Has anyone addressed the security of having a Turing complete foundation? Turing complete means that Ethereum contracts will likely be absolutely loaded with common and proprietary viruses, keyloggers, malware, adware, and a slew of other bad things. I am willing to bet my bank account that in a few short months people will be crying about how they got all their wallets/currency stolen, or their computers are now running slow, or how they blue screen every few minutes after a reboot.
If you want an example of how Turing complete works, load up a peer to peer sharing program and download a bunch of .MOV files and run them. I GUARANTEE that you will get a virus. That's because Quicktime movie files are Turing complete. This is why mkv, mpeg, mpg and avi, while not impervious, are much much safer to download. If you want to invest, mine, and run contracts at the risk of losing everything then go ahead. We will never know for sure how secure Ether is going to be until post release, so asking for money without proof of security is another red flag.
I want to know the answer to this as well. Yes LeoC is a huge scammer and all around asshole, I get that. What I don't get is why is it ok to completely ignore this valid question solely on that basis? Will just like to let you know, that as a new user, the response to his post didn't have a positive effect on me. I have 5 BTC that I want to invest into something, but everywhere I go there is always something that just doesn't feel right, Ethereum included. So it's no longer the scammer asking the question, it's me. Also I have absolutely no problem with the IPO+premine. The amount of work that the developers have put into this deserves to be rewarded. Also which other developers publicly speak about their cryptocurrency at conventions? Exactly. Look how small Vitalik is, if it ended up being a scam, which is very unlikely, one punch by a disgruntled convention goer would put him in a coma. Besides the nagging issue about security I'm almost convinced to buy into Ethereum.
It's a valid question, you're right. There are some risks of course, our best defenses are: 1) the bounties that will be distributed for security audits, pentest, etc and 2) the relative simplicity of the programming language (less than 50 opcodes, and the c++ VM is circa 200 lines). As Vitalik would say, "The Ethereum language is designed with the need for perfect determinism and consensus in mind." Note that sandboxing is also entirely within the real of possibility and something that they are strongly considering.
So are you saying there will be no protection against the above on release? I'd like a developer to comment. Theoretically I can buy into the IPO and just not run the contracts to avoid security issues right?
Dev here (not android dev, elsewhere for +25 years though):
i wanna invest, thinking of 1 btc, but,,
yeah, a full language concerns me bigtime.
next thing you know
- some script kiddie invents a virus on Ethereum
- someone finds a 0-day, buffer overrun, whatever, that's reported but not patched fast enough, releases that after a month or so... (then kiddies/nigerians/whomever take off from that)
- anyone thought of a f'n botnet from within?
The best thing to do is release some subset of whatever programming language (especially the calculations), and expand that over time.
- check buffers for overruns
- resistant about io functions
-Don't implement a full framework (prg language)..
I wonder what other devs can think of next....