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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

#411

Post by Jabanga »

bloominglotus wrote: post #337
Jabanga wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By design, they enshrine the rights of the individual participant to freely interact in a free market, by preventing the majority from creating any rules to limit access to the platform. So they don't have the same need to adapt as an interventionist government, that imposes itself on the economy through majority dictate, does. In the case of Ethereum, the Turing Completeness also makes it so that each contract is li…

Do you remember when the majority hard-forked, changed history, and restored millions of ether to DAO? Is that not blatantly a majority imposing themselves on the economy through majority dictate?

I don't believe such hard forks will be practical when the ecosystem is larger and more diverse. The DAO happened in a unique point in Ethereum's history, when the community was very small (and thus cohesive) and activity on the network was very little.

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

#412

Post by Jabanga »

ceejayoz wrote: post #333
Jabanga wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bans in question are on the state itself, recognizing such marriages. Unlike anti-miscegenation laws, there is no criminal sanction for those who enter a relationship that they consider marriage. >No, they were struck down by the Supreme Court, and only in 2003! Strictly speaking, that's a law against sodomy, not homosexuality. But I can agree that such laws can be construed as anti-homosexual, given that any sex…

You're attempting some pretty fine hair splitting here. Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury (which some states specifically made a felony: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/10/indian... ). As for…

>Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury

There are no state laws that say 'homosexual marriage is a felony', while there were laws that said so with respect to interracial marriage. The criminalisation that you allege is happening, on the basis that there are laws against perjury combined with non-recognition of same-sex marriage, is not the same as the direct criminalisation of interracial marriage.

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

#413

Post by Dagger2 »

slededit wrote: post #393
Dagger2 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just transfer money however you like, even if you had complete control of the blockchain. Transactions still need to be signed by the private key of the wallet involved. You could put a transaction with an invalid signature into the blockchain, but then the chain would be rejected by clients because of the invalid transaction.

The clients could be rewritten to accept the "invalid" block. That would cause a fork between the modified and unmodified clients. Like fiat currency, the only thing maintaining the definition of a legal block is the software the majority of the network choose to run.

They could indeed, but which users and companies would switch to that forked chain knowing that it's worthless? Having a lot of hashing power doesn't let you control the software that other people are running.

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

#414

Post by Dagger2 »

Jabanga wrote: post #325
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.

We will not benefit from fewer people working..

The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.

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

#415

Post by Jabanga »

bloominglotus wrote: post #336
Jabanga wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true. That's all it takes to completely change how much money is in my account in a "distributed" bank. I don't own it, and it's certainly not robust against demagogues. Demagogues are by definition political opportunists who play on populism to advance their politics. If democratic elections have a vulnerability to them, so c…

>In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true.

51% is not enough to modify the ledger. A hard fork requires an overwhelming majority to support it. Otherwise, the cost of fragmentation would be immense, and outweigh any benefit those effecting the hard fork could hope to gain from the hard fork.

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

#416

Post by Jabanga »

Dagger2 wrote: post #414
Jabanga wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will not benefit from fewer people working..

The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...

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

#418

Post by Dagger2 »

Jabanga wrote: post #416
Dagger2 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...

That article covers what happens before the apocalypse. What happens after it, i.e. after the point where AI and robots can not only do our current jobs better than we can, but also all of the ones we could possibly retrain to?

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

#419

Post by EdSharkey »

aianus wrote: post #392
EdSharkey wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing for self-taught doctors to practice their quackery, then? Shall we accept freelance surgeons having out gall bladder and appendixes with whatever whiskey, x-acto knife, needle and thread they have at-hand? What exactly are you arguing for here? Obviously, humans are imperfect and corrupt - but you can impose some order and ethics and error correction into any community when you get organized. OP said…

My point is that your suggestion is unlikely to have helped prevent this specific incident or others like it. A guild or professional association keeps quacks and idiots out, it doesn't solve the problem of experienced competent people occasionally making subtle mistakes.

Ok, you're saying that a guild won't prevent human error, especially in something intricate like software development. But there are actual historical examples that run counter to your claim. Other disciplines DO have error correcting standards and practices that catch and prevent errors from flowing downstream. Architects and accountants for example, have such well-established standards that those standards got codified into laws in most countries. I suspect that you believe that software development is not, or cannot ever be, an engineering discipline for reasons.

Thing is, you might not be able to imagine software development can be treated as an engineering discipline, but that doesn't stop others from trying to. And if lawmakers decide to get involved, then 'trying' suddenly becomes 'doing', whether you think that's proper or not.

Regarding 'subtle mistakes', do you consider performing an eval() on an unvalidated input string in the context of someone else's publicly addressable wallet a subtle mistake?

Check out all of the definitions of 'ethics' in the dictionary and then try to say the developers who wrote the original buggy code and the white hats who did the damage control were acting ethically. How deep does the corruption go? Is Etherium corrupt down to first principles and all its founders morally bankrupt?

One of the things a guild does is codify ethical standards for the group, and that is something all software developers sorely need.

We are, I would argue, the most important group of workers on the planet today. Shouldn't we get our act together and mature as a discipline?

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

#420

Post by EdSharkey »

user5994461 wrote: post #341
EdSharkey wrote: post #12

Stories like this make me consider whether programmers that engage in commerce should be forced (yes, by law) into guilds that have rigid journeyman and apprenticeship stages before the programmer gets to touch the production environment. Specialized, official, bonded developer roles need to be established. Our community cannot continue operating in the hacker mode wherever money is involved.

That's already the case. You won't be able to enter without a degree or 10 years of experience.

Depends on the industry. I worked in the games industry with characters that didn't have their high school diploma.

I have a bachelors degree in CS and was working in banking and finance firms with Things haven't changed, programmers are in high demand everywhere.

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