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How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

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Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#41

Post by rspeer »

Jabanga wrote: post #36
jameskegel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this turns me off to the entire tech, no matter how stupid and kneejerk that sounds. If the biggest draw to get me using your technology (immutable contracts) is actually not true, then I'm less inclined to give it a shot outside of novelty value.

The project was very young, and the community miniscule, at the time. It could be justified as a one-time beginner's incident. The network and ecosystem can be expected to behave very differently when it's mature, or even today, given how much larger the community is now, and how much more aware people are of the risks facing smart contracts (which means there is much less justification to rescue those who put money…

> The project itself made mistakes early on by not sufficiently warning people of the risks of the DAO, which gave justification for the do-over.

This is the weakest justification I've heard out of all of them. How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? And how does rolling back the risk make people more aware of risk? Anyone who was not aware of the risk the whole time deserves the most to lose their money.

The right time for the DAO to say "wait, guys, this is risky as hell and we have no idea what we're doing" and give back the money was before they lost the game they had created.

(The fact that you refer to this loss as their "smart" "contract" getting "hacked" indicates that you still don't want people to be aware of the risks.)

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#42

Post by Jabanga »

rspeer wrote: post #41
Jabanga wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project was very young, and the community miniscule, at the time. It could be justified as a one-time beginner's incident. The network and ecosystem can be expected to behave very differently when it's mature, or even today, given how much larger the community is now, and how much more aware people are of the risks facing smart contracts (which means there is much less justification to rescue those who put money…

> The project itself made mistakes early on by not sufficiently warning people of the risks of the DAO, which gave justification for the do-over. This is the weakest justification I've heard out of all of them. How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? And how does rolling back the risk make people more aware of risk? Anyone who was not aware of the risk the whole ti…

>How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky?

People didn't realize the smart contract was at great risk of being hacked, and the project, meaning thought leaders in Ethereum, were partially at fault for this, for not warning people.

This was the first smart contract of its type. It's easy to blame the community in hindsight. I choose to forgive it, as I remember early on in any endeavor, mistakes are normal.

>The fact that you refer to this loss as their "smart" "contract" getting "hacked" indicates that you still don't want people to be aware of the risks.

I don't follow. "Smart contract" is a term of art, and does not imply it's well made or secure. I also don't know what putting the quotations around the "hacked" is supposed to signify.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#43

Post by rspeer »

Jabanga wrote: post #42
rspeer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The project itself made mistakes early on by not sufficiently warning people of the risks of the DAO, which gave justification for the do-over. This is the weakest justification I've heard out of all of them. How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? And how does rolling back the risk make people more aware of risk? Anyone who was not aware of the risk the whole ti…

>How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? People didn't realize the smart contract was at great risk of being hacked, and the project, meaning thought leaders in Ethereum, were partially at fault for this, for not warning people. This was the first smart contract of its type. It's easy to blame the community in hindsight. I choose to forgive it, as I remember early…

The "contract" was evaluated according to the rules that supposedly made it a contract, not hacked. Getting a bad deal in a contract is not getting hacked.

There will be more bad deals in the future because Solidity is badly designed. Mistakes are normal indeed, and Ethereum is certainly not done making them. Promising "this time it's for real, no more take-backs" is just increasing the risk unless they buy some insurance or something.

What's the indication that anyone is aware of the risks now, or that Ethereum devs are warning people of the risks? The investment in Ethereum has increased -- there are banks getting involved in this shit. The risk has not decreased. And yet the devs are still not handing back the investors' money and asking them to kindly wait until more security or insurance features are designed.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#44

Post by vvillena »

kefka wrote: post #3

And remember, that there's a special function called VIP() . This is an implied function that wraps around your full code. This is instantiated if/when core founders are losing money on a function that possibly had a bug in it. This function returns the wrapped function, under the guise of a new blockchain, with invalidations applied to all 'unintentional' side effects of bad or buggy code. It happened with the DAO,…

This is simply not true. The protocol spec that the DAO was in is still alive and well. It's called ETC.

Could it be that you just resent the fact that people give a lot more value to a forked chain called ETH? This is understandable, since the DAO fail made clear that code run on blockchains still depend on human consensus. Code will run according to spec, but only as long as the people running the nodes decide to adopt a specific version of the protocol. Note that no blockchain tech, not even ETC, is free from this fact. You can run a blockchain using the protocol you want, but what gives it value is human consensus.

