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The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

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Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#11

Post by s73ver_ »

The "he didn't do anything wrong!" narrative is pretty misleading, to me. He very clearly did. He exploited a loophole, taking things that were very clearly not meant to go to him.

And these defenses of what that person did are doing nothing but undermining faith and credibility in these things. I don't care if you want to call what he did a hack or not a hack; at the end of the day, he exploited a loophole to take things from other people. Things that they were never intended to receive, or even be a party to. By hearing more and more of the community just shrug their shoulders and go, "oh well, he sure got us," while defending those actions, it shows that this is not a safe place to store value, or to move it. Think about it: Do you want to entrust your business's important payments to a system where it could be intercepted like that, and it's treated as if it's no big deal?

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#12

Post by [deleted] »

pkilgore wrote: post #6
pkilgore wrote: post #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

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.

[deleted]

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#13

Post by detaro »

stale2002 wrote: post #10
grey-area wrote: post #7

On 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,…

This article is not about the DAO hack.

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#14

Post by ollieshmollie »

grey-area wrote: post #7

On 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…

I agree. I took the crux of the article to be, "What's the point of smart contracts?", not "The hacker in this case didn't do anything wrong."

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#15

Post by elnygren »

It seems we have some mismatch between the abstraction layer where we want to talk about cryptocurrencies and how their actual implementation goes.

IMHO, we are venturing to the domain of lawyers; most people are not just going to be saying computer code == what-we-agreed-here because most people are just normal people and they couldn't care about computer code. And let's face it, cryptos are already full of normal people, it's not for the early nerds anymore.

However, always keep in mind that cryptos are not regulated, they are not always too compatible with current regulation regarding normal money and they are extremely valuable when considering the fact that they are not regulated.

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#16

Post by grey-area »

stale2002 wrote: post #10
grey-area wrote: post #7

On 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,…

While this isn't about DAO, its true that recourse to courts undermines a central tenet of smart contracts, hence as you say DAO people would probably insist the code is the contract, until a problem occurs.

In fact the DAO fork brings up another problem which applies to Bitcoin too - the developers (and miners if a POW coin) are de facto arbiters of the fate of millions, and if this sort of system were to gain widespread use, would have enormous power, in fact they already do even if you think the coins are overvalued. They decide if a fork is justified, a change will be adopted, or a tweak to algorithms to discourage certain behaviour. They become in some ways a parallel system of government/law without accountability. For all the pretence that people can just fork the project or choose another client, we've seen how hard that is to pull off, and how much influence is retained by the central developers of such a project with the recent Bitcoin Cash fracas.

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#17

Post by KGIII »

pkilgore wrote: post #6
pkilgore wrote: post #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

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.

I am reminded of a buddy of mine. He put a bunch of junk on the lawn. He also took a full sheet of plywood and painted "free for the taking" on it. Someone took the plywood and left his pile of junk.

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#18

Post by tylersmith »

pkilgore wrote: post #6
pkilgore wrote: post #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

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.

The difference is that strict adherence to rules as written is the entire point of smart contracts. If you want nuance and subjective interpretation you use Ricardian Contracts. If you absolutely need smart contracts for some aspect they can be added to Ricardian Contract with the added benefit of prose.

In the OpenBazaar community we call them Dumb Contracts. https://medium.com/@therealopenbazaar/the-case-for-dumb-cont...

Re: The ethereum “hacker” didn't hack anything

#20

Post by ryanlol »

elnygren wrote: post #15

It seems we have some mismatch between the abstraction layer where we want to talk about cryptocurrencies and how their actual implementation goes. IMHO, we are venturing to the domain of lawyers; most people are not just going to be saying computer code == what-we-agreed-here because most people are just normal people and they couldn't care about computer code. And let's face it, cryptos are already full of normal p…

If computer code == what-we-agreed-here isn't what you want, then you don't want smart contracts.
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