I find it disturbing that Medjedovic was prosecuted in the first place. If anyone is guilty of this situation, it's Kellar and Day.
The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
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Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#22Good for the hacker then and well played.
If you really hate crypto projects so much, rather than complain all day long about the crypto-bros getting rich off of their tokens, just hack the smart contracts themselves and the project should offer a bounty if not beg for a negotiation for that and once the project creators fix the bug, you keep the rest.
Job done, until the regulators come.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#23Code is law.
A common misconception about law/contracts is that they are static. You can technically "not break" any laws and still be held accountable by a court of law.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#24What’d he do that was illegal? Seems like he didn’t cheat and insider trading laws don’t seem to apply. Oops crypto is a unregulated market.
FTA: > In their complaint, lawyers for Kellar and Day argued that two particular steps of the attack violated statutes against market manipulation and computer hacking. One was swapping almost all the UNI tokens out of the DEFI5 pool, the otherwise irrational trade that distorted the pricing such that Medjedovic could buy tokens out from under Indexed users, who were forced by the algorithm to sell. “The only purpose…
If the law is held to have supremacy over “smart contracts” and implicit intent is held to be more important than explicit terms, than this undermines not just a major argument for smart contracts but a major argument as to why crypto as a whole is valuable.
Enforcing a contract through a written contract & traditional finance vs a smart contract becomes a mere implementation detail since in either case somebody can come crying to the courts when they lose money. Smart contracts are only interesting if they’re a form of binding arbitration. If smart contracts are not binding, they just become poorly written contracts.
Smart contracts being binding honestly might need to be legislated.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#25What’d he do that was illegal? Seems like he didn’t cheat and insider trading laws don’t seem to apply. Oops crypto is a unregulated market.
He was in communication with the IF team, and contributed something to their system, so it's possible that he defrauded them and inserted malicious code into the protocol, not just interacted with the protocol.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#26What is interesting to me is how it shines a light on the regulatory framework of the non-crypto economy. If you read up on edge cases, there is a lot of people deciding if something is "fair", and my notions of fair and a particular judges notions of fair are often at odds. To steal from Frank Zappa: Legal isn't the same as allowed, allowed isn't the same as fair, fair isn't the same as just, and just isn't music.
There are lots of stories lately about stolen NFTs. The podcast ReplyAll did an episode where they tracked down the current owner of a stolen NFT. He had sympathy for the original owner but he had no intention of turning it over.
I don’t get why purchasing a stolen NFT is different than purchasing a stolen guitar from a pawn shop. Shouldn’t the previous owner be able to use the courts to demand the return of the item that was stolen from them?
Or is this just something that hasn’t been tested yet?
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#27Code is law.
>"Code is law."
I agree, but with the caveat that code is the letter of the law only. As it currently stands, there is no way to resolve a dispute, ambiguity, or unintended consequence with smart contracts in the same way that a court of law would handle such issues with a conventional contract. There is no room for interpretation and all smart contracts must be understood as such.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#28What’d he do that was illegal? Seems like he didn’t cheat and insider trading laws don’t seem to apply. Oops crypto is a unregulated market.
FTA: > In their complaint, lawyers for Kellar and Day argued that two particular steps of the attack violated statutes against market manipulation and computer hacking. One was swapping almost all the UNI tokens out of the DEFI5 pool, the otherwise irrational trade that distorted the pricing such that Medjedovic could buy tokens out from under Indexed users, who were forced by the algorithm to sell. “The only purpose…
Isn't the intended purpose of this particular computer to part fools and their money in a non-regulated "code is law" ecosystem?
It seems like it's working as designed, even if it's not the outcome its operators wanted.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#29Hey, code is law right? He is the rightful owner now.
Re: The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
#30> His profile on one social network included a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle about the futility of humanity's quest for knowledge: “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” Hey! He’s just like me. > But did Medjedovic do this, or did the algorithm? Barry Sookman, a lawyer in Toronto specializi…
If I write code that can be exploited with a buffer overflow and you exploit it, who is the law going to punish more harshly?