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For all its flaws (and there are countless) the one thing about the show cryptocurrency space that stands out to me as a programmer is that programming errors c

by bhaak 4y ago

For all its flaws (and there are countless) the one thing about the show cryptocurrency space that stands out to me as a programmer is that programming errors can be suddenly very costly (granted, in this case it was more of a DevOps blunder). Being able to very easily put a price tag on sloppy programming is intriguing to me.

pavlov 4y ago
When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.
- askmike 4y ago
  > Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?
  - solumunus 4y ago
    This is missing the point to a degree that makes me think you're being intentionally obtuse, but maybe you're just ignorant so I'll bite. Banking computer errors can easily be rectified by humans, banks are regulated, your funds are at least partially guaranteed by the government (depending on where you live). The degree to which you're trusting computer programs with your finances is orders of magnitude less than with cryptocurrency where it's possible to lose any amount $ of asset value in an instant with absolutely no means of recourse. Your bank analogy is silly and nowhere near analogous.
    - bhaak 4y ago
      CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues-revlon-over-lender-status-after-900-million-mistake https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues... You can say that's an edge case today but I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future.
      - automatic6131 4y ago
        >CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company. Given it was an accidental early repayment of a loan, this isn't quite the slam dunk you think it is. If they had paid a company they didn't owe money to, they could get the money back through the courts. Crypto is meant to evade those courts.
        bhaak 4y ago
        The reason was not because of a repayment but because you wouldn't expect a respectable bank like CitiBank to do such a mistake. > “To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion, would have been borderline irrational,” he wrote. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-loan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-... That's as close to "code is law" and other nonsense of the crypto libertarians as you can get.
        okasaki 4y ago
        Not really. Right in the paragraph above that one: > Recipients of cash wired in error are typically required to return it.
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        > I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future. I don’t agree. I trust that loopholes like that will be slowly rectified with legislation if not present today. In fact, it’s likely that crypto will (problematically?) be heading the same way. There was a recent case of a crypto buff who found a bug in some project and made off with a few $Million and I think the courts said he could be arrested and expected to return it, just as if he made off with cash. Importantly, they basically said “blockchain isn’t the source of truth to the courts” which was the guys defense. IMO a bright future for people, but not for a crypto venture.
        4y ago
- bhaak 4y ago
  > When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? You can strike out "financial" and that's already the realty we're living in. We got lucky that Y2K was not an issue today. We wouldn't probably be able to fix enough code and nowadays much more is under direct computer control than back then. Nobody "wants" that but it happens gradually. With crypto, it didn't happen organically but crypto blasted onto the scene from the side of complete digitization. Looking at that, it's easy to say that nobody would want that but while you're looking this way, traditional finance is creeping towards complete digitization as well, just behind your back. > This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances. I'm not saying that crypto is an improvement as it is now. Nor that it will ever be (it might but I have my doubts). But what you're missing is that crypto is complete wild west, like traditional finance was maybe in 1900. The whole history of finance is a sequence of fuckups and laws and regulations that were imposed to prevent similar fuckups to occur and we still got the 2007 financial crisis, after 150 years of improvements. I can try to stay as far away from crypto as possible but as I said in my previous post, there are aspects that are interesting even if most of it is completely nuts.
pjc50 4y ago
You (and everyone really) should probably read some more comp.risks http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ Certain fields have always had a high cost of programming error, including a cost in human life. It's just that cryptocurrency combines this with a first-to-market rush that's somehow still going on, encouraging a rush to error.
- bhaak 4y ago
  I don't disagree with that there have always been niche areas where there is a high cost to programming errors (like space or medical). But with crypto, the effect is much more direct. The programmer is handling money much more directly and if something goes wrong, they are much more directly affected and not being insulated from the effects.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Yes. In space, aviation, and medical, it is usually someone else that is affected, not the programmer.
    - progrus 4y ago
      And in space, aviation, and medical, it takes a long time to go to market.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    At the first proper job I had we would measure our service outages in dollars per second. It was always in the thousands, and we were just a rather ordinary financial OLTP service.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  First to market is only part of the problem. Another self inflicted problem is that execution of those "smart" "contracts" cost tokens (so essentially money). This incentivizes developers to write the shortest possible code, without any "fluff" like tests or additional checks or more verbose style. And the immutability problem also increases severity of the problem - you either deploy immutable "contract" signifying that it should be respected because it can't be changed later for malicious purpose, or you deploy modifiable "contract" and that is not good for the reputation of the company.
mclightning 4y ago
Please send $100 each time you have a bug in your code, to following ETH wallet; 0x17C489878E89136cd399D162ECCed25924749822 You're welcome.
JackFr 4y ago
The level of self-perceived vs. actual competence in the crypto space never ceases to amaze. A mea culpa of “The one thing we purport to be good at we actually have literally no understanding of and when shit doesn’t work we just run it a few times with different arguments.” My god.
scotty79 4y ago
When I first found about cryptocurrencies it struck me as it was the first time in the history where data on my computer were directly worth something. Which suddenly made security worth something.

by bhaak 4y ago

pavlov 4y ago

When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances.

