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

No one has bothered to sue over a smart contract yet. I concur with pkilgore in "I frankly can't wait until this shit gets litigated."

Seriously? You realize that's delusional, right? Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.

The set of people who think that blockchain is the right way to organize society is astonishingly small, and they're basically all speculators.

People may not agree on which regulations they want (environmental regulations? drug regulations?)

Or what taxes should be spend on (education? infrastructure? protectionist tariffs? military?)

Or how taxes should be leveraged (regressive? progressive? on capital or income earners?).

But for each regulation, each tax, and each thing taxes are spent on, you can find many people -- in many cases, even a majority of people -- who support that regulation or tax.

People like to talk about how they don't like regulation or taxation. And maybe their empty rhetoric has you confused. But in fact, people are self-interested. They will crucify you for doing what they say they want if you stop paying their teachers, or let their roads erode, or take away their social security, or close the military base their best friend's local economy revolves around, or build a sewage treatment plant in their backyard.

Once you get past empty rhetoric and into specific contracts, building consensus is enormously difficult. Much of the complexity in modern laws and taxation policy is essential, not accidental, and arises from millions of varying opinions and priorities and emotional investments.

My neighbor was a hard core anarcho-libertarian. Hated the police state and thought all taxation was theft. But he also called the police to have them write tickets every time we parked in the street even a minute past the time when street cleaning started. People aren't rational; they're self-interested. Everyday comforts always dominate broad ideological "beliefs". "The state is evil, but I hate dirty streets".

If you want to use computer-implemented contracts for law, you'll need to be able to describe this essential complexity. IMO that's going to be difficult or impossible, and laws will change often enough that the overhead will become enormously expensive. Orders of magnitude more expensive.

> Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective?

Well, vacuously.

I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.

You really think the average American would be OK with throwing out the constitution for some computer program they don't understand? Or ditto for any other country? To be blunt, you're completely out of touch.

What I'm actually claiming is that your claim -- that piling complex (and apparently buggy!) software on top of contractual law somehow reduces the complexity of the legal system -- is terribly ignorant of the essential complexity that laws codify. Sorry to blunt. 99.9999% of people really don't give a fuck about what your gpu says.

(The fact that contract languages can't even come close to expressing many of the common private sector agreements and financial transactions that aren't so addled with political concerns should be more than enough evidence that this approach won't skill to the level of nation-states.)

> Time will tell who is right.

Several millennia of time already has.

We've had contracts and ledgers for ages. When a majority of people find themselves in a situation they don't like, they rarely shrug it off and say "oh well, that's the contract". They go to ballot boxes or, more commonly in the arc of history, start shooting people.

What makes you think people would resign themselves to subjugation to objectionable instructions from your GPUs when they're clearly unwilling to subjugate themselves to objectionable instructions from other people's graphite and pulp?

If anything, crpytocurrencies have negative rhetorical appeal for the vast majority of the population. And when the largest examples are hacky javascript interfaces to speculators' bank accounts, I can't really blame them.

The argument for reverting the DAO was that 1) Ethereum was very new and there was still a lot of confusion about good community practice, 2) It would still serve as a cautionary tale even with the reversal, since it was the first big mistake, 3) A large percentage of all Ethereum early adopters were invested in it, so letting the money go would have a bad effect on adoption, 4) Because Ethereum was so new at the time, the DAO represented a large percentage of all outstanding Ethers.

We just won't see another theft with all of those attributes in place. The community is diversified and better educated.

> Are we going to end up with 50 forks

Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense of yes, there will literally be 50 forks. But that's the point of cryptocurrencies... anyone can fork them and run things their own way.

No in the sense that No, we won't have Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and 48 other equally valid forks.

Forks have to be based on ideas if they are to last. Ethereum is based on the idea that it's a startup platform and there's going to be a little jostling around as it gets going, but that in the long term interventions will only be made when there are clear existential threats to the network.

Ethereum Classic is based on the idea that you never fudge the blockchain ever. What's written is written and what's done is done.

For there to be a third big chain, there needs to be a third big idea. What's that idea? Reverse all clear instances of fraud or theft?

OK, cool. That's a third chain. They'll fork off ETH and reverse this transaction. Maybe ETH keeps it, because it falls under "buyer beware" for them.

Now we've got three forks. One currency where nothing ever changes, one where only existential threats are dealt with, and one where theft and fraud is actively policed with a big beurocrasy.

Again: This is the point of cryptocurrency! You can set up different regimes with different ideas, and they will work differently.

> and then how does that even work - do then people accepting these crypto-currencies need to decide which forks they're going to accept from?

Yep. Just like how you can accept Dollars, Euros, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, you can also accept Ethereum Classic, and any other fork you like. It's all just currencies. They'll all be tracked on the exchanges and talked about endlessly on online forums.

The difference is, instead of being tied to the political system within a geographic area, they're tied to an idea.