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Remember the DAO hack in 2017? I think whoever was responsible for it was a hero because they showed that the claims peddled by Buterin/Wood are at best utopian

Remember the DAO hack in 2017? I think whoever was responsible for it was a hero because they showed that the claims peddled by Buterin/Wood are at best utopian, and at worst fraudulent. The idea that code is law and there is no centralized actor who can control the network fails because bugs exist. Buterin showed the world the emperor has no clothes, and the underpants are full of skid-marks, when deciding to fork. A hard fork was the only rational thing he could have done and how any other centralized actor would have responded. But by doing so all the previous talk about decentralization and "code-is-law" mumbo-jumbo was exposed for what it is. So whoever did this should be celebrated from saving the world from a much bigger shock that would have eventually happened once it would have been actually adopted by real market players. If you hack a system like IOTA, OneCoin, Ethereum and show the world that it's just a bunch of scammers who talk about things they wish the system to be, as opposed to what it realistically can be (or presently is), they are doing the world a favor by educating the rest of us. We do not talk enough about what a grift the whole Ethereum platform is. I guess it is because people are just tired of it because we've already had at least 6+ years of pointing it out. Not just Ethereum's Wood/Buterin but many others (the guys behind the IOTA foundation making claims about contracts with Microsoft, Volkswagen and Cisco that never existed). They all suffer from the same issue which is very prevalent in Tech. They have been trying to "fake it before they make it" for too long and can no longer walk it back. When people do this the whole thing becomes bigger than them, it goes from an idea to a prank to a worldwide scam[1] from which you have no choice other than doubling down on your lies. [1] see the story of Dr Ruja Ignatova - "The Missing Crypto Queen" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads <- the major difference between Ruja and Buterin is that Ruja was a McKinsey consultant who didn't understand technology. This makes Buterin a far more successful (and more dangerous) player. Buterin is what Ruja could have been if she wouldn't have had to trust others in defining the technological aspect/parts of OneCoin.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
(copy-pasting) The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances. 1. Ethereum had just launched. There was a sense of everything being in beta. 2. The Ethereum stakeholder set was very small, so obtaining consensus for such a controversial hard fork was much easier to accomplish than it would be today. 3. The economy on Ethereum was very small, so a) a hard fork was far less disruptive than it would be today. b) an undermining of Ethereum's commitment to neutrality/immutability jeapardized far fewer decentralized application projects than it would today. 4. Smart contracts were completely new, so there was a sense that people could be forgiven for their mistakes. 5. The Ethereum Foundation had promoted the idea of a DAO on their website, and several Ethereum founders had promoted the specific DAO that ended up being hacked. These facts made the DAO appear to be more than a completely third party app. Ethereum is very different today than it was in 2016, and a DAO-scale mishap would never lead to a hard fork again.
- notahacker 5y ago
  That's arguably even worse though, it's the Ethereum Foundation acknowledging the principle that DAO code is law and people deserve the contracts they sign up for is fundamentally nonsense, but taking the position that malicious actions mattered only when early adopters were the people hurt and people behind the Ethereum foundation were personally embarrassed by them.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    I may not have conveyed my point effectively. What I was implying is that the EF may have inadvertedly gave the impression that the DAO had its blessing. If something is presented as part of the official protocol, then people will assume that a hack will lead to a rollback. In general, I think given how ambitious the DAO was, the rollback can be excused. It's hard to stress how new a universal smart contract execution environment were at the time. Until outside of a few extremely niche communities, the idea had never been discussed, let alone experimented on, before Ethereum was introduced. And the DAO was a very complex smart contract, that every one jumped in with intuition about the vulnerabilities of smart contracts.
- theduder99 5y ago
  Reminds me of another story this week about a bug in a smart contract leading to $30 million being stolen. The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    >>The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point. It's a programmatic contract. But 'smart contract' is easier to write/say, and otherwise catchier, so I suspect it'll stick.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

(copy-pasting) The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances. 1. Ethereum had just launched. There was a sense of everything being in beta. 2. The Ethereum stakeholder set was very small, so obtaining consensus for such a controversial hard fork was much easier to accomplish than it would be today. 3. The economy on Ethereum was very small, so a) a hard fork was far less disruptive than it would be today. b) an undermining of Ethereum's commitment to neutrality/immutability jeapardized far fewer decentralized application projects than it would today. 4. Smart contracts were completely new, so there was a sense that people could be forgiven for their mistakes. 5. The Ethereum Foundation had promoted the idea of a DAO on their website, and several Ethereum founders had promoted the specific DAO that ended up being hacked. These facts made the DAO appear to be more than a completely third party app. Ethereum is very different today than it was in 2016, and a DAO-scale mishap would never lead to a hard fork again.

notahacker 5y ago
That's arguably even worse though, it's the Ethereum Foundation acknowledging the principle that DAO code is law and people deserve the contracts they sign up for is fundamentally nonsense, but taking the position that malicious actions mattered only when early adopters were the people hurt and people behind the Ethereum foundation were personally embarrassed by them.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  I may not have conveyed my point effectively. What I was implying is that the EF may have inadvertedly gave the impression that the DAO had its blessing. If something is presented as part of the official protocol, then people will assume that a hack will lead to a rollback. In general, I think given how ambitious the DAO was, the rollback can be excused. It's hard to stress how new a universal smart contract execution environment were at the time. Until outside of a few extremely niche communities, the idea had never been discussed, let alone experimented on, before Ethereum was introduced. And the DAO was a very complex smart contract, that every one jumped in with intuition about the vulnerabilities of smart contracts.
theduder99 5y ago
Reminds me of another story this week about a bug in a smart contract leading to $30 million being stolen. The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point. It's a programmatic contract. But 'smart contract' is easier to write/say, and otherwise catchier, so I suspect it'll stick.