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That means there is an entrepreneurial prospect for you to enter the space with a team that has a more serious background, right? Eventually people will general

by mbrock 9y ago

That means there is an entrepreneurial prospect for you to enter the space with a team that has a more serious background, right? Eventually people will generally understand that contracts require serious correct engineering, and you'll be able to capitalize on expertise. Smart contracts have only been generally available for like a couple of years. Most people are clueless about how to do them properly. That means it's an interesting thing to work on! And hopefully we'll steer the ship towards safety, correctness, and simplicity.

icelancer 9y ago
>Eventually people will generally understand that contracts require serious correct engineering, and you'll be able to capitalize on expertise. No one gets paid for exploiting a minor hole in a bridge, causing it to collapse. They will by finding holes in smart contracts, as evidenced. Bug bounty programs do not exist to provide alternative means of financial remuneration for black hat hackers. They exist to provide white/grey hat hackers an opportunity to get paid for doing the right thing. And yet black hat hackers still sell zero-days to rogue governments and operatives. Why do you think this bug bounty model of securing smart contracts will be any different? Capitalizing on expertise against smart contracts has its own reward with a shorter feedback cycle than selling zero-days: You directly profit from finding security breaches and stealing money.
- mbrock 9y ago
  I think we'll be able to just prove the correctness of our contracts and then use them safely. Of course you can't do that with Microsoft Windows because it's too complicated, but you can do it with small contract bytecodes.
lmm 9y ago
The kind of person who's risk-averse enough that they'd pay extra for a better contract engineer is probably not the kind of person who's using smart contracts at all. And buying contracts is lemon market, which is only really solvable via regulation - but its biggest fans are regulation-averse people.

by mbrock 9y ago

icelancer 9y ago

>Eventually people will generally understand that contracts require serious correct engineering, and you'll be able to capitalize on expertise. No one gets paid for exploiting a minor hole in a bridge, causing it to collapse. They will by finding holes in smart contracts, as evidenced. Bug bounty programs do not exist to provide alternative means of financial remuneration for black hat hackers. They exist to provide white/grey hat hackers an opportunity to get paid for doing the right thing. And yet black hat hackers still sell zero-days to rogue governments and operatives. Why do you think this bug bounty model of securing smart contracts will be any different? Capitalizing on expertise against smart contracts has its own reward with a shorter feedback cycle than selling zero-days: You directly profit from finding security breaches and stealing money.

mbrock 9y ago
I think we'll be able to just prove the correctness of our contracts and then use them safely. Of course you can't do that with Microsoft Windows because it's too complicated, but you can do it with small contract bytecodes.

lmm 9y ago

The kind of person who's risk-averse enough that they'd pay extra for a better contract engineer is probably not the kind of person who's using smart contracts at all. And buying contracts is lemon market, which is only really solvable via regulation - but its biggest fans are regulation-averse people.