Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jerrrry | Hacker News Reader

Technical hacks against the protocol and implementations are fair game, and is the implicit incentive that balances the market.

Social engineering and financial hacks are not fair game, and are "illicit" in the sense that crypto is obviously an international martial zone.

Exhaustively brute forcing a keyspace is valid, making your username an XSS to steal funds from an insecure page/downstream app is not valid.

Finding and leveraging an exploit in a contract is valid, both a paper/legal contract and a literal codified Eutherem contract. Flashing incorrect token prices on CoinMarketCap.com to take advantage of (unauthorized? grey) downstream screenscrapers and rugpulling affected tokens is NOT valid, but, admittedly murkier.

View on HN

Fair game and valid according to whom? You cannot legally rob a bank just because they left it unlocked and unmanned. It might be possible to take crypto due to a bug in a protocol, and arguably justifiable, but that doesn’t mean it would hold up in court if you were identified as the one using the exploit.

Socially acceptable. Because I am not going to acknowledge or respect a Turkish summons. Although I would expect a Turkish hit squad.

>You cannot legally rob a bank just because they left it unlocked and unmanned.

Exactly - because it isn't a bank, it is a bunch of cash on the street, if it was unlocked and unmanned.

And even if there was a clear Sticky Note with foreboding text, you would be in the clear to pocket a stack of cash sitting on the sidewalk, left unattended, guarded only with a sticky note.

The steelman and strawman are nearly identical - a bugged contract or implementation isn't a bank, it is a bunch of cash on the street. It stopped being a bank once a bug was found.

I suspect that your belief about found things is at odds with the law.

Theft-by-taking has a wholly different level of legal magnitude gravitas than robbing a bank, tho.

I found someone's car keys in the street this morning. I'm pretty sure that didn't entitle me to their car.

No, because keys for a car and keys for a wallet are wholly different, and even then, picking a lock (bruteforcing a keyspace) isn't comparable, because the value, intent, and purpose of a car is not in its properties of being able to be transferred, transmitted, and it's future value increasing (although that last one is true incidentally), but it is primarily used to get from A to B.

If you found a gift card with the PIN in the street, it would entitle you to a moral inhibition. If you went through a stack of discarded gift cards and found ones with change, you would be less morally wrong, but just as legally right.

Finding a debit card in the street with the PIN is akin to finding someone's wallet.dat file on their github. That is stealing, so no comparison.

Thanks for these analogies. People unfortunately want the new technologies to be an exact replacement of the status quo. There’s no reason for it to be the case and the way these technologies work may make it infeasible to enforce the rules of the status quo.

> And even if there was a clear Sticky Note with foreboding text, you would be in the clear to pocket a stack of cash sitting on the sidewalk, left unattended, guarded only with a sticky note.

That's not true, and not true globally. Unattended valuables being taken is still theft. Though prosecution is rare, it still happens [0].

[0] https://www.macaupostdaily.com/article12506.html

It's not a matter of whether it's theft. Of course it is.

But if you leave your valuables in the street unattended and then come back shocked to discover that they aren't where you left them, this is not a problem that requires new legislation to solve. The solution to preventing this from happening to you in the future is quite obvious and doesn't involve the government.

And if the government manages to catch the thieves, great. But if they don't, c'est la vie.

In New York in the 90s I picked up $150 in small bills off the street. Just strewn around in the middle of the day.

It still gives me delight to remember that. I needed the money, but the continuing pleasure in recalling has been worth far more.

> You cannot legally rob a bank just because they left it unlocked and unmanned

Nobody suggested making crypto crimes legal. Just metering the degree to which law enforcement, a public good, is put to use pursuing it. Why should a law-abiding saver bail out what in many cases looks like a gambler’s foray?

> Why should a law-abiding saver bail out what in many cases looks like a gambler’s foray?

Because having an idea about how these frauds are committed are helpful for society as a whole. Law enforcement investigating such crimes is the first step towards meaningful laws and regulations.

Acting as though these crimes never happened because they're not enshrined somewhere in the criminal code is cutting off one's nose to spite the face. The negative externalities will still be there, and they will land squarely at society's doorstep. We will all have to foot the bill one way or another.

Everyone's a rugged individualist until they get rugpulled.

I am not sure what you mean by “bail out”. When something gets stolen from you, the government doesn’t repay you for the actual amount. They do pay to litigate/make litigation possible. That is part of the societal contract - if you own something and someone takes it from you, the court system exists so you have legal means of restitution. I don’t really care about whether that’s good or not to apply to crypto, I am merely pointing out that it does.

It's a bit unfair to make that comparison. Most technical hacks are always present until somebody abuses it, to make a fair comparison the bank would have to _always_ be left unlocked and unmanned

The guarantee that a bank gives is not the same guarantee that a smart contract gives you. the bank guarantees the safety of your money, the smart contract guarantees that it will as stated in the code.

