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The collapse of the IRON stable coin

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371–380 of 502 posts

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#371
post #5

This has always been the problem with smart contracts. They are infact dumb contacts. To program one you need to think about all the edge cases. The programmers here likely did want >0 here. The possibility that the thing feeding price data return zero incorrectly was higher than the price legitimately being zero in their minds. There is no court or lawyer who can interpret the spirit of the contract.

This is precisely why Cardano is using Haskell for their language.

Yeah when I first read the Cardano stuff back in 2018, I was like "thank God someone gets it and wants to avoid the dumpster fire that is Ethereum"

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#372
post #311

> _share_price here refers to the price of TITAN, as provided by an oracle, which is correctly reporting it as… 0 (somewhere in the distance, you can hear a room full software engineers burst into laughter ). Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that re…

There are a lot of systems now that don't use oracles. Prices are maintained by people arbitraging any significant difference.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#373
post #311

> _share_price here refers to the price of TITAN, as provided by an oracle, which is correctly reporting it as… 0 (somewhere in the distance, you can hear a room full software engineers burst into laughter ). Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that re…

For prices you can use Uniswap's oracle which is time weighted average price and can't be manipulated unless you buy a ton of the token over the entire time period. In this case it was using a Sushi swap oracle (uniswap clone that's on matic) with very liquid pools so it was accurate, just lagged a bit when titan was dropping rapidly.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#374

I have never read so much about nothing as I have when reading about some new coin. It's worse than a pyramid scheme. At least there, you end up with a decade-worth of skin cream.

You're talking about multi-level marketing. Which isn't quite a pyramid scheme (even though it is pyramid-ish). Pyramid Schemes have the originators (the "top" of the pyramid) win lots of money, while the base (the "bottom" of the pyramid, where most people are) losers. And the top barely did any work to get there: they just took the money from people below them.

> You're talking about multi-level marketing. Which isn't quite a pyramid scheme

Aunt Meg, is that you? I told you to stop it with the essential oils already.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#375
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any experienced crypto investor knows that putting money into an unaudited contract that's less than a few months old is basically throwing that money away. There is another side to this, though, which is that protocols than have been around for a year or more without problems are quite trustworthy and become important building blocks for DeFi.

> have been around for a year or more without problems > quite trustworthy As someone being used to write fixes to code that is 20 or even 30 years old, I had to chuckle.

Yes, but these smart contracts are often fairly short (in essence, they shift value from one ledger entry to another), and not every bug is exploitable. They are also effectively paying a bounty worth hundreds of millions of dollars if you can find an exploit. It is not unreasonable to feel increasingly confident in their safety after some time.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#376
post #5

This has always been the problem with smart contracts. They are infact dumb contacts. To program one you need to think about all the edge cases. The programmers here likely did want >0 here. The possibility that the thing feeding price data return zero incorrectly was higher than the price legitimately being zero in their minds. There is no court or lawyer who can interpret the spirit of the contract.

Everybody said the same thing about the 1987 automated trading crash. Get rid of those darn computers!

Sorry; decentralized autonomous finance is here to stay. There will be less disasters as we go along, but they will be much bigger.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#377
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's obviously the point, though. You are trading one set of risks for a completely different set of risks. But that's exactly the point. People are not able to interpret "smart" contracts. For normal contracts most people can understand the contract and if there is a dispute you have laws and courts who can interpret in every case. In case of "smart" contracts even the contract developers more often than not see…

eh, for a regular financial contract you need lawyers and judges. There is plenty of counterintuitive law that burns people. For this one you need programmers and computers. On both cases, if you go in blind or wing it you might get burned.

most lucid comment yet.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#378
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "legal system" needs to be applied by some kind of oracle or by force to a node operator. Yes, this is usually how it's done. Business logic is not a legal authority.

This is a strange statement. It's like saying that a forloop isn't authoritative because it hasn't been approved by a court. "Legal authority" isn't a well-defined object in the evaluation of smart contracts. It is certainly not an authority in the sense that the EVM (or, for other blockchains, corresponding VM) code is. Is this really a surprise? Nodes don't evaluate common law, they evaluate smart contracts. That's…

>Not everyone believes in the legitimacy of the state, let alone that the legal system is somehow the proper authority for evaluation of disambigous source code.

This is something that I haven't been able to figure out about blockchain enthusiasts. Assuming the blockchain is wildly successful, it poses an inherent threat to the ability of the modern state to collect taxes. Why do blockchain enthusiasts, who already don't think the state is legitimate, not take the logical next step. A potentially existential threat illegitimate parties that have large militaries will end well for the blockchain how? To put it more glibly, how many divisions has bitcoin?

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#379
post #373
post #311

> _share_price here refers to the price of TITAN, as provided by an oracle, which is correctly reporting it as… 0 (somewhere in the distance, you can hear a room full software engineers burst into laughter ). Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that re…

For prices you can use Uniswap's oracle which is time weighted average price and can't be manipulated unless you buy a ton of the token over the entire time period. In this case it was using a Sushi swap oracle (uniswap clone that's on matic) with very liquid pools so it was accurate, just lagged a bit when titan was dropping rapidly.

The general consensus is that it's a terrible idea to rely on Uniswap (or any other dex) as a price oracle for valuation/pricing for other on-chain defi applications/dexes. With enough capital (which can be acquired through flash loans) you can absolutely perform economic attacks though atomic transaction chains involving moving the dex price. Uniswap, Kyber, and others will tell you the same thing. This makes me think that even things like DAI/MakerDAO (and anything that relies oracles like Chainlink) can start to get brittle when/if the major price discovery and liquidity are on Dexes.

This has been seen in practice, for example in the Fulcrum hack:

https://gist.github.com/alexvansande/edcc9fe935b61526766c956...

https://dappradar.com/blog/defi-flash-loan-attack-what-just-...

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#380
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget "central actors" or whatever. A ponzi scheme is a description of a certain type of fraud. We can reduce it to it being the fraud of claiming new capital as investor dividends. It's a little more complex, but at its heart, that's what you got to do. If there is no lie about the source of the money, it's not technically not a ponzi scheme.

If that's your definition, fine, but lots of people use it in a looser sense and have forever. Nobody wins in an argument over which definition of a word or phrase is correct. Whatever happened to the debates over whether something was ironic?

That argument can be used in a lot of contexts where people wouldn't. Regardless/irregardless, literally, gif, decimate, etc.

And I'm not saying don't say it's like one, I'm just saying it's technically not one.

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