8 ms·

> This isn't a normal loss by the way, where you can prosecute someone or sue somebody. No, this is the instant, digital theft of the entire value of the contra

> This isn't a normal loss by the way, where you can prosecute someone or sue somebody. No, this is the instant, digital theft of the entire value of the contract, to an anonymous digital address where it will be quickly blended in with hundreds of millions of dollars of similar thefts a month. Also worth pointing out that a non-trivial number of people would say that no theft at all has occurred, as the smart contracts are supposed to be the final authority, and if you can convince a smart contract to give up its value to an attacker then that's perfectly fine as that's how the contract was written. Ethereum Classic is a good example of this.

marcoperaza 9y ago
That's a fascinating point. Can any lawyers comment on how the law might see this?
- sandralisa88 9y ago
  just as Gerald implied I am in shock that a person able to earn $7711 in 1 month on the > computer . go now>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ >
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The whole point of smart contracts is that lawyers' (and judges) opinions are not relevant. As soon as you need them and they have some power to make the thing go one way or the other the whole smart contract concept has failed.
  - marcoperaza 9y ago
    As long as real people can be hauled before a real court, judges and lawyers--but more importantly, the law--will be highly relevant.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      You really just simply do not get it. Just like the law can not define Pi to be 3 the law should not be able to influence the outcome of a smart contract if smart contracts work at all because that is how it is intended to work, smart contracts are supposed to be the entirety of the agreement, no outside interpretation should make a difference nor could it make a difference. This is where the Ethereum crowd has - in my eyes at least - already failed with how the handled the previous hack, the concept is as currently implemented fundamentally flawed. https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/ https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-... I can see the dilemma (get the money back or kill Ethereum) must have been a tough one but if they really wanted Ethereum to be taken serious they should have chalked that up to their education fund and call it a day.
      - marcoperaza 9y ago
        I do get it. I just don't think that's realistic. What smart contracts should be according to you is mostly irrelevant to how the law will treat them.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        You still don't get it. The law will not have anything to say about smart contracts because the law will not be able to enforce a contract one way or another depending on some judge but it will simply execute and that's the end of that. This so that some guy in China or India and some guy in the United States can agree on terms without having to haggle over whose legal jurisdiction will kick in if and when there is a dispute about the contract. Until we get a world government and until judges are able to order millions of nodes all over the world to do a hard fork there is no way around a smart contract environment that actually works. But we don't have that at the present, Ethereum as far as I'm concerned was DOA because of DAO.
        marcoperaza 9y ago
        However a smart contract between you and me may execute, a court can still order me to give you money, or order me to enter into a different smart contract. And if I don't comply, they will eventually hold me in contempt and at some point seize my property by force and throw me in jail if I resist. The authority of the state ultimately rests on its ability to resort to violence to enforce its will. No smart contract can change that.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - meddlepal 9y ago
    This is adorably naive hacker thinking.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      No, the adorable naive hacker thinking is that one could actually write a contract that has no room for interpretation (see DAO). There is a very good reason we have judges and lawyers, which is that being 100% un-ambiguous is impossible, and smart contracts are no exception to this rule, only there every ambiguity will allow either one of the contracting parties or an outsider to make off with the loot. So for now nobody appears to be willing to stand by 'the code is the law'.
