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OptiFi Program Incident Report

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Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#14

Post by RedShift1 »

Commands like that really need a confirmation prompt and a command line switch to override like --do-as-i-say (long form only). Good example of developers being put in an end user's shoes, I hope they learn from that mistake and update their programs.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#15

Post by vicnicius »

nishs wrote: post #4
krageon wrote: post #2

Dev edits on live, makes mistake. Nothing to really see here.

I think there are some lessons that can learned from this. For example, the command line: solana program close didn't seem to sufficiently represent the destructive nature of the action. The program's designers should likely have chosen the verb "shutdown", instead of "close".

A simple confirmation step with a relevant warning could possibly make developers think twice before proceeding.

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#16

Post by askmike »

pavlov wrote: post #7
bhaak wrote: post #5

For all its flaws (and there are countless) the one thing about the show cryptocurrency space that stands out to me as a programmer is that programming errors can be suddenly very costly (granted, in this case it was more of a DevOps blunder). Being able to very easily put a price tag on sloppy programming is intriguing to me.

When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.

> Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program?

Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?

Re: OptiFi Program Incident Report

#18

Post by bhaak »

pavlov wrote: post #7
bhaak wrote: post #5

For all its flaws (and there are countless) the one thing about the show cryptocurrency space that stands out to me as a programmer is that programming errors can be suddenly very costly (granted, in this case it was more of a DevOps blunder). Being able to very easily put a price tag on sloppy programming is intriguing to me.

When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.

> When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program?

You can strike out "financial" and that's already the realty we're living in. We got lucky that Y2K was not an issue today. We wouldn't probably be able to fix enough code and nowadays much more is under direct computer control than back then.

Nobody "wants" that but it happens gradually. With crypto, it didn't happen organically but crypto blasted onto the scene from the side of complete digitization. Looking at that, it's easy to say that nobody would want that but while you're looking this way, traditional finance is creeping towards complete digitization as well, just behind your back.

> This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.

I'm not saying that crypto is an improvement as it is now. Nor that it will ever be (it might but I have my doubts). But what you're missing is that crypto is complete wild west, like traditional finance was maybe in 1900. The whole history of finance is a sequence of fuckups and laws and regulations that were imposed to prevent similar fuckups to occur and we still got the 2007 financial crisis, after 150 years of improvements.

I can try to stay as far away from crypto as possible but as I said in my previous post, there are aspects that are interesting even if most of it is completely nuts.

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