallets and easily administrate them? Is any agency insuring this yet? If so, then isn't this also user-error here? Don't allow a wallet of $X size that you can't afford to have disappear?

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

#327

Post by abritinthebay »

Jabanga wrote: post #307
splintercell wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. The federal Department of Education was created in 1980, so there was no DoE to eliminate in 1960. The growing centralization of education policy in the han…

Aside from in the rest of the developed world, where it has...?

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

#328

Post by ihattendorf »

magnetic wrote: post #297
CoryG89 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks. Sure there is. As the DAO hack showed us, if you can get enough of the network to agree to it, you can literally rewrite history and create an alternate universe where the contract never went wrong.

I've heard this argument before and was wondering how it can be considered ok: 1) hacker steals massive amount of money from a crypto wallet 2) hacker cashes out and gets real money 3) network realizes the hack and "rewrites history" as if "the contract never went wrong" How is this a valid outcome? Somebody in here is out a large amount of real money.

The whole reason the DAO hard fork worked was because the funds were locked until a certain date. The hackers couldn't access them until after that date, so the hard fork before that date resulted in no hacked ETH being traded for USD (or anything else).

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

#329

Post by buttershakes »

int_19h wrote: post #76
pipermerriam wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your parallel is not an accurate one. One of the key and powerful features of the Ethereum Virtual Machine or, EVM, is the ability to delegate execution to external libraries. You can think of this much the same way you think of installing 3rd party libraries in your favorite programming language of choice. In the EVM you can write a "library" which performs some common functionality such as manipulation of date-time…

A serious question: are the benefits really worth it? How much overhead would it be to just include the library code directly into the contracts instead (so that the whole thing can be verified as a single black box)?

Its not really worth it. Very over complicated. Really they just need to do code/data deduplication on chain somehow and forget about using contracts as libraries in this way.

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

#330

Post by Jabanga »

abritinthebay wrote: post #327
Jabanga wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. The federal Department of Education was created in 1980, so there was no DoE to eliminate in 1960. The growing centralization of education policy in the han…

Aside from in the rest of the developed world, where it has...?

I've seen no evidence of that. Pretty much the entire advanced world has seen its rate of progress slow since the late 1960s, in concurrence with growing public sectors.
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