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Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

blog.ethereum.org

171–180 of 629 posts

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#171
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What does halting trading has to do with compromising decentralization? You do know what "decentralization" mean right?

They're now talking about essentially blacklisting the hacker's ETH address, how is that decentralised? Halting trading is a show of force too, if they believed a single thing of what they preach they'd let the free market continue its course with the hacker walking away with the money. Looking at your comment history it seems clear you have an agenda here, so I'll ignore the ad hominem.

how is that decentralised? [..] Halting trading is a show of force too

Decentralisation does not preclude "force". The one really has nothing to do with the other. Unless your idea of "decentralization" is actually the solipsist view that every person is an island, and social structures hold no benefit for survival.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#173
post #115

Well, that was kind of inevitable. Building a financial system out of pure code with no humans in the loop and no legal structure is building a self-distributing bug bounty piñata. It's decentralised, so there's nobody who can throw a breaker and shout "stop!"; cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, so thefts are permanent; and it's somewhat anonymous, so thefts are hard to trace. It also demonstrates that bei…

Exactly what I was thinking. If they had some sort of fraud-related authorized structure, which was able to "reverse" the result of an obvious software bug, I would say that it should've been much more stable financial system.

Except that would require human intervention. And the whole reason why people love cryptocurrencies is removing the "man in the loop", with administrative power to deny, reject, roll back, or deem illegal their transactions.

It's like these people have never seen War Games.

(It also attracts the kind of people who think that banks, financial institutions, VISA and Paypal are "very likely" to defraud them while something entirely new and unproven with no legal structure is somehow less likely to defraud them or lose their money. See also people who think that bitcoin might be more stable than the US dollar.)

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#174
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of ethereum holders would want to rollback. That is consensus. If they don't hard fork they can keep running an old node. What is the problem?

How do you know? Of course, it could be established using "safe" blockchain voting technology...

The longest fork wins.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#177

EtherScan is a Block Explorer and Analytics Platform for Ethereum, which is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts. What is this platform??? What is "DAO"??? What are "Uncles"??? What is "Ethereum"???

With all due respect, this wasn't very constructive. HN is full of new and strange acronyms. Most of us either skip the article about it if we're not interested or simply google the term. Ethereum is a blockchain based cryptocurrency that also lets you submit programs to the blockchain that nodes around the world run in exchange for a small fee. I don't know what Uncles are, other than the brother of your father. The…

Well I mean the topic just assumes one knows everything there is to know about the subject, and to me, that's just wrong. I had no idea what any of that stuff meant, so I went to research it, and came back even more confused than I was when I started.

Nevertheless, I thank you kindly for taking the time to explain.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#178

The DAO lasted even less time than I thought.

It didn't even make it out of the nest! Poor fat tender little fledgling org devoured in a blink. I was expecting it to at least bubble, before failing hard.

I was giving it until the splitting time was up. So much idealistic naivety. Would have been interesting to watch. I'm sure there'll be more attempts at DAOs yet. Lesson learnt at least.
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