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A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

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Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#241

Post by yorwba »

jacquesm wrote: post #160
rdlecler1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely true. The law can make crypto currencies illegal and put them outside the banking system. The US government did this with online gambling payment systems like NetellerC which severely crippled that industry. They also could potentially charge the founding developers and ICOs. Basically if the law makes it too difficult and non-convertible to real currencies and mainstream goods and services then t…

Yes, and the more such laws a country makes the less relevant that country will be in international commerce. It's very hard to outlaw progress, it will simply route around you, there are many historical examples of this.

Under the current situation, it's more like the more countries make such laws, the less relevant the respective cryptocurrency will be in international commerce. Last I checked, state-backed fiat currencies were still more important than anything crypto.

And while it's hard to outlaw progress, it's also very hard to identify progress before it happens, and even then you can never be sure whether people won't go back to the previous system.

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#242

Post by Jabanga »

throwawayjava wrote: post #239
Jabanga wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it (other than believing that the history of some institution is not a story of progress).. In other words, it's not comparable to "comrade". >Appe…

Like I said, feel free to keep talking like this. In fact, I encourage you to do so. > The political process differs in this respect. On this we agree. I don't see how layering software engineering on top of politics will ever simplify politics.

I am referring to the state-backed political process, not the general variety of politics one sees in private institutions. The former is qualitatively different from other institutions in our society.

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#243

Post by Pigo »

kahnpro wrote: post #164
AsyncAwait wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time, I'm going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of "hackers robbing banks" is "vigilantes robbing the remaining banks", something is very wrong with your system I can see what you're saying, but I don't think that this is a problem with cryptocurrencies specifically , it's a problem with buggy software, yes, but it's something that is the case with every dangerous…

This is a problem that everybody seems to skip over with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are being sold as eliminating trust and allow us to rely on the cold certainty of mathematics. Only trust hasn't been eliminated from the system, it's just been shifted from a central bank to the authors of the software client you're using. To the majority of the miners in the network. The awful politics, lies, greed, corrupti…

>It’s important to understand that this exploit was not a vulnerability in Ethereum or in Parity itself. Rather, it was a vulnerability in the default smart contract code that the Parity client gives the user for deploying multi-signature wallets.

Yeah, I don't see the difference here. So it was an aspect of Ethereum that had the vulnerability, how many more millions have to be stolen before the system is successfully QA'd?

I'd never heard of Ethereum before, so now this is the only thing I've heard about it.

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#245

Post by harryh »

return0 wrote: post #194
dullgiulio wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?

Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Some people don't trust a government elected by only half the population, for example. Some others may prefer to trust an elite of "enlightened hackers" than hordes of plebs. You might be right that governments are more evolved and have more history but that doesn't make them universally better.

Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice.

Oh come on. It absolutely is an empirical choice. Crypto-currencies have a very short history and that history is CHOCK FULL of people losing their money due to various forms of incompetence and graft.

Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses.

Please.

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#246

Post by crispyambulance »

adrianN wrote: post #74
eridius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't a normal loss by the way, where you can prosecute someone or sue somebody. No, this is the instant, digital theft of the entire value of the contract, to an anonymous digital address where it will be quickly blended in with hundreds of millions of dollars of similar thefts a month. Also worth pointing out that a non-trivial number of people would say that no theft at all has occurred, as the smart contra…

Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? We already have contracts that require highly paid humans to judge whether they've been broken or not. To me at least Etherium was dead the moment they chose to fork because they felt a contract was "hacked".

Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law".

That's OK for now as the _real_ money being put into crypto-currency is understood to be a speculative thrill-ride. People who put actual _real_ money into this stuff know it could vaporize at any time for completely insane reasons. Its basically a bunch of people playing with funny money and having loud arguments about absurdly complex rules.

If, somehow, this stuff is to make it into the real world and start interacting with money, institutions, courts and the livelihoods of regular people, it will have to be VERY different from what it is now. That means you can't have smug, over-confident programmers writing clever shit-code and proclaiming it to be "law" and the "final authority".

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#247

Post by ameister14 »

Jabanga wrote: post #179
dullgiulio wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?

Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The t…

>Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity.

Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations.

In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing. Their understanding of economics was extremely limited, as well. I wouldn't argue that US society is much more unfair than it was in 1903 - would you?

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#248

Post by throwawayjava »

Jabanga wrote: post #242
throwawayjava wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, feel free to keep talking like this. In fact, I encourage you to do so. > The political process differs in this respect. On this we agree. I don't see how layering software engineering on top of politics will ever simplify politics.

I am referring to the state-backed political process, not the general variety of politics one sees in private institutions. The former is qualitatively different from other institutions in our society.

> political process

If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship.

If you can implement people's political preferences in your contract language, and your contract language is used for political or governmental purposes, then people's political preferences will be codified -- as far as possible -- in your contract language.

Which means that in order to participate in governance, people will have to understand both their preferences and also the contract programming language and its underlying runtime. Being an active citizen becomes strictly more difficult. To be very clear about it, people's preferences will not have changed. Consensus will remain a messy, complicated web of compromises that are difficult to reason about and implement via judge, let along codify for a computer.

And all of this won't even achieve your political motives, unless you're planning on building some sort of anti-Whig-ideology static analysis into your contract language, I guess.

(Which, frankly, I hope you do, because that would be kind of funny and cool.)

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#249

Post by kasey_junk »

Jabanga wrote: post #233
throwawayjava wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your Whig history As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Either because they have read those pamphlets and eye-roll, or because they haven't and figure you're a rambling extremist. It's literally equivalent to communists beginning propaganda pieces with "Attention all Comrades!" That said, I disagree with you, so feel free to keep talking this way…

>As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it (other than believing that the history of some institution is not a story of progress).. In other words, it's not comparable to "comrade". >Appe…

> Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it

While this is true, outside of some specialized historical critique fields the most common usages of this term are in forums/literature of the libertarian and free market anarchist bent.

In those places its a short hand for the idea that government as currently practiced in the west is clearly bloated and corrupt beyond repair, and the only reason every doesn't agree is that they are bamboozled by some Polly-Anna version of history.

That statement is not clear and needs further backing up to many of us, who do not subscribe to the "Whig History" model but also don't think governments are objectively bad in all instances.

Whether you knew that subtext or not, you used the term in the same way, to argue a similar philosophy, so it's not at all surprising that someone called you on it.

Re: A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum

#250

Post by wu-ikkyu »

dullgiulio wrote: post #173
return0 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains: who you trust. Governments have resolved the question long ago (by enforcing trust), cryptocurrencies are just now starting to face the same question. You are correct however that who you Trust remains the greatest issue behind creating a currency.

Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?

Remember the trillions that went missing due to fraud and sly bookkeeping in 2008, and how no one was held accountable?
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