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Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

blog.ethereum.org

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Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#591

Post by nsajko »

qwtel wrote: post #475
kauffj wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide a far more accurate insight into the likelihood of events than any other alternative. You can think of it as betting if you like, but it's betting with lots of positive externalities. Consider a business that needs to reason about the probability of a law passing, severity of global warming, or any number of other difficult to predict events. Prediction markets would provide by far the most accurate insi…

EDIT: Moved to the correct location in the discussion tree. It's very frustrating for me to see "probability of a law passing" and "severity of global warming" being thrown in the same basket. While the first lends itself naturally to be framed as a binary prediction market (and there are good reasons to believe that the market will produce reliable forecasts), "severity" doesn't lend itself to be framed in this way…

Presumably he meant a specific prediction like "Greenwich will be permanently flooded by 2025" ?

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#592

Post by [deleted] »

qwtel wrote: post #475
kauffj wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide a far more accurate insight into the likelihood of events than any other alternative. You can think of it as betting if you like, but it's betting with lots of positive externalities. Consider a business that needs to reason about the probability of a law passing, severity of global warming, or any number of other difficult to predict events. Prediction markets would provide by far the most accurate insi…

EDIT: Moved to the correct location in the discussion tree. It's very frustrating for me to see "probability of a law passing" and "severity of global warming" being thrown in the same basket. While the first lends itself naturally to be framed as a binary prediction market (and there are good reasons to believe that the market will produce reliable forecasts), "severity" doesn't lend itself to be framed in this way…

[deleted]

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#593

Post by xg15 »

programmarchy wrote: post #522
qwtel wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collection could be written as part of the smart contract that wants to use the service of the DRO (of course that part would have be be bug-free…). Generally, I think ancaps would argue that violence wouldn't occur because it is too costly (as they do in the context of private defence agencies [1]). Anyway, I believe this argument is flawed, in the sense that people have resorted to violence, despite the fact th…

A counter-argument is that most of the American population did not want to enter either of the world wars, but were dragged into it by state and corporate interests who, unlike the general population, did stand to profit enormously from the war. PDAs would not have the authority to do this.

As far as I understood it though, ancap wouldn't forbid any of the corporations that did profit from the war. (Or, in fact couldn't forbid it as this is the whole point). So what would prevent those corporations from engaging in the same war propaganda that the states did?

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#594

Post by sjg007 »

darawk wrote: post #532
ar0 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If this soft and hard fork idea really goes through, it seems that now you are in fact getting the worst of both worlds: For your contract, you have to write code that apparently is very hard to get right and bug-free[1], while at the same time you are at the whim of a "community" -- whose decisions (sorry, "suggestions") can apparently be announced by one guy in a blog post -- not to deem what you are doing…

> Agreed. If this soft and hard fork idea really goes through, it seems that now you are in fact getting the worst of both worlds: For your contract, you have to write code that apparently is very hard to get right and bug-free[1], while at the same time you are at the whim of a "community" -- whose decisions (sorry, "suggestions") can apparently be announced by one guy in a blog post -- not to deem what you are doin…

This basically sounds like, should we bail out Greece?

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#595

Post by [deleted] »

imglorp wrote: post #214

This is what concerns me about contract programming. With human contract law, if there's a minor typo or loophole, participants can generally see the spirit and intent, and at worst go to a judge who will usually enforce the intent. But with software contracts, only the characters matter and there's no intent anywhere: either you get paid or you don't. ETH is advising, "Contract authors should ... be very careful abo…

[deleted]

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#596

Post by johncolanduoni »

makomk wrote: post #363
johncolanduoni wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that when they say it's a suggestion, it's truly a suggestion. If a majority of the miners refuse to accept the update, then what anyone at the Ethereum foundation wants them to do is irrelevant. There is definitely a lot of social pressure to consider here, but there is still no central switch. I'm generally not a huge fan of cryptocurrency (as currencies that is, I love the tech), but I fail to understand…

A lot of social pressure is probably an understatement. slock.it are implying that people who oppose the hard fork are likely to be the attacker and asking people to contact them with information about the identity of anyone who organizes opposition to it: https://twitter.com/christopherhesh/status/74379447973649612...

Yeah, but that's slock.it (not the Ethereum foundation) who were the same ones who found a similar bug in their code elsewhere are just plastered over it while claiming that there was no risk. They have a history of being cocksure about their programming, and didn't even think to take a quick look at the rest of their code. It's unsurprising that they're being scuzzy about this too, and I think the Ethereum community is pretty fed up with them at this point :P

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#597

Post by sneak »

Joeri wrote: post #445
infodroid wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike traditional contracts, the idea was that smart contracts were going to eliminate the need for enforcement or dispute resolution. So that law is enshrined in code. But this incident has set a precedent, at least within Ethereum, that the project leadership will intervene to enforce the spirit of a smart contract. So what now are the benefits of Ethereum smart contracts over the traditional legal system? The way…

If anyone can intervene, intervention will happen, even if it takes a new law to make it so. The only way to eliminate the human interpretation factor is to eliminate the possibility for human interpretation. This is effectively impossible in a pre-singularity world, so there can be no such thing as a contract enshrined in code which is binding.

Interesting from a practical perspective; I hope that ideologically we exercise enough restraint to prevent this historic circumstance.

Perhaps that is only a reasonable hope for values under $50-100M USD.

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#598

Post by swyman »

mikeash wrote: post #458
programmarchy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind Ethereum is less than a year old, the DAO is even younger. It's still new, risky, and fraught with problems that need to be solved. If you're not familiar with anarcho-capitalist theory, there's a concept called a DRO -- dispute resolution organization [1] -- that can perform arbitration functions in a decentralized manner, i.e. without a monopoly on judicial services like the state. In the future, as th…

What's crazy to me about the whole thing isn't the bug in the DAO nor the fact that it's being taken advantage of. As you say, it's all very early stuff, and there's no surprise that it hasn't been fully worked out yet. What does surprise me is that people poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into this new, unproven thing. To me, this says that while Ethereum itself may be technologically fine, the co…

Or their other options are ripe for disruption

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#599

Post by mrep »

yonilevy wrote: post #393

Just an idea - why not contact the attacker (via a public message), and offer him or her a deal - they get to keep say 1% of the stolen amount, given that they upload a smart contract that guarantees the money is sent from the stolen account to a "trusted" address (from where it will go to DAO 2.0). That way everyone wins, hacker gets paid a fair amount for finding the security hole, no messy forks.

Give back tens of millions of dollars for what? Karma?

Re: Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability

#600

Post by vessenes »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #391
vessenes wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is FUD, broadly speaking. The devs have put out a patch for miners which allows them to decide whether or not they wish to fork over these transactions. Centralization is not required for this decision, instead, distributed consensus. The counterpoint to your statements is simply that consumers need safety with their money. It is no badge of honor to let unsophisticated technical people lose money for some extre…

> This is FUD, broadly speaking. The devs have put out a patch for miners which allows them to decide whether or not they wish to fork over these transactions. Centralization is not required for this decision, instead, distributed consensus. With all respect Peter, this is not FUD and OP is raising a valid concern. Yes, the miners vote on the patch - but given the infant state of the ecosystem and the large loss incu…

I've written a longer post about this: http://vessenes.com/point-counterpoint-ethereum-miners-shoul...
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