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These incidents really illustrate the main flaw of smart contracts: a single bug in your code can lead to incredible losses. I simply don't think it's possible for human beings to write good enough software for smart contracts.
Human beings write software that flies people around the world and shuttles people between the Earth and space. Managing money is not more important than many things we use software for.
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How is that different from a traditional contract written by a lawyer? A single word could leave a huge unexpected hole in a traditional contract.
Because traditional contracts can be interpreted by a court of law and adjudicated with context. There's an entire field of contract law, with hundreds of years of precedent to fix very obvious human errors, like a typo where neither party could have possibly meant what is "technically" in the contract.
And all of that is a kind of technology that many "technology" people are far too eager to throw away for spurious reasons (often because they just plain don't understand it).
It's like if someone was working on autopilot program and rewrote it in a "modern" language, and "simplified" it in the process by dropping a bunch of "unnecessary" use cases...then it turns out that at least some of those cases were there for good reason and a bunch of planes crash. A lot of cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff is half-baked because it seems focus on faddish technology for its own sake rather than trying to actually build someone that works.
Is there a website along the lines of istheshipstillstuck.com or arewewebyet.org but for "Is that coin / smart-contract dead already" ? Would be an useful reference in this ever-changing landscape, though I would pity the maintainers.
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Oil is physical; it takes up space, and needs special protections to not pollute the container it's stored in. Digital goods, meanwhile, can just be transferred permanently "into the void" (i.e. to an account without an associated key.)
Interesting didn’t know this. I always assumed it had to go to someone else. So digital currency can’t go below zero (or where you are paying someone to take it off you).
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3k8dnq/someone_has...
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Human beings write software that flies people around the world and shuttles people between the Earth and space. Managing money is not more important than many things we use software for.
Software that you can't update is borderline not-software. It's hardware with no joysticks for humans to adjust. It just happens to be hardware that's implemented in code.
Is it theoretically (or in practice) possible to reverse / mitigate these kinds of token transfers? How would we even think about that?
There is no such thing as a stablecoin, it's a made up term to try to lend legitimacy to new crypto scams. And I say this as someone who just bought some Ethereum in the hopes of making a profit :)
This is uninformed. What do you call USDC, which is directly redeemable for US Dollars by anyone with a Coinbase account? Every USDC is backed by one USD of deposits in a US-based bank. USDC is a stablecoin, and there are plenty of others out there.
Are you talking about selling USDC to another baghholder? Thats not 'redeeming' that's trading.
Zero counts as stable. Nothing further is ever going to happen to that price, I'll bet :)
Not really. If owning a coin becomes illegal it can fall below zero where you are paying someone to take your coins. Something similar to oil happened a while ago when storage had become an issue so prices fell below 0$
A point that most crypto heads miss is that the world does not run algorithmically. Legal contracts do not work like a software program and that characteristic is a feature not a bug. Not being able to reverse transactions that were part of an exploit is in infact a bug. Businesses need that tolerance for error. You need an oracle in your system. The oracle can maintain transparency of the attestations carried out if…
Sure it does: moving gold and commodities between countries in non-mutually-friendly regimes, very much resembles crypto.
Fiat finance is a system of contract law built on top of a de-facto "state of nature" of irreversible no-arbitrator commodity transfers. It exists in places where people can agree on who the arbitrating party should be. It does not exist outside of those places. It especially does not exist between powers that are actively at war.
Cryptocurrency platforms are, at a base layer, a digital equivalent to the commodities-transfer "state of nature." Many crypto platforms also have the mechanisms within them to build fiat finance systems atop them. (The keyword to search here is "security tokens".)
I personally think that's for the best. Build something that can simulate all the kinds of finance the real world operates on, rather than only some.
Most people, most of the time, if they touch crypto at all, should be doing so using one of the fiat "layers" on top of crypto, rather than the commodities-transfer base layer. Just like people should be buying things using credit cards, rather than by sending gold bullion in the mail.
But if the fiat layer were the only layer, then you'd have a system that only worked where contract law works, which would be no better than the existing fiat ecosystem, in the sense that it wouldn't enable many of the use-cases that cryptocurrency enables. Chief among those use-cases being securely transferring commodities to people in countries that your own fiat regime's financial infrastructure refuses to deal with, for them to then convert to local fiat money. (See e.g. the saga of this YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAPrhJwVweWZA8GEPoClSdw trying to pay his employees/contractors in Nigeria, Liberia, etc. for their work.)