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.
The collapse of the IRON stable coin
371–380 of 502 posts
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#372> _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…
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#373> _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…
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#374I 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.
Aunt Meg, is that you? I told you to stop it with the essential oils already.
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#375Earlier 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.
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#376This 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.
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
#377Earlier 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.
Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin
#378Earlier 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…
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> _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.
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
#380Earlier 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?
And I'm not saying don't say it's like one, I'm just saying it's technically not one.