    - krisoft 9y ago
      I agree with you. If the point of a smart contract is that "code is law" and "judges doesn't make decision, the protocol does", that surely sounds like naive hacker thinking. If that's not the point of smart contracts then what is a smart contract? How is it different from that thing which we call just "contract"? So either the smart contracts are just contracts, or they are product of naive hacker thinking.
      - kcanini 9y ago
        I think the point is that they bundle together the agreement with the actual execution of the agreement. The execution is performed by public code that everyone can audit and verify for themselves.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > The whole point of smart contracts is that lawyers' (and judges) opinions are not relevant. To the extent that that's true, the idea is simply wrong. I would argue that it is quite possible to see smart contracts as having potential practical value without taking that ideological position on their role, however.
  - Fej 9y ago
    A judge's opinion is always relevant. You cannot escape the real world just because a smart contract says so. No one has bothered to sue over a smart contract yet. I concur with pkilgore in "I frankly can't wait until this shit gets litigated."
- pkilgore 9y ago
  Lawyer/programmer here (US law). It's an interesting problem. Let's assume offer, acceptance, capacity, legality for a transaction. So question to me is, when do we have a contract (do we have a contract?) and what IS the contract. For this usually (not always) look to the so called "meeting of the minds." If we define the meeting of the minds as the EXACT actual code, it's hard to argue that using a bug in the code is a breach. Simplistic example: I write a lease that says if I sell the house me or the buyer can terminate the lease on 30 days notice. You do not do any diligence on that lease. When I sell the house and the buyer terminates, you're out of luck. If we define the meeting of minds as "you are promising to do thing X for me, and you propose to do it with a smart contract", then if there is a bug in the contract, that might be a breach on behalf of the person offering to do thing X. Simplistic example: Your website says if I send ETH to address "0xExample" you offer a service that will send it back in 6 months. If 0xExample is hacked and money wasn't returned, well, you could argue that there was a breach of a contract to return your money. No idea how a Court might come out, and being the law, it depends on shades of grey, other factors, skill of lawyers, etc. I frankly can't wait until this shit gets litigated.
adrianN 9y ago
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".
- spuz 9y ago
  > Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? I think this is a common misunderstanding of Ethereum and blockchains in general. The current Ethereum blockchain is authoritative only as long as a majority of it users consider it to be authoritative. The same applies to Bitcoin. No single person decided to fork Ethereum after the DAO was hacked, it was decided by a quorum of Ethereum users. The original fork still exists as Ethereum Classic and if you believe that the "contract is king" then you are still free to continue using that fork along with everyone else who shares that view. You say "To me at least Ethereum was dead the moment they chose to fork" and that is probably the view of many Ethereum users. I'm certain many Ethereum holders chose to divest their positions and move their assets elsewhere. That is a big loss for the currency but obviously enough people still believe it to be worth something and so it survives. Because of their distributed nature, cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users. They don't need to be perfect to survive, only to be slightly fitter than their competitors.
  - edzc92 9y ago
    You forgot when the people that run ethereum made the default vote choice as the hard fork. This is important.
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      I guess to be fair they should've had those clients go 50/50?
      - edzc92 9y ago

