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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Something like this happened last year with Ethereum. A hacker stole $150 million, but the funds were conveniently trapped on one place for a month. People rolled out a patch that moved the funds back to their original owners.

Some people thought that was a bad idea and kept running the unpatched version. That caused the blockchain to split into two separate blockchains, the patched (ETH) and unpatched (ETC).

After that, it was up to the market to determine which version was more valuable. So far ETH is worth a lot more, so apparently the market was fine with this action in this particular case.

If people were to roll out a patch that committed a theft instead of repairing one, it's unlikely that many other people would go along with it. There'd be another split, the thieving chain would drop to a low value, and the original chain would keep rolling along with funds unstolen.

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The term "hacker" depends on your viewpoint. Put another way, a user executed a function on a decentralized smart contract platform that transferred $150 million to the possession of the function's caller.

If the value of smart contracts is that they will execute as written with no possibility of third party interference then Ethereum is not a smart contract platform. It is a very inefficiently designed public ledger governed by a highly centralized group of developers who can change it on a whim.

>The term "hacker" depends on your viewpoint. Put another way, a user executed a function on a decentralized smart contract platform that transferred $150 million to the possession of the function's caller.

I think if you view the action as criminal or if you view it as just a clever use of the smart contract, the person who did this is a hacker. They understood and controlled the software in a way the designers did not intend.

My memory of the event may be confused with another one, but I believe the guy who did this did it accidentally. He was as confused by the result as everyone else - in fact, he froze the account on his own, so that he wouldn't have access to it.

That was one of the events, I think. There was another one. Perhaps that's the one being described here. I seem to recall that one had a bunch of whitehats who figured out the bug and rushed to exploit everyone just to prevent the bad actors, and so they could return the funds later.

This all happened less than a year ago and there was a lot of discussion of it, here and elsewhere. We have google and duck-duck-go, not to mention a search bar on most HN pages.

Perhaps we could point to facts rather than vague remembrances?

Feel free to look it up and confirm or deny my recollection. That's more work than I was willing to put into it at the time I wrote that.

I don't think there's any problem relating vague recollections as long as they are presented as such and attempt to expand the conversation.

That's the recent Parity multisig wallet freeze. So far it doesn't look like there will be a fork for that.

The event I described happened in the summer of 2016, and was a fairly sophisticated attack.

So obviously you're in the group which thought it was a bad idea to alter the ledger. I think there's a reasonable case to be made for that point of view. My point was that in the end, everybody got the chain they wanted.

I don't think the word "hacker" should be considered pejorative on a site called "Hacker News."

> It is a very inefficiently designed public ledger governed by a highly centralized group of developers who can change it on a whim.

But they can't just change it without the network going along with the change. And, after all, it is the network who decides what the code does in the first place by running the same protocol.

It's still a system governed by consensus. The network came to a consensus that it wasn't how the contract should have executed.

> If the value of smart contracts is that they will execute as written with no possibility of third party interference then Ethereum is not a smart contract platform.

Why would there be such value in a dumb contract platform like that? Historically, what societies have chosen to adopt such a set of values?

I see real value in smart contracts despite the mentioned flaws above. The smart contracts can automate A lot of transactions that use intermediaries, see notaries, lawyers, judges that do a ton of bulk work to validate paperwork authenticity, all sorts of agents and middle-men that charge fees etcetera.

Ok, people say it’s not secure, contracts can be hacked, but why not back these smart contracts by law? And when issues/breaches happen have a judge decide. These tools should be complementary and should not eliminate each other. We can and probably will have smart contracts alongside the day-to-day bureaucracy to help us with the simple stuff at first. Like when I need to pay a couple thousand to a notary for changing ownership of an estate only because of trust issues. If that is not ripe for disruption then I don’t know what is.

It’s like trying to jump from manual driving to fully automated driving and complaining it’s not safe and it won’t work.

I think the perceived value comes from the assumption that contracts can be written perfectly. Apparently, some people believe that the problems encountered so far are just a matter of weeding out the problems and eventually contracts will be much less likely to have loopholes like this.

I don't really agree with that worldview, but not strongly enough to bet that it won't reach some fairly safe equilibrium at some point. Even then though, a major bug could be lurking for years just waiting to be exploited later.

This is a rather perfectionist point of view, implying that our current day-to-day contracts are perfect and don’t have loopholes. Why do smart contracts have to be written perfectly to be usable by people.

In the end, what’s perfect in the world around us? Big banks fail and lose people’s savings, cars break and cause deaths and it has’t stopped people from adopting these on a large scale and keep on improving them.

Wanting all contracts and actions performed by them to be immutable is an odd point of view in my eyes, but I'm not sure I would call it perfectionist because the perfection depends on whether you think a perfect system fulfills the contracts to the letter or the spirit.

In the physical world, we arbitrate contracts with authorities vested with the power to make decisions over them, such as courts, governments, mediators, etc that both parties have agreed has the final say, because the alternative is unworkable.

In a consensus system such as a blockchain, that consensus is based on a majority of the participants. Wanting them to have no say on the outcome of actions is like wanting the courts to have no jurisdiction over your contracts.

cryptos seem to reflect society in that way: you can be an ideologue and go your own way, but you ll suffer the consequences (ETC value). the design choices that most coins have are that the currency reflects the ethics of the majority of users. Would be interesting to devise an algorithm that makes itself immutable.

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