Topic: The Market is not wrong, Vitalik Buterin is. - page 5. (Read 4371 times)

You are also one of those guys that don't want to see the concept of "smart contract" do you.  There's no intend in a smart contract, apart from the code, no matter how strange, weird, and fucked up it may behave.  
There are, BY DEFINITION, no bugs, holes, exploits or whatever in a smart contract, because, as I said, that would compare the actual behaviour of the code to some "intend" which is ABSENT.

It is a whole different story with a judge, because part of human justice is exactly the NON-mechanical character of law, and the need for human judgement (by a judge).  Now, that is EXACTLY what a smart contract is to do away with !

You guys really, really don't seem to understand the weirdness of the concept of smart contract.

There's a whole page of definitions there. Read...

Yeah:

"take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"

So if you HAVE the legal right, it is not stealing, right !  Given that the guy HAD the legal right (the code was the law), it was not stealing.

Read
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+steal&ie=&oe=

I still don't believe people believe the thief is right. You do this for FUD. You cannot have that low of a moral ground. Exploiting a weakness in a system that was obviously not intended to be there is still an exploit, so he stole the funds. If a law is not perfectly written it doesn't mean you should interpret it and act based on what " you think" they meant. You won't tell that to the judge.
That guy that wanted to 51% dao atack, using your logic it would be okay right, nothing wrong, i assume, right ? Or you check your credit card and because of an error, weakness in the system, you withdraw 100$ and it gives you 1000$ instead, and then you exploit it 1000 times more to enrichen yourself, but you're not wrong because you used the machine as you should. You get to keep it i suppose ?

Be my guest, because to me, stealing is exactly that: unlawfully taking away other people's property without their consent.  So I'm curious.

But in a smart contract, that gets executed automatically.   If he takes away a million because I am contractually obliged in any case, that's not theft.  They are his, now, even if I keep them (unlawfully now) physically in my possession.

If you OWE me 10 dollars, then I can rightfully come and take them.  It is just a matter of politeness if I ask you.  They are mine.

If I buy a house, and I pay you, then now the house is mine.  I don't have to beg you for the key now.  It is now legally mine.  I can politely ask you to hand over the key, but if you don't, I break into the front door of my (now) own house and if you try to stop me, YOU're the wrong guy.

And now you show yourself for who you are. That is only HALF of the definition. Are you going to put the whole definition or do you want me to do it??

There's a big difference. He is asking you to honour your contract and deliver a million dollars to him. Let's say that when you last wrote a cheque to someone that you were leaning on that contract and some guy sees the imprint and decides he's plundering your account.

So rather than claiming funds, he has actually taken the funds already.

See the difference?

One is a chancer, the other is a thief.

UNLAWFULLY taking away other people's property without their consent.

Now, remember that the code was the law, that the hacker used the code, the whole code, and nothing but the code, and that all DAO users had consented to the fact that the code was the law.

He didn't break any code.  He used it, and it was the law as to the statements made on which every DAO owner agreed.

He didn't steal any secret key.  He didn't fork any block chain.  He used the code to the full extend, as it had been written.  He didn't break anything.  In as much as you think the code was broken, then the law was broken because the code was the law.

edit: let me clarify this somewhat, because you seem to miss the point.

Suppose that I present you a contract where I say that it is a contract that allows you to live in my appartment next week, against paying me $150 dollars, and that the contract is written in Dutch, and that the Dutch text is the ultimate authority.

Now suppose that that Dutch text is such, that indeed, it describes that you can live in my appartment for a week and you pay me $150 dollars, but that if your name starts with a D and ends with a d, then I owe you a million dollars.  I didn't even know this: I wrote the Dutch text using Google translate, and Google translate fucked up.

Now suppose that a guy named Donald, fluid in Dutch, reads this, and he comes over and signs this contract with me.

Do you think that if he claims his million of dollars, he's a thief ?

Actually, I liked ETH quite a lot.  The idea of smart contract, devoid of any humanity, with a totally mechanistic unstoppable machinery, appealed to me.  I started to think it could help in the singularity transition, from humans to machines taking over.  So I was mightily disappointed with the hard fork, bringing all of human judgement, corruption, hypocrisy, unfairness and arbitrariness back into what was supposed to be cleaned out of this mess.

