Topic: The Market is not wrong, Vitalik Buterin is. (Read 4371 times)

What do you mean by "fail". ETC is moving and trading. It may be declining but it still has supporters. They will both run for a long time. What's more important is who will support which chain for what purpose and what value will that bring?

It seems that one of the chains will fail over time. The question is, which one?

He's a thief regarding moral standards.  In the same way that the state is a thief when it collects taxes.
Whether he's a thief according to legal standards (which ones ?) is to be seen, and can only be pronounced by a court.
And in the system at hand, he's no thief at all, because he acted legally (the code).

So I agree with you to call him a moral thief, like the state is a thief.


Because in going to court, Vitalik was going to get much more from the whip than the thief whose identity is unknown.

Analogy: If you are the owner of a money laundering service, is going to court because they stole from you an option ?

Let us agree with calling the attacker a "thief". He got coins that weren't his without permission, so yes he is a thief.

Why do you think Vitalik just left the thief alone? He knows he will lose against him. He is losing even now after the hard fork.

Exactly. There was no such as DAO Thieft. He never stole anything, by strict definition of the smart contract concept. He used EXISTING code to execute the contract. This is something that some people keep failing to understand. A smart contract is presented AS IS, and you cannot complain that the code did something that you didn't expect. It is part of the smart contract.

Frankly I think the pro-fork people need to watch Inside Job and the Big Short to understand anti-fork people. Additionally, it might help them to look at other historical economic disasters such as the one created (on purpose) in the late 70s and early 80s to slap down working people.

While I don't disagree with their viewpoint that the DAO hack was theft (no matter the situation taking something that belongs to someone else is) they seem to completely not understand evil and corruption in a political or economic system. Their philosophy has unfortunately demonstrated a complete disrespect for the cryptocurrency scene, the technology and what it wants to achieve. ETH is no different than fiat as a result.  

You clearly do not understand what is a smart contract, where the code is the law.  A bank doesn't say that the code running on their terminals is the law, on the contrary.  The human law for banking is such that there is an intend, different from the code.  That intend is written in human language in legal texts.  And doing what you suggest with a bank terminal is AGAINST these human legal texts.

But in a SMART contract, the ONLY law is the code and there is no other intend or human legal text.  So ALL aspects of the code are part of the legal system you set up, including all non anticipated behaviour, which you would, in other circumstances, call "bugs".  The bugs are part of the contract.  If you can't accept that, you can't accept the concept of smart contract, and then ethereum has no meaning because it is a tool to make smart contracts.

The worst is that the ONLY "human" contract terms *clearly stated that the code was the law*. 

It is as if the bank had said that the software of their terminals was the law in a human legal document (which is exactly what the DAO website did).  In that case, if you succeed in transferring money, then you played by the bank's declared rules, and if they take it away from you THEY are the thieves.  But, as you say, that is NOT the law that goes for banking.  So your example doesn't work.

Now, a securities firm that didn't register and whose' monetary actions with the money of share holders wasn't running according to all legal dispositions is probably a way way bigger problem than a doubtful transaction between non-existing and if existing, probably illegal, entities.

You are correct that in some jurisdictions that "property of the DAO" is not defined. In most Western nations though cryptocurrency has been defined and is viewed either as a type of property or form of currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country

The link supplied is for bitcoin but many countries definition includes all cryptocurrencies. The property of the DAO was ETH and as such that property has been defined.

The code would not be defined as law in any country and as such using it's flawed code to remove property from it's owners would not be justification of theft. It would be considered theft of existing and defined property.

Edit: I think denying that the removal of ETH from the DAO is theft is the weakest (and false) argument of anti-fork and ETC supporters. As I said earlier the problem could have been dealt with in a different way without requiring a hardfork and maintained the integrity of the blockchain.

According to probably most human law systems, it was maybe theft.  I say "maybe", because if the code isn't the law, then "property of the DAO" is also not defined.

And you see, this is exactly where crypto gets it completely wrong. You seem to forget that we live in a real world where humans exist.

If it can be coded, it can be cracked by a human. What you have just quoted is a software thieves charter. Basically, if you can steal it, then steal it (and well done for being smart enough to steal it).

Sorry, but that's not going to wash with the public you're trying to encourage to use these systems. Or are these systems simply for us to look at and smirk amongst ourselves about how great they are??

TBH, I was very very suspicious when I heard the Slock.it team were going to build a DAO rather than just go for straight funding. It made believe that they knew the smart locks they were talking about just weren't going to work so they found an alternative route to distance themselves from future failure. I guess it didn't work!

If you re-read my statements you'll discover I didn't offer an opinion on smart contracts at all. The concept that the code is the law is a marketing statement of the ETH community and has nothing to do with the rule of law as applied by society.

