The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
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Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#2Sorry, but that's bs.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#3It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out in court (if they are caught).
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#4Oh come on, a blockchain isn't an improvement because you can call lawenforcment and they'll try to catch the hacker? This was 100% illegal, even if you consider the law article he linked.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#5"The smart contract is the authority"
Not sure that's as clear as the article suggests (at least to the extent you are dealing with entities within the reach of U.S. law (which is a whole lot!)).
See my thoughts on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14820950
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#6"The smart contract is the authority" Not sure that's as clear as the article suggests (at least to the extent you are dealing with entities within the reach of U.S. law (which is a whole lot!)). See my thoughts on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14820950
To put this another way, though, just because I don't sanitize my database inputs on my website, doesn't necessarily mean your SELECT * command will not be considered a hack.
Both are exploitation of unintended behavior.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#7On the actual contract, it's possible a court would find that the contract was between parties x and y, and therefore party z inserting themselves into it is not valid. Often law comes down to intent, so the hacker could well find themselves in trouble, even if technically all they did was play by the rules allowed by the contract.
There is another interesting point here, which I think applies to Bitcoin too - if the blockchain/smart contract is the distributed source of truth and lets you deal with untrusted third parties without a middleman, it shouldn't require external arbitration.
If you need external arbitration in the event of problems, which requires verifying identity, intent, etc, why not have a central system with strong identities and regulatory bodies in the first place and forget the distributed system (which is slower and another point of failure), since the centralised system is what you fall back to anyway when the distributed trust fails.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#8And if I use a teleportation device to move money directly out of a bank vault no breaking and entering has occurred and therefore no theft.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#9This was a waste of time to read.
Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything
#10On the actual contract, it's possible a court would find that the contract was between parties x and y, and therefore party z inserting themselves into it is not valid. Often law comes down to intent, so the hacker could well find themselves in trouble, even if technically all they did was play by the rules allowed by the contract. There is another interesting point here, which I think applies to Bitcoin too - if the…
Courts will absolutely use intent to judge contracts.
The interesting thing with the DAO though, was the explicit INTENT of the contract, was for it to be entirely governed by the code.
As in, the announcement website, and all the marketing for the DAO included a whole lot of lines like "None of the information here is binding. The only thing that it binding is the code. The contract is the code".
So, it is arguable, that allowing people to exploit "bugs" in the code was actually intended.
Of course, they didn't think there were going to be any bugs, but I bet that if you asked the DAO people ahead of time, before the bugs were found, something like "Hey, if I find a bug and exploit it, is that within the contract?", then i bet that the DAO people would have said yes.