Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

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This is not the first article I've seen which has repeatedly assumed the worst possible intentions for the "hacker":

"He stole the money", "he only gave it back because he was scared", etc.

This article flat out calls him a "disruptive criminal".

All of this ignores three important points:

1 - These people don't know his intentions, and it's approaching libel to say they do.

2 - There's a strong argument to be made that this "hacker" did nothing illegal. He broke no law, and executed code as it was written; enhancing the strength of crypto in general in the process.

3 - The guy could have churned the coins up and given them to friends and family before doing a little time. I think most people - the vast, vast majority - would happily do ten years in jail for half a billion dollars.

So, my question is, what do these awful publications have to gain by being such arseholes to someone who didn't do anything illegal, strengthened crypto, and gave back 611 million dollars that he had no real obligation to return?

While I have my own opinions about the attacker's intent, and how it might have changed in response to developments, I agree that the attributions in this article are speculative. They are also as much about the author's attitudes as they are about the attacker.

The return to the status quo ante is the best possible outcome, and the payment to the attacker under the guise of a reward is smart, both to encourage the completion of the restitution and to establish a pattern of response which may be desirable to repeat in the future - for example, we can readily imagine a situation where someone pulls off something like this, and remains anonymous, but then balks at the risk of touching the loot: this reward would give that person some encouragement to perform a restoration.

One thing which can be said with some objectivity is that no-one who holds to the dogma that "the code is the contract" has any grounds to complain about the original act, regardless of whether the affected accounts were restored. This was a wake-up call, and we will see whether the response amounts to anything more than hitting the snooze button.

There's no way I'd spend ten years incarcerated for half a billion dollars.

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