Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 194 posts

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#171

Post by kbody »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #136
kbody wrote: post #73

This case feels so closely to the very interesting case of Aviva France[1], where a not "well-futureproofed" life insurance contract is making a person very rich by the day. Unfortunately for Aviva, their contracts are actually law in contrast to Ethereum where if the devs feel like it, they can do/revert anything. [1]: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/27/2120422/meet-the-man-...

Am I missing something? I thought the devs had to have everyone agree to do a hard fork. If the devs were in complete control, that wouldn't have been necessary.

There's Ethereum Classic with is the original chain that survived the hard fork without the "reversion", which has $2B market-cap if that matters. But more than that it has fans that believe in Ethereum but know the value of immutability.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#172

Post by hiram112 »

foepys wrote: post #63
n8n3k wrote: post #59

Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.

It's always been like this. Be smug and aggressive when it goes right and cry for help when something goes wrong. The housing crisis was the same. Claim you got the thing that makes everybody rich and when everything went inevitably downhill, ask the "enemy" aka the regulator/government/police to bail you out.

You're 100% right.

Same idea with the guys getting rich of off of patents in the pharma industry (e.g. EpiPen). Nothing these forms are doing is technically illegal.

But the reason some of these guys are gonna be crucified is the arrogance and lack of public contrition. They really need to take a page from the banking execs of 2008 who cried no-fault all the way to the bank.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#173

Post by [deleted] »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #147
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps in some cases a broad consensus mechanism (like hard fork) is preferable to putting it in the hands of 12 random people Sounds good in theory. In practice it's mob rule. We have pretty good evidence, i.e. history, that the rule of law is better.

Ok, so you are saying there is scientific evidence for for the statement "the rule of law is better than mob rule"? I'd love to see a couple citations for that? Hell, I'd be fascinated to read the experimental setup. To be truthful, it sounds like someone hooked you with some pseudoscience on poor foundations.

[deleted]

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#174

Post by droidist2 »

supernumerary wrote: post #81
n8n3k wrote: post #59

Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.

Can we do an experiment and use 'she' for anonymous players in these stories? Would be kinda cool. The article uses 'he' throughout, and only acknowledges the possibility of it being either/or/group in the final paragraphs.

I thought we were only supposed to use "she" as the default pronoun when the subject is something positive though, like always "she" the engineer, but never "she" the thief or "she" the serial killer.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#176

Post by kalleboo »

nebabyte wrote: post #157
kalleboo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause It absolutely is. Which is why you don't say "code is law". Which is why Ethereum is dumb.

If you think laws are written without exception clauses, I have a bridge to sell ya.

Laws are interpreted by courts.

There is no court of Ethereum aside from "can I convince the developers + 50% of miners to do a hard fork"

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#178

Post by dsacco »

nebabyte wrote: post #152
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #46

If R2-D2 used Ethereum. C-3PO: He made a perfectly legal move. Han: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee (The Ethereum founders). C-3PO: But sir. Nobody worries about upsetting a droid (a regular contract user without influence). Han: That’s cause a droid (regular contract user) don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets (hard fork the entire crypto currency and call you a thief) when they lose. Wooki…

They took a vote and the vast majority voted for the HF. Had Vitalik ignored the vote and put his organization and the "canonical" chain on the non-HF side his would be the "abandoned" no-name chain, and people would now be mining some ETH derivative in line with their votes. This is honestly just a fulfillment of "code is law", with the obvious rule above it being "humans accept or reject laws collectively". In this…

The whole value proposition of "code is law" is that the letter of the law theoretically obviates the spirit of the law.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#179

Post by Trundle »

supernumerary wrote: post #156
nebabyte wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not the one asking for an imposition of some rule. When you write the article, pick whatever pronouns you want.

No one is asking for a rule. In fact - the conventional use of masculine pronouns that you're enforcing is perhaps the closest thing to a rule that's being imposed, albeit subconsciously. Bro.

I've read enough articles where anonymous or hypothetical actors are given feminine pronouns by female authors that I'd say the convention is to favour the pronoun that represents yourself, not to default to masculine ones. Writers choice.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#180

Post by jjeaff »

kalleboo wrote: post #176
nebabyte wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think laws are written without exception clauses, I have a bridge to sell ya.

Laws are interpreted by courts. There is no court of Ethereum aside from "can I convince the developers + 50% of miners to do a hard fork"

I have a solution. Perhaps you take the etherium users, and they can vote and elect arbitrators, let's call them judges. Then those judges can hold "court" and a selection of etherium users would act as a "jury" to decide on how to handle exceptions. Of course, we will also need to appoint people to enforce those laws. Maybe we should start with a constitution to get things all lined out...
Post reply on HN