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> 1. Edge case leaks 87% of tokens to a dedicated hacker. Sorry? The level of code safety in smart contracts is abysmally bad today, Ethereum didn't further th

by fab13n 9y ago

> 1. Edge case leaks 87% of tokens to a dedicated hacker. Sorry? The level of code safety in smart contracts is abysmally bad today, Ethereum didn't further the state of the art with EVM/Solidity (quite the opposite), and this needs to be fixed before any serious business can rely on a DApp. Smart contracts are like aerospace engineering, not like iStore apps development; delivering slightly buggy code, written as fast as possible, by easily interchangeable developers, doesn't cut it. It's worse than for aerospace actually: when you design a plane, your opponents are the laws of physics, which merely don't care about you. When designing a smart contract, hackers are specifically after you, and statistically, some of them are smarter than you and your code. > 2. I locate and bribe/extort your main influencer/s How is it different from the current practices of bribing executives and misleading shareholders (naively supposing that shareholders need to be mislead in order to pass bad, narrow-sighted judgements)? > There are so many other fun problems with code-as-immutable-law for human institutions. Indeed! > It's concerning that none of these are even remotely addressed in the Colony literature I take Colony as an experiment. As hinted above, I think you'd be a fool to bet your livelihood on some Solidity code. I don't think we're able to foresee which of those problems matter, nor the compromises which best mitigate them. Like in code optimisation, you need to measure before acting; Colony will meet those issues, will try to address them, and may or may not survive the process. Whether the lessons learned benefit Colony 2.0 or another project raised from its ashes, it's hard to say, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn't matter much.

DRAOBE 9y ago
With actual people you can informally convince either colleagues or the state that an exec is acting in bad faith of outside the policy framework of the company. And this can trigger formally defined actions. A sort of protection against deceit is built in by the fact that regulations are merely social conventions and not physically binding. How do you informally convince code to stop trusting a certain influencer? You'd have to put in code paths managing this first, because code is a physically binding regulation.
popcorncowboy 9y ago
Precisely. > ...bribing executives and misleading shareholders You raise an interesting point - in a Colony there is presumably no concept of enforceable fiduciary duty to shareholders (because there are none - we're not trading securities, we're trading plastic house chips on a blockchain). There are no legislated considerations for other members/colonists/dappsters/etc. I can vote/act with impunity, regardless of value creation/destruction potential. Welcome to the legal grey zone. > I take Colony as an experiment. As do I, and one I hope succeeds. But I'm not sure THEY do, which means early adopters are riding a bet that Colony gets it right the first time.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Just cause you hand out pieces of plastic (or tokens on a blockchain) instead of paper doesn't make it not a security. (As the ICOs are finding out!) Security is as security does in a lot of these cases, so if it functions as a security, you're likely to run into encounters with the SEC.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Once large amounts of real money are be involved there would be an amazing clash of conventional corruption attacking the heads, a computer security battle attacking the basic building blocks of the influence mechanisms, the demagogic tactics known from online discussion boards trying to sway opinions of the masses of low influence individuals, the gray "pay for likes" business that exists in the shadow of big social media sites, and all the gaming-the-system tricks with multi-accounts and the like that are rampant in open, long-running multiplayer games. Oh, the drama! It might be compelling to join as a perfect substitute for an HBO subscription, who needs game of thrones. You might see a group forged in a decade of Eve online alliance warfare fighting mob hackers fighting two competing factions of hedge fund managers fighting a 4chan prank. On the other hand, sufficiently boring organizations (e.g. stewardship of some greying enterprise software open source) with peeexisting informal trust networks should be perfectly safe. But would they need "colony"?

by fab13n 9y ago

DRAOBE 9y ago

With actual people you can informally convince either colleagues or the state that an exec is acting in bad faith of outside the policy framework of the company. And this can trigger formally defined actions. A sort of protection against deceit is built in by the fact that regulations are merely social conventions and not physically binding. How do you informally convince code to stop trusting a certain influencer? You'd have to put in code paths managing this first, because code is a physically binding regulation.

popcorncowboy 9y ago

Precisely. > ...bribing executives and misleading shareholders You raise an interesting point - in a Colony there is presumably no concept of enforceable fiduciary duty to shareholders (because there are none - we're not trading securities, we're trading plastic house chips on a blockchain). There are no legislated considerations for other members/colonists/dappsters/etc. I can vote/act with impunity, regardless of value creation/destruction potential. Welcome to the legal grey zone. > I take Colony as an experiment. As do I, and one I hope succeeds. But I'm not sure THEY do, which means early adopters are riding a bet that Colony gets it right the first time.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Just cause you hand out pieces of plastic (or tokens on a blockchain) instead of paper doesn't make it not a security. (As the ICOs are finding out!) Security is as security does in a lot of these cases, so if it functions as a security, you're likely to run into encounters with the SEC.
usrusr 9y ago
Once large amounts of real money are be involved there would be an amazing clash of conventional corruption attacking the heads, a computer security battle attacking the basic building blocks of the influence mechanisms, the demagogic tactics known from online discussion boards trying to sway opinions of the masses of low influence individuals, the gray "pay for likes" business that exists in the shadow of big social media sites, and all the gaming-the-system tricks with multi-accounts and the like that are rampant in open, long-running multiplayer games. Oh, the drama! It might be compelling to join as a perfect substitute for an HBO subscription, who needs game of thrones. You might see a group forged in a decade of Eve online alliance warfare fighting mob hackers fighting two competing factions of hedge fund managers fighting a 4chan prank. On the other hand, sufficiently boring organizations (e.g. stewardship of some greying enterprise software open source) with peeexisting informal trust networks should be perfectly safe. But would they need "colony"?