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Comment by libeclipse | Hacker News Reader

This is really funny, and hopefully this time people will realise the danger of using programmer-written contracts to manage millions of dollars.

If someone can accidentally delete that volume of your money, it's not that someone's fault, it's your fault.

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Bank accounts, wire transfers that move trillions are also written by programmers, so should we stay to cash economy only? The problem is immaturity of crypto currency/contract market as it's still in its infancy. I'm optimistic about crypto economy future as most of current problems could be fixed (or at least alleviated) by standards, regulations and discipline.

Bank accounts, wire transfers that move trillions are also written by programmers

Sure, but they're written in ways that humans can generally roll back a mistake and if two humans disagree about what should be done (due to a 'bug' or inconsistency in the contract) there are processes where a third human can listen to their arguments and decide what sounds like the most reasonable course of action. At no point is the code written by programmers the final arbiter of what the 'correct' course of action is.

Yet this system is not bulletproof either:

0. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11414191/Hacker...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

Of course no system is completely bulletproof against a determined attacker. There are however a few differences. First of all what these people did is obviously illegal and people go to jail for doing that sort of thing. As it stands there is no legal consensus on whether exploiting a bug in a smart contract is illegal or not.

Secondly and more importantly, the fail-safes built into the system largely work. In the Bangladesh case for example the vast majority of the money they where attempting to steal was never transferred due to humans intervening and overriding the transfer order. And even a non-trivial amount of the money that was transferred was later recovered by reversing the transaction.

Exactly. And this is just because there are no regulations to make it illegal and standard protocols to follow that, as I've mentioned in my first post, is the key requirement if crypto economy is to be something more than just a wet dream of crypto-anarchists.

But if one of the design requirements that we want/need is that people can override any contract and roll back any transaction, what do we gain from a blockchain/crypto based solution.

My bank account isn't managed by some sketchy Solidity contract.

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