marcoperaza 9y ago

That's a fascinating point. Can any lawyers comment on how the law might see this?

sandralisa88 9y ago
just as Gerald implied I am in shock that a person able to earn $7711 in 1 month on the > computer . go now>>>>>>>>>>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ >
jacquesm 9y ago
The whole point of smart contracts is that lawyers' (and judges) opinions are not relevant. As soon as you need them and they have some power to make the thing go one way or the other the whole smart contract concept has failed.
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  As long as real people can be hauled before a real court, judges and lawyers--but more importantly, the law--will be highly relevant.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    You really just simply do not get it. Just like the law can not define Pi to be 3 the law should not be able to influence the outcome of a smart contract if smart contracts work at all because that is how it is intended to work, smart contracts are supposed to be the entirety of the agreement, no outside interpretation should make a difference nor could it make a difference. This is where the Ethereum crowd has - in my eyes at least - already failed with how the handled the previous hack, the concept is as currently implemented fundamentally flawed. https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-the-soft-fork-and-the-hard-fork/ https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-... I can see the dilemma (get the money back or kill Ethereum) must have been a tough one but if they really wanted Ethereum to be taken serious they should have chalked that up to their education fund and call it a day.
    - marcoperaza 9y ago
      I do get it. I just don't think that's realistic. What smart contracts should be according to you is mostly irrelevant to how the law will treat them.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        You still don't get it. The law will not have anything to say about smart contracts because the law will not be able to enforce a contract one way or another depending on some judge but it will simply execute and that's the end of that. This so that some guy in China or India and some guy in the United States can agree on terms without having to haggle over whose legal jurisdiction will kick in if and when there is a dispute about the contract. Until we get a world government and until judges are able to order millions of nodes all over the world to do a hard fork there is no way around a smart contract environment that actually works. But we don't have that at the present, Ethereum as far as I'm concerned was DOA because of DAO.
        marcoperaza 9y ago
        However a smart contract between you and me may execute, a court can still order me to give you money, or order me to enter into a different smart contract. And if I don't comply, they will eventually hold me in contempt and at some point seize my property by force and throw me in jail if I resist. The authority of the state ultimately rests on its ability to resort to violence to enforce its will. No smart contract can change that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- meddlepal 9y ago
  This is adorably naive hacker thinking.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    No, the adorable naive hacker thinking is that one could actually write a contract that has no room for interpretation (see DAO). There is a very good reason we have judges and lawyers, which is that being 100% un-ambiguous is impossible, and smart contracts are no exception to this rule, only there every ambiguity will allow either one of the contracting parties or an outsider to make off with the loot. So for now nobody appears to be willing to stand by 'the code is the law'.
  - krisoft 9y ago
    I agree with you. If the point of a smart contract is that "code is law" and "judges doesn't make decision, the protocol does", that surely sounds like naive hacker thinking. If that's not the point of smart contracts then what is a smart contract? How is it different from that thing which we call just "contract"? So either the smart contracts are just contracts, or they are product of naive hacker thinking.
    - kcanini 9y ago
      I think the point is that they bundle together the agreement with the actual execution of the agreement. The execution is performed by public code that everyone can audit and verify for themselves.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The whole point of smart contracts is that lawyers' (and judges) opinions are not relevant. To the extent that that's true, the idea is simply wrong. I would argue that it is quite possible to see smart contracts as having potential practical value without taking that ideological position on their role, however.
- Fej 9y ago
  A judge's opinion is always relevant. You cannot escape the real world just because a smart contract says so. No one has bothered to sue over a smart contract yet. I concur with pkilgore in "I frankly can't wait until this shit gets litigated."
pkilgore 9y ago
Lawyer/programmer here (US law). It's an interesting problem. Let's assume offer, acceptance, capacity, legality for a transaction. So question to me is, when do we have a contract (do we have a contract?) and what IS the contract. For this usually (not always) look to the so called "meeting of the minds." If we define the meeting of the minds as the EXACT actual code, it's hard to argue that using a bug in the code is a breach. Simplistic example: I write a lease that says if I sell the house me or the buyer can terminate the lease on 30 days notice. You do not do any diligence on that lease. When I sell the house and the buyer terminates, you're out of luck. If we define the meeting of minds as "you are promising to do thing X for me, and you propose to do it with a smart contract", then if there is a bug in the contract, that might be a breach on behalf of the person offering to do thing X. Simplistic example: Your website says if I send ETH to address "0xExample" you offer a service that will send it back in 6 months. If 0xExample is hacked and money wasn't returned, well, you could argue that there was a breach of a contract to return your money. No idea how a Court might come out, and being the law, it depends on shades of grey, other factors, skill of lawyers, etc. I frankly can't wait until this shit gets litigated.

adrianN 9y ago

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".

spuz 9y ago
> Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? I think this is a common misunderstanding of Ethereum and blockchains in general. The current Ethereum blockchain is authoritative only as long as a majority of it users consider it to be authoritative. The same applies to Bitcoin. No single person decided to fork Ethereum after the DAO was hacked, it was decided by a quorum of Ethereum users. The original fork still exists as Ethereum Classic and if you believe that the "contract is king" then you are still free to continue using that fork along with everyone else who shares that view. You say "To me at least Ethereum was dead the moment they chose to fork" and that is probably the view of many Ethereum users. I'm certain many Ethereum holders chose to divest their positions and move their assets elsewhere. That is a big loss for the currency but obviously enough people still believe it to be worth something and so it survives. Because of their distributed nature, cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users. They don't need to be perfect to survive, only to be slightly fitter than their competitors.
- edzc92 9y ago
  You forgot when the people that run ethereum made the default vote choice as the hard fork. This is important.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    I guess to be fair they should've had those clients go 50/50?
    - edzc92 9y ago