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This is plain silly. Even centralized payment settlement systems do depend on thousands of lines of closed source code that contain bugs. Banking backends have

This is plain silly. Even centralized payment settlement systems do depend on thousands of lines of closed source code that contain bugs. Banking backends have bugs. Cars have bugs. Even buildings may have fuck ups that need to be dealt with after construction. If you think it through you simply can not rely 100% on anything humans build. But still societies as a whole thrive and human progress is real. DeFi is no exception. It’s designed to make banking cheaper. But it’s new technology and will take some time to mature. Personally, I believe banks won’t exist in the traditional sense anymore 20 years in the future if you like it or don’t. I mean, I love steam locomotives but I don’t expect them to be a common means of transportation ever again. ;-)

carlgreene 5y ago
Centralized payment settlement systems are mutable. That’s the difference and the whole argument. A bug in a DeFi contract? Sorry nothing we can do! Bug in Wells Fargo account settlement code? Ah we’re sorry, let’s roll that back for ya!
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  Ethereum contracts are not 100% immutable. They need to maintain state like a token‘s balance. That’s why Ethereum‘s VM supports contract variables. You can also use variables to store addresses to other contracts and call external methods indirectly using these pointer like structures. If I understood the bug correctly, the hacker was able to modify such a pointer and redirect all transactions to a wallet contract she controlled. So this is how you can upgrade contracts: There is the „implementation contract“ pattern. Basically, you define a user-facing proxy contract defining the interface but all it does is delegate user calls to the actual implementation contract by maintaining a variable pointing to it. Using a privileged call you can update that address even after deploying the proxy.

carlgreene 5y ago

Centralized payment settlement systems are mutable. That’s the difference and the whole argument. A bug in a DeFi contract? Sorry nothing we can do! Bug in Wells Fargo account settlement code? Ah we’re sorry, let’s roll that back for ya!

G3rn0ti 5y ago
Ethereum contracts are not 100% immutable. They need to maintain state like a token‘s balance. That’s why Ethereum‘s VM supports contract variables. You can also use variables to store addresses to other contracts and call external methods indirectly using these pointer like structures. If I understood the bug correctly, the hacker was able to modify such a pointer and redirect all transactions to a wallet contract she controlled. So this is how you can upgrade contracts: There is the „implementation contract“ pattern. Basically, you define a user-facing proxy contract defining the interface but all it does is delegate user calls to the actual implementation contract by maintaining a variable pointing to it. Using a privileged call you can update that address even after deploying the proxy.