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Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

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Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#91

Post by hsod »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #69
vkreso wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no perfect rules nor there is perfect law. The hard fork was simply an abandonment of an obviously unjust law, a revolution really. The people voted with their feet, and the current market cap is an indicator of where those votes went. People don't like to get screwed over.

In that case, why not just use current contract law with centuries of jurisprudence? Without, "code is the contract", Ethereum is a pointless, buggy, leaky abstraction of current contract law.

Perhaps in some cases a broad consensus mechanism (like hard fork) is preferable to putting it in the hands of 12 random people.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#92

Post by droopyEyelids »

vkreso wrote: post #61
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #46

If R2-D2 used Ethereum. C-3PO: He made a perfectly legal move. Han: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee (The Ethereum founders). C-3PO: But sir. Nobody worries about upsetting a droid (a regular contract user without influence). Han: That’s cause a droid (regular contract user) don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets (hard fork the entire crypto currency and call you a thief) when they lose. Wooki…

There are no perfect rules nor there is perfect law. The hard fork was simply an abandonment of an obviously unjust law, a revolution really. The people voted with their feet, and the current market cap is an indicator of where those votes went. People don't like to get screwed over.

The whole point of computers is that they're perfect rule-following systems.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#93

Post by pikzen »

vkreso wrote: post #61
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #46

If R2-D2 used Ethereum. C-3PO: He made a perfectly legal move. Han: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee (The Ethereum founders). C-3PO: But sir. Nobody worries about upsetting a droid (a regular contract user without influence). Han: That’s cause a droid (regular contract user) don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets (hard fork the entire crypto currency and call you a thief) when they lose. Wooki…

There are no perfect rules nor there is perfect law. The hard fork was simply an abandonment of an obviously unjust law, a revolution really. The people voted with their feet, and the current market cap is an indicator of where those votes went. People don't like to get screwed over.

>The hard fork was simply an abandonment of an obviously unjust law, a revolution really.

This is what Ethereum users actually believe.

Want it or not, Ethereum is very much led by a small group of people, and when those people lose their money, they ask the community to hard fork because really it would be a shame if the cryptocurrency they invested in lost value and became worthless. After all, it's not as if every cryptocurreency was nothing more than just a way to speculate.

Ask a thousand people if they want to lose money or win some, they'll all answer win. Even if lose is the normal (and in Etheureum's case, codified and agreed on by everyone) course of action.

By the way, the vote was at a default 'yes' and had to be explicitly disabled.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#94

Post by dgacmu »

AJRF wrote: post #50
Jabanga wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the token sales I've seen are ponzi schemes. "Ponzi scheme" seems to be the buzzword used to describe any irrational or bubbly investment. It's incorrect usage of the term.

You are categorically wrong about this. Ponzi schemes are financial frauds where, under the promise of high profits, users put their money, recovering their investment and interests only if enough users after them continue to invest money. Further to this, its qualatively provable, as you can look at the contracts and actually class the type of Ponzi scheme they are. * https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/06/01/2189634/i…

The wikipedia article on Ponzi Schemes draws a fairly subtle distinction between a classical Ponzi schemes, economic bubbles, and pump-and-dump schemes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Most ICOs seem more like pump-and-dump by that nomenclature, than like true Ponzi schemes, in which the Ponzi operator is directly involved in all of the transactions in and out of the system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#95

Post by ubernostrum »

darawk wrote: post #21
DINKDINK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ethereum foundations reaction to the DAO hack proved that the "code is the contract" is not true. Which questions the very value of smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain because it's proven that they're immutable now This is a good discussion: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...

> The ethereum foundations reaction to the DAO hack proved that the "code is the contract" is not true. I disagree. The code must also refer to the implementation of the Ethereum clients, and the collective will of the network participants. Those are implicit provisions of the contract, specified in advance. The Ethereum Classic chain still exists, and the thief is welcome to use it. People have simply voted with the…

I thought the whole point was to do away with "implicit" or "everybody knows" or other human-interpretation/subjective factors?

If the premise is "the code is the contract, period, except we reserve the right to change the contract at any time or even to cause the contract retroactively never to have existed, based on implicit or subjective factors decided by humans and not by code", then it's a very different beast.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#96

Post by kalleboo »

bluejekyll wrote: post #86
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, people also want to take back losing moves in chess. The whole point of Ethereum was that the code alone specified the contract.

But code is written by humans... have you ever seen code with no bugs? In 20 years of professional development I have not. Given that humans are imperfect, and could even potentially act in bad faith, isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause? I get the argument to not have one; that it's impossible to have favorites and central figures manipulate the system, but nothing is perfect.

> isn't it reasonable to have an exception clause

It absolutely is. Which is why you don't say "code is law". Which is why Ethereum is dumb.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#97

Post by [deleted] »

apozem wrote: post #83
n8n3k wrote: post #59

Thief? He strictly followed the terms of a contract by people who were very clear that "code is law" and who did not want institutions were the result is decided by human judgement.

Building a financial system without some level of flexibility and human judgment seems like an awful idea. Forgive the lengthy story, but this tale courtesy of Matt Levine is perfect for this [1]: > The California electric grid operator built a set of rules for generating, distributing and paying for electricity. Those rules were dumb and bad. If you read them carefully and greedily, you could get paid silly amounts…

[deleted]

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#98

Post by tzs »

devdoomari wrote: post #23

> ". Over email, he said, “We might be up the creek ;).” Later, when Gün pointed to the error in line 666, Daian replied, “Don’t think so.” well, isn't the financial law against this kind of incompetence in the first place? I don't think the thieves would be guiltier than the team behind DAO. ps: and line 666??? who the hell keeps a single source-code file that big? no wonder bugs are around...

> ps: and line 666??? who the hell keeps a single source-code file that big? no wonder bugs are around...

Why would you expect there to be a relationship between source file size and bugs?

Suppose a program has 100 functions, and each function is 10 lines plus on average 4 lines of comments.

If I organize it as a single file, it will be about 1500 lines.

If I organize it as 10 files, they will each be about about 150 lines.

But when I'm actually working on the program I'll be seeing it through a window that shows the same amount regardless of whether the program is one big file or 10 smaller files.

Since I see essentially the same thing in both cases, I don't see how the bug rate will be different.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying it is OK to always put everything in one file. There are times when good design requires multiple files. For example if a program must use global variables and the language supports globals that can only be references within the file containing them, then organizing files around which globals functions need access to might be a good idea and help avoid bugs.

But in that case it is not the size of the files that matters. It is their data access needs.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#99

Post by microcolonel »

bluejekyll wrote: post #90
microcolonel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/seL4/seL4 https://www.mitls.org/

sel4 is amazing, but it is not bug free: https://github.com/seL4/seL4/issues/36 It might be close... for miTLS I don't have access to the issues, but let's assume it's bug free now for sake of argument; it hasn't always been bug free, that is in earlier unproven releases. "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!" - Edsger Dijkstra

Minor nitpick: the x86 port was never verified, the 32-bit ARM one was.

Re: Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

#100

Post by [deleted] »

jchw wrote: post #78
lproven wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you mean apart from every Unix ever? (All right, all right, excluding Mac OS X. But it's weird.)

That's filesystems, not the OS. There are some extremely good reasons to treat filenames as bags of bytes, which is why Apple got rid of case folding in APFS. Think performance, locale issues, etc. (And before someone says it, yes, of course performance matters for filenames. Every single stat shouldn't need to worry about case folding.)

[deleted]
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