However, the hack, at the same time, made me realize the fundamental stupidity of the foundation of ethereum, namely Turing-complete contracts.   That's an aberration, because a contract always has to come to a conclusion, and by definition, Turing-complete descriptions are undecidable as to whether they will come to a conclusion.  No legal disposition ever is Turing complete.  No court, no judge, can ever get locked up in an infinite loop (worse, can get locked up in a loop of which it is undecidable whether it is infinite or will just take a long time).  Courts have to come to a verdict at a given date.  The number of appeals is finite.

Turing complete contracts are an aberration.  
This is what the hacker learned us, and I think it is for better.

Solidity-based contracts will always be a mess.  There's no way, apart from VERY VERY simple contracts, to ever prove that those contracts will not have infinite recursion, or infinite loops in rare cases.   Solidity is a hackers' paradise.  It is for sure NOT something in which to write watertight contracts.

This is the great service that the hacker did: to stop this madness before it made REAL damage, when real people engaged in real contracts that way.  Now, only greedy idiots lost money, and well-deserved.

So stealing back that money from the saviour from Turing complete contract madness to give it back to the deluded idiots thinking they were going to become rich quickly, is, in my eyes, highly immoral.

I do think that ETC has a reason to exist, namely as funny playground to write small, simple contracts.  One doesn't need a lot of money to pour into that.

ETH is screwed, because of its immoral precedent.

All you are doing here is defending a thief. Don't you see it?? The DAO guys were stupid victims of their own hubris, but the thief was the person who broke the code to steal the funds. Yes, stole the funds.

You can call it legitimate all you want but anywhere other than crypto it would be seen as a heist. As I said, pseudo-intellectuals will forgo their principles on here because they hate this or that crypto. I will not.

A thief is a thief is a thief

For all you 'intelligent' people out there, define 'steal' for me.

+10. Excellent summary.

Well, what morality is there in declaring that the code is law, but if you use the code, and it is not to your likings, you change the rules ?

I would think that keeping your engagements is a high moral standard, and scamming people, not keeping your engagements, and undoing things that happened according to your engagements, is rather low on the moral scale.

WHO invented the funny rules ?  It wasn't the hacker, it were the DAO guys !  Those are equivalent to the scammer telling you that he has 50 tankers in the Atlantic.  It are the DAO guys who told you (in their description) that DAO funds were only to be moved by a vote, and *at the same time* told you that only the code is the law (and that code didn't only allow for funds to be moved by votes, but also by tricky tricks the hacker found out).

So who was the lying scammer here ?  The hacker who saw the trick, or the DAO guys making people believe things that weren't true ?

It's because they have a very low moral ground. You don't want to be friends with these people, you don't want to meet them, and if they are family, move away.

I agree with you, but the hacker is still a thief. In the same way that the stupidity of a greedy individual losing $50,000 to scammer claiming to have 50 tankers of oil in the Atlantic does not magically turn the thief scammer into not-a-thief-or-scammer.

But on BCT funnily enough, it does!! Because scammers and thieves are folk heroes in this industry. Makes it so easy for you guys to accept a thief in your midst.

He played by the crazy rules that the ethereum/DAO couple set fort and where they seduced so many idiots in funding a hacker's bait that they reached more than $150 million at a certain point.

Honestly, accepting the game of putting money in a "smart contract" where "the code is the law" and where you have tons of pages of source code written in a Turing-complete and rather new programming language, Solidity, is nothing else but funding a hacker's bait.

Whining because your thing did exactly as could be expected, namely that a hacker won the bait, is beyond me.

But if there's one thing that that hacker isn't, it is a thief.  The only thieves are those who didn't keep with their engagements of "the code is the law" and went as far as forking a block chain in order to undo the rightfully gained bait by that hacker.

I can of course understand the embarrassment combined with the monetary loss of that bunch of megalomane idiots that thought that they could pull the feat of writing a complicated smart venture capital firm simulation in a new turing complete language without any unexpected behaviour and pumping $150 million dollars from innocent people and themselves, but THEY are the thieves in the end.

I could not care less about ETH or The DAO. I will never defend a thief. If your hate for ETH will make you throw your principles in the bin, then that's up to you.

He is a thief and he is waiting to enjoy the spoils of his crime. Keep defending him. Maybe he will toss you a few.