181–190 of 409 posts
Opsec really isn't that difficult, you just have to give it some thought.
You love to see it. Love to see crypto taking Ls.
No I don't think I'll love to see a person who "written the N-word into the code itself, 16 times." to steal 16 Million.
> Medjedovic added that he'd taken on “substantial risk” in pursuing this strategy. If he'd failed he would have lost “a pretty large chunk of my portfolio.” (The 3 ETH he stood to lose in fees was worth about $11,000 at the time.) This is misleading, either intentionally or due to Medjedovic's incompetence. You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to…
> Medjedovic added that he'd taken on “substantial risk” in pursuing this strategy. If he'd failed he would have lost “a pretty large chunk of my portfolio.” (The 3 ETH he stood to lose in fees was worth about $11,000 at the time.) This is misleading, either intentionally or due to Medjedovic's incompetence. You can fork the current head of the mainnet blockchain to localhost and try infinite permutations for free to…
> But in our email exchanges, he argued that he'd executed a perfectly legal series of trades. In real finance, there is an understanding that technical loopholes can exist, since not every outcome can be foreseen when writing laws, but the legal system can frequently prosecute against a series of actions which are, individually, legal, but which together are taken in order to achieve something illegal. That is, mode…
The courts have found that a written description of the contract is legally binding even if the smart contract has a bug that allows things that were intended to be disallowed. Further the courts held the right to decide whether something was allowed or not allowed on their own judgement regardless of the smart contract, asserting the primacy of the law and jurisprudence over cryptonerd utopian fantasy.
> But in our email exchanges, he argued that he'd executed a perfectly legal series of trades. In real finance, there is an understanding that technical loopholes can exist, since not every outcome can be foreseen when writing laws, but the legal system can frequently prosecute against a series of actions which are, individually, legal, but which together are taken in order to achieve something illegal. That is, mode…
This is a thing that confused me about smart contracts. I don't see how they can exist without a judicial system. They do seem to have some uses under that framework. Like the system is auditable so you can prove if someone cheated and changed a contract out from under you (and you lost your copy), but that's only a minor improvement on the current system. The US has a lot of legal policy that is based on spirit of t…
The problem with smart contracts isn't that there are bugs, but that buggy results are final with little to no recourse, by design, unless you get everyone to agree to hard fork the chain (rolling the "bad" transactions back and eplacing the buggy contract) and/or the implementation (if the bug was in the platform rather than the contract).
The legal system has a similar principle of not being liable for conduct that predates a ruling or law that forbids it, but it also has the principle of agreements being interpreted according to common sense understanding by a person with ordinary skill, and where skill differences exist between them the non-expert's interpretation is the one given precedence.
These meta rules don't have equivalents in smart contract systems, which makes them brittle. The only way smart contracts end up being used for non-trivial purposes is if they are made explicitly subordinate to the existing legal infrastructure in ways that will gum up the works, or if smart contracts are subject to mandatory formal verification possibly including game theoretic 2nd order effects.
This is how crypto operates. Buyer beware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Law isn't law unless it's been enforced through courts, precedent and ultimately someone with authority to use force to force compliance.
In other words, "code is law" only if it complies within the existing framework of our laws. IMO, this still leaves a lot of room for creative applications of smart contracts.
And these systems could exist. But they are not the systems that are being designed. They are in fact antithetical to the stated goals of all of these cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems.
This was an interesting read. The case is now in limbo until authorities can locate Medjedovic or he decides to appear. “I did not steal anyone's private keys. I interacted with the smart contract according to its very own publicly available rules. The people who lost internet tokens in this trade were other people seeking to use the smart contract to their own advantage and taking on risky trading positions that the…
Reminds me of the standard advice of "don't roll your own cryptography." There are a lot of subtle nuances that make it hard to get right. When you have well-funded teams of absolute novices writing rules for complex games with money on the line, this is what happens. Rather than just having user accounts taken over and having to do a mea culpa, the reward isn't lolz or dark web money, it's actual money, and a lot of…