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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

#431

Post by loceng »

Jabanga wrote: post #406
erikpukinskis wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you won't have any coworkers who are just there for the paycheck and actually have zero interest in solving the company's problem.

People don't need to be motivated by high-minded ideals to make useful contributions.

Of course they don't - and that's fine. All throughout our evolution we would of had children and elders who would have had limited productivity. Now with automation, how many less people do we actually require to work? It will be very few - it will definitely be more people than the minimum required.

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

#432

Post by loceng »

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.

Elon realizes this, hence his warnings about AI - how we deal with it is build a better bot that counteracts EvilBot 1.0.

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

#433

Post by nl »

Jabanga wrote: post #403
nl wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much the entire advanced world has seen its rate of progress slow since the late 1960s, in concurrence with growing public sectors How are you measuring progress there? If you mean economic growth then now might be a good time to point out that correlation does now imply causation. Otherwise perhaps increasing life expectancy also causes a larger public sector? ;)

Correlation can be an indication of a causative association. I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is.

I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is.

Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because I have evidence showing the opposite: eg China has an estimated public sector value of between 29% and 50%[1] and it is generally regarded as a high-growth economy (6.5%+ growth(, while somewhere like Greece (22% public sector, 0% growth) isn't.

In-fact, eyeballing that table doesn't show much apparent correlation at all. There are high-growth, high-public sector countries, high-growth, low public sector countries, low public sector, low growth AND low public sector high growth countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...

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

#434

Post by Jabanga »

nl wrote: post #433
Jabanga wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation can be an indication of a causative association. I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is.

I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is. Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because I have evidence showing the opposite: eg China has an estimated public sector value of between 29% and 50%[1] and it is generally regarded as a high-growth economy (6.5%+ growth(, while somewhere like Greece (22% public sector, 0% growth) isn't. In-fact, eyeballing that tab…

Share of employees working in the public sector is a more narrow statistic than the total role of government in the economy. The share of GDP consisting of government spending is a better measure of that. The correlation between the size of government, as percentage of GDP, and GDP growth, is strong. [1]

China has substantially lower levels of social welfare spending. Its healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP is 5.5% for example [2].

Labour regulations are also much less onerous. You can use IQ tests to filter candidates for example, which would be extremely illegal in the West.

[1] http://ime.bg/uploads/335309_OptimalSizeOfGovernment.pdf

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?locations...

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

#435

Post by Jabanga »

sunir wrote: post #424
Jabanga wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm cynical about all developed countries. Almost none of them have shit together. The cost disease affects the entire developed world, and I suggest it's due to the government playing an increasingly dysfunctional role in society. Do you think mass-surveillance is a uniquely American phenomenon?

In the OECD? Yes.

You're wrong..

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

#436

Post by abritinthebay »

Jabanga wrote: post #404
abritinthebay wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that you'd have to come up with a VERY suspect definition of "progress" to make that stick. Especially as almost all the major innovation in that time started with tech developed from public funding. NASA, DARPA, and CERN would like a word with you. Also most of the private sector innovation was due to public funding and tax code incentives (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc). So basically technology, science, med…

Progress as defined by gains in per capita GDP, median wages, and life expectancy. And the public sector growth that I view as harmful is growth in social welfare programs and regulations restricting business activity. >Especially as almost all the major innovation in that time started with tech developed from public funding. Quite a bold statement..

Bold? Not really.

Basically your idea of progress is “pure unrestrained corporatism” which is pretty horrific.

Thank god your reality doesn’t exist - we’ve seen what happens when it gets closer to that and the human cost is disgustingly high.

Progress my ass.

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

#437

Post by scottlamb »

crispyambulance wrote: post #246
adrianN wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? We already have contracts that require highly paid humans to judge whether they've been broken or not. To me at least Etherium was dead the moment they chose to fork because they felt a contract was "hacked".

Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law". That's OK for now as the _real_ money being put into crypto-currency is understood to be a speculative thrill-ride. People who put actual _real_ money into this stuff know it could vaporize at any time for completely insane reasons. Its basically a bunch of people playing with funny money and having loud arguments about abs…

> Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law".

