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Despite Bitcoin's downsides, they've never actually had an issue nearly as bad as what Ethereum's experiencing now. With Bitcoin, most issues were a result of

Despite Bitcoin's downsides, they've never actually had an issue nearly as bad as what Ethereum's experiencing now. With Bitcoin, most issues were a result of private organizations misappropriating money or security. But the entire foundation of Ethereum is now considered completely unreliable.

nawitus 10y ago
"But the entire foundation of Ethereum is now considered completely unreliable." Considered by who? The bugs are in the smart contract, not Ethereum itself.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  But wasn't the smart contract system the selling point for the novelty of Ethereum? If it doesn't work reliably, why should we use it over the more mature and stable Bitcoin?
  - anonymousab 10y ago
    It works reliably, insofar as you are fully able to write and execute a desired contract, but also able to write a contract that shoots you in the foot. Like a certain programming language's features, it may happen to be easier than not.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      That's a strange way to design a financial contract system. I mean, just like Rust checks for memory safety at compile time, can't the contract language make similar checks? Or perhaps the contracts can run in a simulator first?
      - nawitus 10y ago
        Yes, you can write a contract language (or improve an existing one) which contains static checks. That hasn't been implemented yet probably because of lack of resources. The higher level contract language is compiled down to byte code. You can in addition implement these safety checks to be executed during runtime, but that costs money.
      - erikpukinskis 10y ago
        It's not a financial contract system. It's a decentralized general purpose computing platform. It can be used for financial contracts.
  - 21echoes 10y ago
    My understanding is that the bug was in a particular contract written using the Ethereum contract "language", not Ethereum itself. E.g., one does not stop using Python because there's a bug in Quora
    - Animats 10y ago
      The people who screwed up the DAO smart contract can't fix the problem from within the DAO, and they want to change the rules of Etherium to fix the DAO's problem. The fact that the same people are behind Etherium, the DAO, and the programmable door-lock startup makes this possible. It also makes it suspicious. In the Bitcoin world, all too often we've seen an "outside hack" that turned out to be insiders.
      - wcummings 10y ago
        >and the programmable door-lock startup The door lock company is the funniest part of the whole thing. It makes this meltdown so much less surprising tbh.
        stale2002 10y ago
        Whats up with the door lock thing? I haven't heard about that.
        nawitus 10y ago
        Probably refers to this: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ethereum-based-slock-reveals-first-ever-lock-opened-money-1527014 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ethereum-based-slock-reveals-first-... Somewhat related: the lock in my apartment is actually based on cryptography too. It uses SHA-1, which is somewhat scary, because it's not considered "safe" anymore. The algorithm was probably chosen because it uses less energy compared to safer ones, as the lock gets the energy from the turning of the key.
        tamana 10y ago
- gcr 10y ago
  Professional security audits of The DAO's smart contract code never caught this bug. This conclusively shows it's impossible for a mere mortal developer (or even a team of seasoned security professionals) to write smart contracts that behave in predictable ways. As an outsider, I will never use Ethereum for this reason. The EVM may be reliable, but the humans that use it are completely unreliable, and it's the humans that form the foundation of any distributed system.
  - nawitus 10y ago
    It doesn't seem that rational to stop using Ethereum simply because a single smart contract contained a bug. It's a new project so there's bound to be bugs here and there. Of course, maybe your position is that you will never use any Ethereum-like software, which might become impractical in the future.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      It's almost like you didn't read the comment. They had experts review their code, and they didn't catch the bug. They had huge public interest, and nobody caught the bug. So the chances are, unless big, breaking changes to the platform are made, the vast majority of contracts that will ever be written will be buggy.
Animats 10y ago
Bitcoin has turned out to be quite secure technically. The problem with Bitcoin is that anonymous unidirectional remote money transfers are the con man's dream. Bitcoin thus became a scam magnet. The goal of Etherium was to provide something akin to a contract so that remote parties could not just take the money and run. That seems to have failed technically. (Another big problem with Bitcoin at scale is that you can't count it without access to the keys that let you spend it. This makes outside auditing very difficult and helped to enable the Mt. Gox scam. Etherium doesn't address that. Some multi-signature scheme where external parties could determine that an account has funds without the key needed to take them would be useful for a cryptocurrency. But, as Etherium shows, adding complexity adds exploitable bugs.)
- xorcist 10y ago
  > Some multi-signature scheme where external parties could determine that an account has funds without the key Correct me if I misunderstand, but checking that an account has funds is trivial. It's in the blockchain. Multi-signature transactions are also standard.
- grapehut 10y ago
  > Another big problem with Bitcoin at scale is that you can't count it without access to the keys that let you spend it. That's not remotely true, I'm not sure what gave you that idea. Bitcoin at its core is based around asymmetric encryption, which allows only 1 party to send money but everyone to verify it. By sharing a public key (a bitcoin address) you can see the funds, but can not spend it. In fact, right from the start bitcoin client even included the ability to sign and verify messages from addresses to prove ownership. Right now I could give you the bip44 (public key) of my wallet and you could see every transaction I have received, sent (and all future ones, from that wallet). But you'll have no ability to spend my money. Although I'm not going to do that for the same reason most people won't: privacy. Anyway, there's been proof of solvency schemes for a long times, it's just most exchanges and services (with a few notable exceptions) haven't seen a business case in implementing it.
  - Animats 10y ago
Klinky 10y ago
The issue here appears to be a human misunderstanding of best practices. An investment gone awry, maybe due to insider malfeasance or incompetence. Bitcoin has most certainly had its fair share of those too. This is Ethereum's Mt.Gox moment.

nawitus 10y ago

"But the entire foundation of Ethereum is now considered completely unreliable." Considered by who? The bugs are in the smart contract, not Ethereum itself.

