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Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

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Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#31

Post by kator »

> Another decision he made when he had no idea of the bug shows how quirky and unforgiving code can be. “If the capital ‘T’ in line 666 had been a small ‘t,’ that would also have prevented the hack,” he says.

Can someone familiar with this explain how something financially based can have a capitalization flaw? I would expect a smart contract language to have very strict type and variable linking. Humans make many mistakes in coding but most of the time it doesn't cost $55m. A transaction language should be very strict so either the smart contract language is flawed or the author of this article is overstating something for dramatic effect.

EDIT: Found this: https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/v1.0/DAO.sol#L666

on a deeper dive: http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao...

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#34

Post by kefka »

kator wrote: post #31

> Another decision he made when he had no idea of the bug shows how quirky and unforgiving code can be. “If the capital ‘T’ in line 666 had been a small ‘t,’ that would also have prevented the hack,” he says. Can someone familiar with this explain how something financially based can have a capitalization flaw? I would expect a smart contract language to have very strict type and variable linking. Humans make many mis…

That's primarily because Ethereum is pure amateur hour. When Bitcoin had built in checksums on addresses, Eth Dev's just said "watch where you send money". They ended up having to later add in a capitalization scheme to serve as a hash.

I have no clue how they managed to fool so many people with poor and shoddy work. But they have so far. And they've fooled everyone that this is a 'hack' even after saying time and again "The code is the contract, and the contract is the code"... Unless lead devs lose money.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#35

Post by vkreso »

ghaff wrote: post #18
yorwba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but here is how I would argue: The DAO was created with the intention to allocate its funds according to a certain voting scheme, with everyone's power determined by the number of tokens they held. But the program did not correctly implement this intention, and the DAO hack exploited the difference to bring the funds under control of the attacker. This most likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and…

Which is one of the issues with smart contracts. Yes, written contracts are the contract in the physical world. And sometimes people get outlawyered or just plain screw up and lose money because of circumstances that they didn't foresee. But when things come to court, there's still generally some oversight usually provided through the court system or mediators to put the brakes on clearly absurd and/or unfair results…

Of course! Customs and other legal (based on moral) norms are basically the primary source of law or of its interpretation. Human systems based on rigid, or even utopian (that is totalitarian in practice) rules simply cannot handle the complexity of the real world. The system may seem good and functional at first but with the first problem which would because of the nature of complexity and chaotic system dynamics of human interactions inevitably happen, the system would crash (or in this case, get forked) since it would not offer any flexibility.

Without getting too abstract, even traffic lights or zebras, from the perspective of a pedesetrian, (as an example of a simple system) would be a horrendous and extremely time consuming experience if its rules were enforced by the letter. Imagine if you could >onlyHuman made systems need to be imperfect and the rules need to be flexible or the system will fail.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#37

Post by TomMarius »

portent wrote: post #27
yorwba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but here is how I would argue: The DAO was created with the intention to allocate its funds according to a certain voting scheme, with everyone's power determined by the number of tokens they held. But the program did not correctly implement this intention, and the DAO hack exploited the difference to bring the funds under control of the attacker. This most likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and…

The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" applies to the US. What if the hacker lives somewhere else? Then that law does not apply to him, and the action was not illegal.

Are you familiar with the individual known as Kim Dotcom?

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#38

Post by pjc50 »

kator wrote: post #31

> Another decision he made when he had no idea of the bug shows how quirky and unforgiving code can be. “If the capital ‘T’ in line 666 had been a small ‘t,’ that would also have prevented the hack,” he says. Can someone familiar with this explain how something financially based can have a capitalization flaw? I would expect a smart contract language to have very strict type and variable linking. Humans make many mis…

Actually, could someone post a link to the source so we can all see?

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#39

Post by tlrobinson »

DINKDINK wrote: post #8
wwwv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The principle of Ethereum is that code is law, the "hacker" followed the law to the letter and acted in a prescribed manner. What's the crime here exactly?

The ethereum foundations reaction to the DAO hack proved that the "code is the contract" is not true. Which questions the very value of smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain because it's proven that they're immutable now This is a good discussion: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...

Do you mean "mutable", not "immutable"?

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#40

Post by Jabanga »

AJRF wrote: post #13
atomical wrote: post #4

Is it even illegal to hack Ethereum? Some purists would say the smart contract was behaving as written.

It isn't, if you take the case under contractual law there is absolutely no basis to charge the person who extracted the $55m. The contract had 'flaws' but it was the contract, so tough cookies it agreed to something you didn't like, but you wrote it! (Except we know now it was too big to fail, which in turn means centralization) The DAO was pumped up by VCs and friends of the founder of Ethereum, which, before the l…

David Birch has been bashing cryptocurrency since around 2012. It seriously goes that far back for some of these ideologues.

Edit, just to give people an idea of where he's coming from ideologically, these are some of his comments that show the kind of world he wants to see:

https://youtu.be/c8mdr8iwX20?t=6m49s

"law-abiding taxpayers like me are subsidizing criminals to use cash and not pay taxes"

https://youtu.be/c8mdr8iwX20?t=10m47s

"so getting rid of cash has some other benefits which will lead to unexpected changes. For example for economists, getting rid of cash means that you lose the zero lower bound on interest rates. You can't have interest below zero because if you drop interest rates below zero people will just draw out the cash and just hold it. If you don't have cash you can have negative real interest rates. So getting rid of cash has a lot of benefits."

https://youtu.be/c8mdr8iwX20?t=13m55s

"So if you allow us technologists to build the stuff so we build something like Bitcoin which let's pretend it's anonymous. Do you know what you get if you let us build that? You get a giant electronic Somalia. If you want to live in a society which is entirely driven by anonymous cash, where the rich aren't accountable anymore, where whoever's got the most money can be the warlord and do what they like, well that's what you're letting us build now"

His demonization of cash remind me of this:

"The cashless society – which more accurately should be called the bank-payments society – is often presented as an inevitability, an outcome of ‘natural progress’. This claim is either naïve or disingenuous. Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge"

https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...

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