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Comment by lottin | Hacker News Reader

Moreover the "hacker" is simply doing something that is allowed by the contract so it's hard to argue that these hacks are even unlawful.

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Yeah, that's my question with all this. I mean, ransomware is obviously illegal. Finding vulnerabilities in smart contracts - well, "the code is the contract", so the hacker is just executing the code as it was published.

I mean, the whole reason Ethereum Classic exists is because a subset of Ether folks felt that restoring the funds in the original DAO hack was contrary to the whole "the code is the contract" ethos.

If Code is law then hard fork is also law. Otherwise those Ethereum classic people are saying that code is law but only the DSL of Solidity. Outside updatable Ethereum engine code is not law.

> If Code is law then hard fork is also law

Not at all. All crypto currency only has value because other people collectively choose to "believe" a certain chain. Usually there is global consensus of which chain is the "true" chain, but there have been many times in the past that one group has decided to follow a different fork for whatever reason. I mean, Bitcoin has Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold. The value that gets allocated to a particular fork just depends on the number of other people that choose to follow that chain.

You were just giving me arbitrary facts after saying “no”. I get this feeling you don’t understand what I’m talking about. The biggest code is lowercase was after the Dao fork when Ethereum hard forked. The argument given by Therion classic people was that since code is law it’s unethical and incorrect to hard for the funds away from the hacker, because he now legitimately owns the stolen funds.

Ignoring contract law (which would not blindly accept "the code is the contract", and people's ethos does not allow them to arbitrarily decide how contracts shall work in the country where they live), the fact that some action was explicitly written in a contract that was properly signed by everyone does not necessarily mean that the action was lawful.

For example, if you intentionally misrepresent what the contract means to deceive someone into signing a contract, then is fraud, and it also invalidates the contract. If the fraudster already got the money according to that (invalid) contract, no matter if it's cash or crypto, they possess it, but it's not lawfully theirs.

I mean, at its heart then you are really arguing than smart contracts shouldn't exist in the first place (I don't really disagree).

The entire reason that smart contracts exist is to get rid of the need for any trusted third party intermediary because (as proponents argue) all of the logic for the contract is completely embedded in the code.

If it then becomes necessary to say "The code is the contract, unless there's a bug, in which case we'll have some single or set of arbiters decide what the code was really supposed to do" then why have smart contracts at all, why not just go through a normal escrow process where there is an independent arbiter trusted to determine who "lawfully" deserves the funds.

I'm not necessarily arguing that smart contracts shouldn't exist in the first place - perhaps they have a valid future role in effectively and cheaply adjudicating small claims where currently it might not be worth to enforce a contract due to the effort and costs of the legal process; something vaguely like what arbitration was intended to be.

This use case would IMHO have a quite large market, and it would be perfectly compatible with those smart contracts having a proper (non-code) appeals process explicitly designed in the system - the benefit would be that the third party (arbiters, or state, or whatever) is not used in most cases, because that would be costly.

Again, though, in that case, as with many use cases where people like to yell "blockchain!!", just use some code running on top of a database.

Blockchain adds a ton of cost and complexity precisely because it is completely "autonomous" with no enhanced trust relationship for anyone. The second you have some people with an enhanced trust relationship, then the whole reason for using blockchain falls apart.

The premise that you can opt out of the laws in the jurisdiction that you're operating in seems faulty.

Smart contracts can let you enforce things that aren't enforceable otherwise, but they aren't going to let you avoid having things enforced through other means.

You could argue all hacking is just doing something that is (accidentally) allowed by the target system.

Not really, because the entire premise of smart contracts is that the code IS the only representation of the contract. In normal software systems there’s an intent and then an implementation. There’s no explicit guarantee they are identical, which is exactly why there are subsystems to allow e.g. refunds or transaction invalidations.

That's just ignoring the intent part.

That premise is clear, proponents of smart contracts would like it to become true, but as of now that premise is simply not true anywhere in the world.

There may be obvious practical difficulties in identifying the counterparty and enforcing a judgement in them, but if that becomes possible (and if $10m is at stake, perhaps it might become possible, bounties, etc) then the argument that "code is the only representation, and this is what the code said, so this was lawful" is not valid, as it contradicts both contract law and fraud statutes.

But code is the only representation, like it or not. The smart contract is code and nothing else.

That's almost true - there often is also some out-of-bounds communication about that code before the smart contract is implemented, which can help establish intent, which matters a lot in resolving disputes about a contract.

But the actual contract terms between the parties and facts like is this contract valid at all, who owns what and who owes what to whom are ultimately determined by contract law, not by the smart contract, like it or not. The smart contract may determine possession of certain things, and in many cases it would be uncontested and there it has a purpose of just doing the contract settlement automatically, but as soon as there's a dispute, then the legal ownership and any claims would be settled according to contract law, not according to what the code says.

Not only unlawful, but unknowable. Monero and other privacy focused coins contain no heads of address names. Once it's in monero, you can create a new wallet and send it there and no one would ever be the wiser.

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