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The collapse of the IRON stable coin

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Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#451

Post by ikeboy »

fogof wrote: post #429
ikeboy wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually surprising and doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If the oracle is just an AMM, then presumably one could get the oracle to register a nonzero value by just putting a small amount of money in the contract. As long as there aren't an infinite amount of TITAN tokens (are there?), even if all of the TITAN in existence were put into this AMM, there would still be a little money left to give TITAN a positive…

The oracle calculated the price to a certain precision, so it rounded down to 0.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#452

Post by im3w1l »

ineedasername wrote: post #388
marcosdumay wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, people write legal contracts without fully understanding what they are writing all the time too. I do disagree that people understand them on most cases. Things are better on consumer law because it assumes from the start that people are stupid and have no idea what they are doing. But other kinds of contracts have quite large security risks.

Yes, and when normal contracts don't ( because they can't ) anticipate every possible scenario, there is a meta layer on top of that to resolve edge cases. In the case of a smart contract, it can even happen that both parties agree in how things should take place when there's a problem! But bad code doesn't work that way, and you can find yourself in a null state of indeterminacy without a built in layer to resolve t…

I trust the alarm on my phone to wake me up in the morning, even though it's been programmed by flawed human beings. It's possible to reach sufficient reliability despite our flaws and bugs.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#453

Post by nuclx »

everfree wrote: post #419
ineedasername wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and when normal contracts don't ( because they can't ) anticipate every possible scenario, there is a meta layer on top of that to resolve edge cases. In the case of a smart contract, it can even happen that both parties agree in how things should take place when there's a problem! But bad code doesn't work that way, and you can find yourself in a null state of indeterminacy without a built in layer to resolve t…

> Trusting any smart contract of sufficient complexity is like trusting that a code base has absolutely zero bugs and zero unanticipated edge cases. I just don't see that as realistic. You can do this to some extent using formal verification. Most code doesn't get formally verified because it's kind of a pain to do, and you can usually fix bugs later, but smart contracts are the perfect candidate for it since they ar…

> You can write perfect code if you have the right tools and do it carefully.

And you are DJB.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#454

Post by andrepd »

lmm wrote: post #360
andrepd wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evading the law (whether the court or a regulatory body such as the SEC [civil] or DOJ [criminal]) is typically a "bad thing" for the person or people intending to or successfully doing so. Oh wow. If only this were true. If only they were so diligent in punishing other kinds of things. Here's something I read recently, from the aftermath of the Libor scandal: https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/stein-waivers-grante…

Nonsense. There's severe punishment for acts that demonstrate clear malice (e.g. violence, possession of substances well-known to be illegal) and light punishment for ambiguous cases (making a subjective judgement call in a particular way), at every level of society. If anything the error is in the other direction - legislation that requires people to make subjective noisy judgments and get them right is futile and a…

Nope. Clear malice was proven beyond doubt in Libor fixing, in credits ratings fixing in the leadup to 2008, etc.

There's severe punishment for crimes committed by regular people, and no punishment for crimes committed by wealthy people, even if all things considered the latter manage to harm millions of people with their actions.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#455

Post by amanaplanacanal »

jMyles wrote: post #445
wins32767 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 d…

Isn't this ultimately a 'might makes right' argument?

In the real world, “right” is only an argument used to help convince other people to use their “might” to support your side of the argument. Physical force always beats morality.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#456

Post by rglullis »

worik wrote: post #298
bob33212 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how ALL of Crypto works. A decentralized ledger means that you cannot call the CEO or CFO of the ledger and have a clearly fraudulent transfer revoked. That is the tradeoff.

Yes. Trading off hundreds of years of experience and judicial tradition and precedent for a brand new shiny (just trust us programmers) system. If the former system were to be irretrievably corrupt, teetering on the edge of collapse, and the proposed replacement were capable of replacing it then it would be worthwhile. The existing international financial system is corrupt, the judiciary in most of our world is compl…

> It is even worse that that which it proposes to replace.

Aside from the vocal minority of BTC maxis that jerk off to the idea of making a crypto-revolution, no serious developer in crypto wants it to replace the existing systems and institutions. We "only" want to create an alternative for the times and places where the current institutions are insufficient or dysfunctional.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#457

Post by rglullis »

lmm wrote: post #356
bob33212 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how ALL of Crypto works. A decentralized ledger means that you cannot call the CEO or CFO of the ledger and have a clearly fraudulent transfer revoked. That is the tradeoff.

Except when you can, e.g. the Ethereum DAO. Turns out crypto is just exchanging one shady cabal for an even shadier one.

No, not really. The Ethereum fork was successful because the majority of the users through absolutely decentralized consensus started following the forked chain.

Vitalik did not pass any legally binding decree to get people to comply, and the worst thing that happened to people who disagreed with the change? They got left to play with the other chain.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#458

Post by Shorel »

jkhdigital wrote: post #357
worik wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Trading off hundreds of years of experience and judicial tradition and precedent for a brand new shiny (just trust us programmers) system. If the former system were to be irretrievably corrupt, teetering on the edge of collapse, and the proposed replacement were capable of replacing it then it would be worthwhile. The existing international financial system is corrupt, the judiciary in most of our world is compl…

> has no support from cryptographers I am a PhD student in cryptography, and judging by the papers I've read there is plenty of support from cryptographers, many of whom are directly involved in research and development. Silvio Micali is practically a founder of modern cryptography (and Turing Award winner), and he co-created the blockchain Algorand. There is also plenty of opposition, as the subject elicits strong o…

In fact, I can think of nothing more profitable for a cryptographer than designing a better cryptocurrency.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#459

Post by mimixco »

georgyo wrote: 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.

The classic "halting problem" in comp sci shows that no one can even determine all the edge cases, much less test for them. This is why all software has bugs and always will have bugs. The way smart contracts lock-up software and make it impossible or difficult to edit can only create more bugs and prevent them from being fixed when they're found. This is the exact opposite of how professional, enterprise software development handles updates!

The lawyer problem is even worse than not being able to interpret the contract. The code isn't even a contract, legally. When conflicts arise from these deals, courts will settle them the way they always have. They won't read code and then decide that "code is law." That's something programmers made up that will also never be true.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#460

Post by mimixco »

Daishiman wrote: post #307
tluyben2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against smart contracts because we do not know how to write software in that way. I like how they sparked a formal verification Renaissance of sorts but that did not help much either unfortunately (if the premise is wrong, no amount of proof will save you anyway). However, if you let all parties review the smart contract (the source is on the chain, you can check it) and agree with it's workings and sign a 'huma…

> but we are adults here: if you agree to put money in smart contracts, you should have verified the code. And if you think the code is flawed, do not put money: otherwise do not complain afterwards. It is not that hard. That's not how it works. Courts generally operate by ambiguous standard of what reasonable people and reasonable experts can actually do given the state of technology. No reasonable software engineer…

This reminds me of the Toyota Prius (and other models') un-commanded acceleration problem. Should car buyers examine Toyota's code, or should they assume that the gas and brake pedals work as expected?

It's not reasonable to expect software users (even other developer users) to understand or audit code in order to be able to use software -- for anything.

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