You're not answering adrianN's question. You're saying why one wouldn't want the contract to be the final authority. But adrianN pointed out that we already have contracts which aren't the final authority. They're asking why the code-based ones are better, given that you still don't want them to be the final authority. (I'm with adrianN; I don't see the point.)

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

#438

Post by electronvolt »

seanwilson wrote: post #360
electronvolt wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree, and the article basically says the same thing--the language is too expressive, and therefore hard to analyze. I don't know that much about the Ether devs, but I'd expect it just didn't occur to them--even among PL folks, knowledge & experience with something like coq is somewhat rare unless you went to the right undergrad or grad school. Especially if you weren't keeping up with the latest research in the…

> I don't know that much about the Ether devs, but I'd expect it just didn't occur to them--even among PL folks, knowledge & experience with something like coq is somewhat rare unless you went to the right undergrad or grad school. Especially if you weren't keeping up with the latest research in the last ~5-10 years or so. Hmm, you'd think they'd know about languages like Haskell though. I don't think it would be pra…

Late response, but: coq has the optional verification that you're proposing. :)

In my experience, Coq is not significantly harder than OCaml to write unverified code in. It's missing some nice shorthand syntax, but other than that it feels pretty similar.

With coq, the main challenge is expressing things that are meant to "run forever" (any truly unbounded recursion)--but my understanding is that would be forced to halt when it ran out of ether (so it's bounded anyways, and if you needed to you could probably explicitly hand that fact to the compiler)--and I think you probably don't want something to loop indefinitely if each iteration costs ether.

The main issues with coq that I think you'd crop up against are things that a good optimizer/compiler could probably help with (e.x. things like the fact that integers are naively represented as cons cells, so addition is O(n) and multiplication is worse). However, I haven't written any smart contracts, so it's definitely possible I'm missing something obvious.

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

#439

Post by return0 »

brazzy wrote: post #216
return0 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains: who you trust. Governments have resolved the question long ago (by enforcing trust), cryptocurrencies are just now starting to face the same question. You are correct however that who you Trust remains the greatest issue behind creating a currency.

I think that is a bit too simplistic a view, and the better question is: when things go wrong, what is your fallback? Modern governments provide an elaborate system of fallbacks: checks and balances, a justice system with multiple levels of appeals. Those may be complex and fallible, but they are at least reasonably good at dealing with unexpected problems. When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks.

> When a smart contract goes wrong, there are no fallbacks.

Like others have suggested, there is a fallback just like in other systems, it's just not formalized - yet. The difference is that in government there must always be a fallback , while smart contracts leave open a possibility that in the future, with an ideally unhackable contract, the fallback can potentially be removed.

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

#440

Post by chalst »

mbrock wrote: post #90
tlrobinson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is formal verification of contracts feasible? Is anyone working on it? Also, here's a possibly crazy idea: could one create bug bounties for algorithms (or even arbitrary software) on the Ethereum blockchain by writing the algorithm into a contract such that if you somehow break it you receive the bounty? An example of this would be the massive implicit bounty currently placed on the crypto algorithms (SHA256, ECDSA/…

Yoichi Hirai and others are working on completing proof assistant support for EVM, meaning you will be able to prove program properties using logical pre/post-conditions with machine checked proofs. There are already useful tools for symbolic execution, and I have a hunch that this kind of verification will be important along with model checking.

The specification of EVM in HOL exists already [1] and can be used to prove correctness of EVM code already. EVM is pretty low-level, though; the same can't be done for Solidity code. Yoichi has a page that outlines his thinking about what Ethereum's formal verification needs are [2].

What I would like to see is a verified high-level smart contract language layered on top of the Ethereum stack, allowing non-logicians to put together contracts that mean what they think they mean. See [3].

[1]: https://github.com/pirapira/eth-isabelle

[2]: https://github.com/pirapira/ethereum-formal-verification-ove...

[3]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5003#comment-94645

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