[HN Gopher] $34M permanently locked into AkuDreams contract fore...
___________________________________________________________________
$34M permanently locked into AkuDreams contract forever due to bad
code
Author : donohoe
Score : 209 points
Date : 2022-04-23 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| remram wrote:
| I never got why we call those things "smart". It just seems like
| a dumber, more pedantic kind of contract.
|
| The kind that can take into account intent via the courthouse
| mechanism is smarter.
| 8bitben wrote:
| Turns out unfettered immutability isn't the holy grail it was
| made out to be
| wpietri wrote:
| Depends on the audience. This sort of immutability is still
| deeply loved by the blockchain idealists and the criminals.
| And more casually by all the people who love them some
| victim-blaming.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Really? I would have thought that a "bulletproof" contract is
| better than a vague one, precisely because the latter is more
| likely to be litigated. What's the value of having a contract,
| if you have to go to court to find out what it means?
|
| Of course, I don't want a bulletproof contract imposed on me.
| It's better if "our standard contractual terms" are vague, so
| that I can sue suppliers. But if it's a private, custom
| contract, then I really need to know beyond doubt what it
| means.
|
| My problem with blockchain "contracts" is that they don't seem
| to be able to affect (or be affected by) the real world - fiat
| bank accounts, delivery of goods in working order, etc. They
| only seem to affect digital pictures of monkeys. I suppose that
| simply means I don't "get it".
| otterley wrote:
| > What's the value of having a contract, if you have to go to
| court to find out what it means?
|
| The vast majority of business is performed under implicit or
| explicit contracts without any disputes whatsoever. We're
| talking billions of interactions per day.
|
| Courts are there for the rare occasion when a dispute occurs.
| There are many kinds of disputes, but one occurs when there
| is a complex agreement that was drafted either vaguely or
| incorrectly. This happens because human beings are imperfect;
| unforeseeable events occur; and because the language in which
| the contract was drafted might be vague or capable of
| multiple interpretations. Court hearings give the litigants
| the opportunity to provide evidence and context so that a
| judge can decide the fairest outcome.
|
| So we don't need courts to do business, but they exist
| because we need some peaceful way of resolving disputes. The
| alternative is violence.
| hef19898 wrote:
| In professional live, when you are talking contractual
| provisions, _after_ signsture, and during disputes the
| relationship is already ruined in most cases. And those
| conflicts are hardly ever litigated.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Nearly all major commercial contracts have an arbitration
| clause, so it's true that those conflicts are rarely
| litigated. "Disputes" are expected, but they go to
| arbitration. That doesn't at all mean that any
| relationships are ruined.
|
| There is a whole industry of arbitrators for hire. They
| are usually specialised in some field of business, so
| they don't need bringing up to speed. And they're all
| experienced lawyers. The work is nearly all paperwork -
| submissions, affidavits, disclosures. There is rarely a
| face-to-face hearing. It's more like doing accounts-
| receivable than sueing someone's ass.
|
| "Just business", as some mobster might have said.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I actually like this kind of naming nowadays, it tells you
| right away how trustworthy it is. Smart is becoming the Karen
| of the tech industry.
| egeozcan wrote:
| As a person who never lived in an English-speaking country,
| associating Karen (or any name really) with such a bad
| personality has always made my "be nice" alarm bells ring.
|
| Truly sorry for the digression, just wanted to know what
| others think, and not blaming you or anything. Spoken
| languages are weird, even weirder than cryptocurrency
| contracts with accidental bad logic - the weird logic in
| spoken languages seems somehow desired.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Unrelated, but I live in Poland and there's similar thing
| related to names. Stereotypical Janusz and Grazyna are
| boomers, Karyna means a poor woman that's not exactly
| educated, and so on. It is not only American phenomenon.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| You are right, of course. Imagine how shitty is must be to
| be named Karen and have millions of people one day start
| using your name as an insult. Just one of the hundreds of
| ways the internet mob steamrolls over people.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> hundreds of ways the internet mob steamrolls over
| people._
|
| There's lots of names that have acquired negative
| stereotypes before. In my lifetime the name "Mike" at one
| point basically meant asshole (not so much anymore) and
| "Bob" basically meant boring, and "Patel" was a catchall
| negative for anyone from India.
|
| There's even research on some of the nuances of the
| phenomenon. [1]
|
| This isn't an aspect of internet mobs, it's an aspect of
| human nature, or at least society in general.