The suggestion that poorly written code (or marketing statements) somehow trumps the rule of law in society and therefore taking the property of others is not theft would not stand in any courtroom. The theft does expose the weakness of ETH smart contracts and we are in complete agreement on that point.

What we seem to disagree on is that the funds were stolen. What I think is self evident you want to justify by suggesting that the code is law. In general the rule of law everywhere calls the taking of another persons property theft.

In the funnily strange world of smart contracts, he's not a thief.  In fact, in that world, there cannot exist thieves.  If you don't understand that, you've not understood smart contracts.  With a smart contract, there is no possible illegal act any more: if you can do it, it is legal, and if it is illegal, you can't do it.

Then you are one of the (visibly many) ethereum supporters who don't know what is the mind boggling idea of a smart contract, which is somehow strange, as the whole value proposition of ethereum is to make smart contracts.

In a smart contract, "code is law, all the law, and nothing else is the law".  I wrote already a few posts on that, but essentially, in a smart contract, you replace totally all human law (state law, international law, morality and all that) by a piece of code, which is the ultimate verdict on "right" and "wrong".  If the code allows it, it is right/legal/fair and if the code doesn't allow that, it is wrong/illegal/unfair.

The Ethereum foundation has scammed people by letting them think that a smart contract is akin to a paper contract, but "in software".  That is not true.  A smart contract is a piece of code that replaces all of human law and morality by a mechanical execution.  A paper contract exists inside a whole bed of human legal constructs, from state and international law, down to human morality and sense of fairness.   A paper contract is much more than what's on paper: it includes implicitly a whole environment of legal and moral rules.

The Ethereum foundation sold smart contracts as if it was similar to a paper contract and people believed it.  If they would have realized how "unlegal", "immoral" smart contracts are BY DEFINITION, then they might not have poured 150 million in something like the DAO.

Because by definition, if the code tells you that you can do it, by definition, you are legal, right, and you are not harming any one.  That is the strangeness of a smart contract.  If the code gives you the coins, then you did so legally.

All the standard arguments of "poorly written software", "exploits", "bugs" and so on don't even exist as a concept in a smart contract.

In fact, the big scam of the DAO was not that there were "bugs" in the code.  The big scam was that the DAO guys "explained" the supposed, intended workings of their code.  In fact, given that the DAO law was the code, they should have only put online the byte code of the DAO.  Not even the source code.   Only the byte code.  THAT was the law and nothing else.

This is similar to not writing a "summary of intend" when you sign a paper contract, but only the contract itself.  What tricked people was that the DAO website told other things than the code.  

In the normal software world, what counts is the intend, and if code does something else, people call that "bugs" and the code is adapted to the intend in an update.  However, in a smart contract, it is the other way around.  You should deduce intend from the (byte) code, and not the other way around.

People simply seem not to understand the weirdness of a smart contract ; in the first place, ethereum supporters, because they believe in the simplism that a smart contract is like a paper contract, but written in code.  It isn't.  At all.  A smart contract is a terribly weird idea and very inhuman.  I support smart contracts but that is because I am a fan of the Singularity, where humanity will be replaced by machines.  This is actually the only kind of vision in which smart contracts make sense.  The Ethereum foundation didn't tell you that, did it.


I perfectly understand that, but that is even another issue.  That is like bitcoin not forking over the more than 50 large bitcoin thefts (real thefts of wallets this time).  But it is still another issue.  



By saying that, you confirm that you don't understand the essence of a smart contract.  The "thief" wasn't a thief under the code=law system.  People only signed up to a contract they didn't understand (including their authors): it wasn't a venture capitalist firm, but it was a hacker's bait.   Which is normal.  EVERY COMPLEX SMART CONTRACT is a hacker's bait because NONE works as "intended".  That's in the nature of smart contracts, and what the Ethereum foundation forgot to tell you.

Only small smart contracts can reasonably well be considered more or less doing as intended.  The claim that complex smart contracts do as intended is the same claim as saying that one can write a complex piece of software not containing bugs or exploits ever.
So all complex smart contracts, being the law, will be legal hacker's baits.

Why did the creators of the DAO say it was safe to put $150,000,000 of ETH in it? Were we warned that there will be bugs or exploits? No. They said it was safe because it went thru a security audit. Who is stupid and at fault here? You know the answer.

I think it is much deeper than that.  No complex system of software can be guaranteed to be without a deviation, in border cases, from intend.  People call that "bugs" and "exploits" (depending on whether it happens like this, or is looked for).
As such, no complex smart contract will work as intended, and you can't correct for it, because it is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.  Correcting bugs in a smart contract is essentially breaking the law, which is unheard of in human law.

So in essence, you can forget about the concept of complex smart contracts.  That is what this story told us.