Cyph0n 10y ago
But wasn't the smart contract system the selling point for the novelty of Ethereum? If it doesn't work reliably, why should we use it over the more mature and stable Bitcoin?
- anonymousab 10y ago
  It works reliably, insofar as you are fully able to write and execute a desired contract, but also able to write a contract that shoots you in the foot. Like a certain programming language's features, it may happen to be easier than not.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    That's a strange way to design a financial contract system. I mean, just like Rust checks for memory safety at compile time, can't the contract language make similar checks? Or perhaps the contracts can run in a simulator first?
    - nawitus 10y ago
      Yes, you can write a contract language (or improve an existing one) which contains static checks. That hasn't been implemented yet probably because of lack of resources. The higher level contract language is compiled down to byte code. You can in addition implement these safety checks to be executed during runtime, but that costs money.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      It's not a financial contract system. It's a decentralized general purpose computing platform. It can be used for financial contracts.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  My understanding is that the bug was in a particular contract written using the Ethereum contract "language", not Ethereum itself. E.g., one does not stop using Python because there's a bug in Quora
  - Animats 10y ago
    The people who screwed up the DAO smart contract can't fix the problem from within the DAO, and they want to change the rules of Etherium to fix the DAO's problem. The fact that the same people are behind Etherium, the DAO, and the programmable door-lock startup makes this possible. It also makes it suspicious. In the Bitcoin world, all too often we've seen an "outside hack" that turned out to be insiders.
    - wcummings 10y ago
      >and the programmable door-lock startup The door lock company is the funniest part of the whole thing. It makes this meltdown so much less surprising tbh.
      - stale2002 10y ago
        Whats up with the door lock thing? I haven't heard about that.
        nawitus 10y ago
        Probably refers to this: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ethereum-based-slock-reveals-first-ever-lock-opened-money-1527014 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ethereum-based-slock-reveals-first-... Somewhat related: the lock in my apartment is actually based on cryptography too. It uses SHA-1, which is somewhat scary, because it's not considered "safe" anymore. The algorithm was probably chosen because it uses less energy compared to safer ones, as the lock gets the energy from the turning of the key.
        tamana 10y ago
gcr 10y ago
Professional security audits of The DAO's smart contract code never caught this bug. This conclusively shows it's impossible for a mere mortal developer (or even a team of seasoned security professionals) to write smart contracts that behave in predictable ways. As an outsider, I will never use Ethereum for this reason. The EVM may be reliable, but the humans that use it are completely unreliable, and it's the humans that form the foundation of any distributed system.
- nawitus 10y ago
  It doesn't seem that rational to stop using Ethereum simply because a single smart contract contained a bug. It's a new project so there's bound to be bugs here and there. Of course, maybe your position is that you will never use any Ethereum-like software, which might become impractical in the future.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    It's almost like you didn't read the comment. They had experts review their code, and they didn't catch the bug. They had huge public interest, and nobody caught the bug. So the chances are, unless big, breaking changes to the platform are made, the vast majority of contracts that will ever be written will be buggy.

Animats 10y ago

Bitcoin has turned out to be quite secure technically. The problem with Bitcoin is that anonymous unidirectional remote money transfers are the con man's dream. Bitcoin thus became a scam magnet. The goal of Etherium was to provide something akin to a contract so that remote parties could not just take the money and run. That seems to have failed technically. (Another big problem with Bitcoin at scale is that you can't count it without access to the keys that let you spend it. This makes outside auditing very difficult and helped to enable the Mt. Gox scam. Etherium doesn't address that. Some multi-signature scheme where external parties could determine that an account has funds without the key needed to take them would be useful for a cryptocurrency. But, as Etherium shows, adding complexity adds exploitable bugs.)

xorcist 10y ago
> Some multi-signature scheme where external parties could determine that an account has funds without the key Correct me if I misunderstand, but checking that an account has funds is trivial. It's in the blockchain. Multi-signature transactions are also standard.
grapehut 10y ago
> Another big problem with Bitcoin at scale is that you can't count it without access to the keys that let you spend it. That's not remotely true, I'm not sure what gave you that idea. Bitcoin at its core is based around asymmetric encryption, which allows only 1 party to send money but everyone to verify it. By sharing a public key (a bitcoin address) you can see the funds, but can not spend it. In fact, right from the start bitcoin client even included the ability to sign and verify messages from addresses to prove ownership. Right now I could give you the bip44 (public key) of my wallet and you could see every transaction I have received, sent (and all future ones, from that wallet). But you'll have no ability to spend my money. Although I'm not going to do that for the same reason most people won't: privacy. Anyway, there's been proof of solvency schemes for a long times, it's just most exchanges and services (with a few notable exceptions) haven't seen a business case in implementing it.
- Animats 10y ago

Klinky 10y ago

The issue here appears to be a human misunderstanding of best practices. An investment gone awry, maybe due to insider malfeasance or incompetence. Bitcoin has most certainly had its fair share of those too. This is Ethereum's Mt.Gox moment.