It's on the the contract dev to write the correct thing and on the contract user to determine if the does what is "says on the thin"

You obviously don't understand basic contract law. US Civil courts routinely apply the principle of equity when interpreting written contracts. Loopholes and errors are disregarded when they violate the clear intent of the agreement.

>routinely

And they routinely admit that some cases are not clear cut. But crypto has no grey zones, by design - you either have the keys, or you don't. And that is the explicit agreement code-contract signers agree to when they go out of their way to DeFi their agreements.

Obviously legal precedents and statutes are not fitted for this purpose yet, because they are reactive, not proactive.

Nothing annoys me more than arrogant ignorance. It's like, pick one! You speak as if these are handled as federal matters, and they are not. Contract disputes are handed as local matters, usually in a local district court.

Furthermore, when you talk about the court you're talking about a Judge. The Judge gets final say and they can take their sweet time, regard or disregard anything they want. In local matters, Judge's act without restraint. Appellate court, the state bar, the judicial qualification board, federal court, all gets involved so rarely they can be ignored. Additionally, these Judges are no stars of the legal profession: cohorts of lawyers will often rig elections and appointments to favor a well-connected but bad lawyer, because being a judge is actually really easy.

So, yeah, it mostly depends on who the judge likes better, and whether society is better or worse if this dispute is decided this way or the other way. I can't stress enough the arbitrariness, and supreme unaccountably, of a local judge's decisions.

> I can't stress enough the arbitrariness, and supreme, unaccountably, of a local judge's decisions.

Exactly. Code-contract signers hate this, and go out of their way to avoid the possibility of this interference.

Judges should tell crypto cases to get rightfully fucked.

If I appear and sue a drug dealer for giving me fake 100's, I'd get laughed at.

Considering crypto is just an massive abstraction layer to hide the online drug trade, the courts should similarly laugh at these _technical_ exploits, in the context of Euth-shit code. Because it's sole explicit purpose of existence is to conduct business without arbitration.

Fine, make crypto outside the legal system. Gains can't be taxed and failure to apply AML/KYC can't be prosecuted, but you get no protection from the courts for theft. I'd take that bargain.

> If I appear and sue a drug dealer for giving me fake 100's, I'd get laughed at.

Is that actually true? On the criminal side, I served on a grand jury, and a lot of the cases we saw were criminal-on-criminal crime. I guess the idea driving the crime was that criminals make easier targets as they're less likely to go to the police. But some did.

No that's not how it works. The same basic rules of contract law apply in federal, state, and local courts with only minor variations.

It is how it works. The rules don't matter; the attorneys know what words to say to give a judge reasons to either admit or reject application of any rule. The coin that remains in a case is likeability and making the judge's life easier.

The net result is a system where attorneys are falling over themselves to prove who is more obsequious to all the judges. If you become a problem in one case, you will suffer in your other cases, too, so individuals with legit complaints against the court can and will be ignored.

The net result is a court that ignores all but the most mechanical rules (and loves to stall on those when it can, because it approximates the appearance of "work"), and has no mechanism for correction. I'm sorry, but the rules don't really matter, to anyone.

That comment is just deranged. I assume you had a bad experience with legal system at some point but you clearly don't understand how it actually operates, especially at the appeals levels.

If that were true, it would not be possible to run a sustainable business in any industry. Legal systems need to generate consistent results with respect to contract law in order for commerce to be successful and efficient.

Cite? No, the way it works is that you pay lawyers who know enough to play it out in their heads and determine who has to pay whom to make it go away. If one side is stubborn and ignorant, then they pull the trigger and the years-long, extremely expensive lottery play has begun.

Your assumptions about the law, about judges, and about rationality, rhetoric, and the justice system in general are about to be destroyed. The lawyers know the high variance of court and generally want to avoid court like the plague.

(The justice system is badly broken, obviously. The core issue is that it takes far too long to judge a case, and a big reason for that is a) the rules are too complicated and b) not adopting better tech. We should have trials that start a week after filing, with online juries, online judges, and real-time access to data. The attorneys can finally earn their ridiculous wages by learning how to fly through information and present it in a compelling way.)

The median lawyer salary is $122K. Whether that's ridiculous is a matter of opinion, but it's only a little higher than software developers. And the average lawyer has more education.

Some civil court hearings are already conducted online.

You'll have to back this up with evidence. You can file complaints about local judges to judiciary committees, administrative judges, you can appeal their decisions, and if you actually go to trial you get a jury unless you specifically waive it (along with all other parties).

I don't see how they're unaccountable, or how contract disputes mostly depend on a judges disposition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com