Ethereum is not a tech utopia. But it is a damn cool tech, and understanding its limitations is important to be able to take advantage of it.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#45

Post by Jabanga »

rspeer wrote: post #43
Jabanga wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? People didn't realize the smart contract was at great risk of being hacked, and the project, meaning thought leaders in Ethereum, were partially at fault for this, for not warning people. This was the first smart contract of its type. It's easy to blame the community in hindsight. I choose to forgive it, as I remember early…

The "contract" was evaluated according to the rules that supposedly made it a contract, not hacked. Getting a bad deal in a contract is not getting hacked. There will be more bad deals in the future because Solidity is badly designed. Mistakes are normal indeed, and Ethereum is certainly not done making them. Promising "this time it's for real, no more take-backs" is just increasing the risk unless they buy some insu…

It was hacked from the perspective of ordinary people.

I address the sanctity of the protocol in an earlier comment:

>The rules of a mature Ethereum protocol should be neutral to the intentions of users, including those that one would reasonably characterize as hackers, but Ethereum was not a mature protocol at the time. It was effectively in early-stage beta.

>What's the indication that anyone is aware of the risks now, or that Ethereum devs are warning people of the risks?

That's what I've observed. I haven't compiled instances of social behaviour that indicates this so I have no objective evidence on-hand.

>The investment in Ethereum has increased -- there are banks getting involved in this shit

They're not putting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ETH in complex smart contracts like the DAO.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#46

Post by jjnoakes »

Jabanga wrote: post #38
jjnoakes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really call the person an attacker when they simply used the contact as-written? I think that's spinning things a bit to fit a narrative.

Yes you can call the person an attacker. The rules of a mature Ethereum protocol should be neutral to the intentions of users, including those that one would reasonably characterize as hackers, but Ethereum was not a mature protocol at the time. It was effectively in early-stage beta. The DAO was the first smart contract of its kind, and was expecting $500,000 worth of ETH to be deposited in it. Instead $150 million…

Regardless of any of this, the person didn't attack anything.

I'm not saying my position on whether the fork was right or wrong, but I think folks on either side should not characterize that incident as an attack.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#48

Post by csomar »

zeven7 wrote: post #13
jameskegel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this turns me off to the entire tech, no matter how stupid and kneejerk that sounds. If the biggest draw to get me using your technology (immutable contracts) is actually not true, then I'm less inclined to give it a shot outside of novelty value.

Unfortunately it's not an honest portrayal of events. Disclaimer: I was a DAO investor. The DAO held 5% of my Ether at the time of the attack. Having said that, it's not as simple as saying: I support the DAO refund because it was in my best interest. That doesn't necessarily follow, and it didn't necessarily follow for most of the other DAO investors. I still held 95% of my crypto $ in Ether. I would have been happy…

There is no morality on the blockchain.

As far as legality goes, I think the attacker is in the clear because what matters is the code and not the intentions.

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#49

Post by woodandsteel »

Jabanga wrote: post #39
woodandsteel wrote: post #37

Last year I was pretty excited about Ethereum for a few months. But then I got to thinking about the social problems I care about, like how factory and middle class jobs are being wiped out by robots and AI, and I couldn't think of how DAPS could fix those sorts of problems on a large scale.

People are not meant to work in factories. They're meant to own parts of factories and other productive enterprises. Ethereum reduces the barriers to entry to becoming a stakeholder in value created by enterprises. The cost to exchange a token is 1000X less than the cost to exchange a security. This is an orders of magnitude reduction in barriers to entry and expansion of liquidity. It means the economy can grow in a…

Do you mean people won't work in factories but instead sit around and collect profits, or do you mean people will work in factories but own them cooperatively, or that people will work but not in factories but in some other type of economic enterprises, or what?

And could you give me a link where this is described in more detail, including addressing various possible objections?

Re: How to Learn Solidity: The Ultimate Ethereum Coding Guide

#50

Post by toolkitman12 »

kefka wrote: post #3

And remember, that there's a special function called VIP() . This is an implied function that wraps around your full code. This is instantiated if/when core founders are losing money on a function that possibly had a bug in it. This function returns the wrapped function, under the guise of a new blockchain, with invalidations applied to all 'unintentional' side effects of bad or buggy code. It happened with the DAO,…

Odd, I can't find this function whatsoever. By the way, Solidity is open source so there are no secrets - go look for yourself: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

No function as op describes, also no source or reference. Screams FUD, nothing to see here...

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