Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

There's a general moral of the story here that isn't specific to Wall Street. If you think you've got a magic hack for some system, don't forget that the system might not be immutable, and that many people will consider the spirit of the rules not just the letter of them (even if this means changing the letter of them).

It's fairly similar to the risk of building a business by adding one feature to someone else's platform.

View on HN

This holds true, even when the system assures you that it is immutable. I recall when a hacker noticed a vulnerability in some Ethereum smart contracts and used it to "steal" ETHs, the transactions were swiftly reversed and the whole concept of "the code is the contract" was thrown out of the window in the process.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/50-million-hack-just-showed-da...

Wasn't the blockchain forked? So technically there is still a version of Ethereum out there that makes it easy for hackers to steal your stuff, but for some reason nobody wants to use that version.

The bug was not in Ethereum, it was in the contracts. And before this incident, the philosophy of Ethereum was that "the code is the contract". The hacker did not breach the contract. They noticed a bug, or as one could say, a loophole, and used it to their benefit.

I don't know what the mechanism of enforcement was. Whether it was a fork or something else, the net effect was that a) the history was rewritten, the contract terms changed retroactively, and the monies were returned to their source; and b) the concept of code is contract was effectively showed to be an empty gesture and the philosophy was effectively abandoned.

It was a fork. Ethereum Classic, the original chain, is still in operation, and in that fork, the DAO fix never happened. But since the DAO affected the core Ethereum developers and early proponents and backers of the system, all the talent stayed with the chain that corrected the issue. To me, that's a fair outcome. Forkability is a necessary feature, not a bug, of immutable blockchains. Just like it is for open source.

Plenty of people still use ETC lol. That's crypto for ya, though.

This is such a great example, because it's an obvious case of "trustless for you but none for me thanks" -- if Vitalik believed that "code is law" was better than having the ability to amend the transaction, he'd just be on ETC dealing with the mess.

If grandma's life savings gets stolen, well sucks for grandma. When it's Vitalik, well, it's time to fork the blockchain.

I mean, it was up to the community at large to ultimately support the new fork. As an example, Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash, but the community largely stuck with the main chain. It's really a market-driven decision which chains or forks thrive and which ones don't. At any rate, it's more and more expensive to do forks as a chain grows in maturity and adoption.

Sure, but do you think "the community at large" really makes such decisions in any meaningful way? Overwhelmingly, "the community" blindly follows a few leaders who happen to have a high profile or make the most noise in the right forums.

Which means that in practice, these "immutable" blockchains and their "code-is-law" contracts are immutable for the masses, but can be modified (in effect, by forking) when it's in the interest of a few powerful individuals/entities to do so.

So what have we gained, really?

Yeah. It is very rare that a clever rules-lawyer-style hack of a game will let you defeat people in power because they usually have enough power to hop up a level and beat you at the meta-game and you do not.

Like Solo telling Luke to let the Wookkie win.

Like the US winning the revolutionary war with guerrilla warfare tactics that native americans used against them when trying to defend themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com