askmike 4y ago
> Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? Where do you think your income and bank balances are tracked and stored? On pieces of paper?
- solumunus 4y ago
  This is missing the point to a degree that makes me think you're being intentionally obtuse, but maybe you're just ignorant so I'll bite. Banking computer errors can easily be rectified by humans, banks are regulated, your funds are at least partially guaranteed by the government (depending on where you live). The degree to which you're trusting computer programs with your finances is orders of magnitude less than with cryptocurrency where it's possible to lose any amount $ of asset value in an instant with absolutely no means of recourse. Your bank analogy is silly and nowhere near analogous.
  - bhaak 4y ago
    CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues-revlon-over-lender-status-after-900-million-mistake https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-15/citi-sues... You can say that's an edge case today but I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future.
    - automatic6131 4y ago
      >CitiBank can't get the money back they accidentally transferred to another company. Given it was an accidental early repayment of a loan, this isn't quite the slam dunk you think it is. If they had paid a company they didn't owe money to, they could get the money back through the courts. Crypto is meant to evade those courts.
      - bhaak 4y ago
        The reason was not because of a repayment but because you wouldn't expect a respectable bank like CitiBank to do such a mistake. > “To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion, would have been borderline irrational,” he wrote. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-loan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-... That's as close to "code is law" and other nonsense of the crypto libertarians as you can get.
        okasaki 4y ago
        Not really. Right in the paragraph above that one: > Recipients of cash wired in error are typically required to return it.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > I and OP are saying, the future will look more like crypto looks today. Not a bright future. I don’t agree. I trust that loopholes like that will be slowly rectified with legislation if not present today. In fact, it’s likely that crypto will (problematically?) be heading the same way. There was a recent case of a crypto buff who found a bug in some project and made off with a few $Million and I think the courts said he could be arrested and expected to return it, just as if he made off with cash. Importantly, they basically said “blockchain isn’t the source of truth to the courts” which was the guys defense. IMO a bright future for people, but not for a crypto venture.
      - 4y ago
bhaak 4y ago
> When the price tag is “everything you own”, how is this an improvement? Who wants to give over their financial life to a computer program? You can strike out "financial" and that's already the realty we're living in. We got lucky that Y2K was not an issue today. We wouldn't probably be able to fix enough code and nowadays much more is under direct computer control than back then. Nobody "wants" that but it happens gradually. With crypto, it didn't happen organically but crypto blasted onto the scene from the side of complete digitization. Looking at that, it's easy to say that nobody would want that but while you're looking this way, traditional finance is creeping towards complete digitization as well, just behind your back. > This aspect of crypto is a 1960s paranoid computer fear come to life, and somehow it’s often presented as an improvement over the existing system of human checks and balances. I'm not saying that crypto is an improvement as it is now. Nor that it will ever be (it might but I have my doubts). But what you're missing is that crypto is complete wild west, like traditional finance was maybe in 1900. The whole history of finance is a sequence of fuckups and laws and regulations that were imposed to prevent similar fuckups to occur and we still got the 2007 financial crisis, after 150 years of improvements. I can try to stay as far away from crypto as possible but as I said in my previous post, there are aspects that are interesting even if most of it is completely nuts.

pjc50 4y ago

You (and everyone really) should probably read some more comp.risks http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ Certain fields have always had a high cost of programming error, including a cost in human life. It's just that cryptocurrency combines this with a first-to-market rush that's somehow still going on, encouraging a rush to error.

bhaak 4y ago
I don't disagree with that there have always been niche areas where there is a high cost to programming errors (like space or medical). But with crypto, the effect is much more direct. The programmer is handling money much more directly and if something goes wrong, they are much more directly affected and not being insulated from the effects.
- FabHK 4y ago
  Yes. In space, aviation, and medical, it is usually someone else that is affected, not the programmer.
  - progrus 4y ago
    And in space, aviation, and medical, it takes a long time to go to market.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  At the first proper job I had we would measure our service outages in dollars per second. It was always in the thousands, and we were just a rather ordinary financial OLTP service.
Yizahi 4y ago
First to market is only part of the problem. Another self inflicted problem is that execution of those "smart" "contracts" cost tokens (so essentially money). This incentivizes developers to write the shortest possible code, without any "fluff" like tests or additional checks or more verbose style. And the immutability problem also increases severity of the problem - you either deploy immutable "contract" signifying that it should be respected because it can't be changed later for malicious purpose, or you deploy modifiable "contract" and that is not good for the reputation of the company.

mclightning 4y ago

Please send $100 each time you have a bug in your code, to following ETH wallet; 0x17C489878E89136cd399D162ECCed25924749822 You're welcome.

JackFr 4y ago

The level of self-perceived vs. actual competence in the crypto space never ceases to amaze. A mea culpa of “The one thing we purport to be good at we actually have literally no understanding of and when shit doesn’t work we just run it a few times with different arguments.” My god.

scotty79 4y ago

When I first found about cryptocurrencies it struck me as it was the first time in the history where data on my computer were directly worth something. Which suddenly made security worth something.