|
| The Internet may shine a light on our flaws, and provide
| some new outlets for them, but it doesn't really create
| new ones, we brought them with us, like settlers from
| Europe going to the "New World" to escape the plague only
| to find they brought it with them.
|
| [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.
| 1996.97...
| nlitened wrote:
| That had happened to Dicks before though.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It wasn't fun being an Adolf in the beginning of the
| previous century =)
|
| These things tend to happen.
| Jach wrote:
| It's just some lingo, dog. (Not actually calling you a
| dog.)
| wpietri wrote:
| People are able to distinguish between "Karen" and "a
| Karen". It's no more of a problem than my dad had with
| people distinguishing between his name "Bill" and "a bill".
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I don't live in an English country either and we have our
| own equivalent male and female names. This is basically a
| common stereotype being so universally seen as negative
| that it becomes an insult. Not great because some people
| actually have that name (and most of them don't deserve
| this association), but then again a person's annoying
| behaviour isn't the worst reason for negative labels.
|
| Like always you can insult and hurt people with "clean"
| language and use vulgar words in non-offensive ways. But
| say what you want, I'll keep calling "smart" technology
| trash ;)
| [deleted]
| floren wrote:
| "Smart" is to contracts as "Democratic" is to country names
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Well, non-repudiation is not the same thing as non-
| reversibility. The former is part of a Smart Contract.
| Unfortunately, most (all?) cryptocurrencies make you take the
| latter too.
| drfrank wrote:
| Has an insurance market already arisen?
|
| I.e. can I buy insurance for some percentage of my transaction
| against a bug swallowing the whole value of my transaction?
|
| Seems like an opportunity to let an economic market drive more
| rigorous dev and test practices by giving shops with more
| rigorous practices lower fees.
| everfree wrote:
| Yes. I'm not going to name drop for fear of it coming off as
| shilling, but I'm familiar with a couple DApps that are two-
| sided marketplaces for insurance on other DApps.
|
| If you lose your money to a smart contract bug in the insured
| DApp, the insurers will reimburse you.
|
| If you really trust the code of a certain app, you can earn
| revenue as the insurer on the other side of the trade.
| vmception wrote:
| yes, its pretty vibrant for the past 2 years. claims get made
| in advance and paid out unceremoniously with no fanfare (just
| like outside of the crypto space) but there could certainly be
| more fanfare and articles around that experience, since you can
| tell by this thread that people who should know about it don't
| know about it. You can find people in the discords of most
| communities who have the claims after an exploit who are like
| "yeah they paid" and move on, and you can look at the insurance
| protocol's contract to see it paid out for your own
| verification of that.
|
| not sure if I've seen it for NFT collection contracts, but
| they're pretty robust and actively cater to the DeFi category
| of services.
|
| here is a list of insurance protocols that also use a token for
| any number of reasons. its a whole category on the "marketcap"
| sites.
|
| https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/insurance
|
| there are likely many well capitalized insurance protocols
| _without_ a token but I don 't know about them for that
| specific reason, which is a fun irony when wondering "but does
| this _need_ a token? "
| rvz wrote:
| doopy1 wrote:
| HN does not have a nuanced view of this space. There's a
| lingering assumption that everyone involved in crypto naively
| wants the "old way" gone in favor of bitcoin, which is
| completely absurd, or that the rest are scammers.
| danaris wrote:
| Well, basically everyone I've talked with on here about it
| that supports blockchain and cryptocurrencies has either
| explicitly or implicitly taken that position (that "fiat"
| should be replaced by cryptocurrency), so yeah, that _is_ my
| assumption.
| wpietri wrote:
| We agree there is a group of people who don't have a nuanced
| view of the cryptocurrency space. But you seem to have
| overlooked about 99% of people advocating for crypto.
| elil17 wrote:
| "Everyone keeps reporting about how this bank keeps getting
| robbed every day but no one is reporting about how their ATM
| sometimes works okay."
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| You sat there waiting to copy and paste this comment weren't
| you?
| rvz wrote:
| Answering a question with a question (especially a totally
| unrelated one) isn't a great start to a conversation.
|
| Given that we have seen tons of scams in crypto like this
| random project and now a payments platform called Stripe has
| joined in (needs no introduction), I am now asking you,
| (assuming you know what Stripe is and what they do) where is
| the scam that Stripe is doing in their announcement of Crypto
| payouts?
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Perhaps it was posted using a DAO running a SmartContract on
| The B_Chain?
|
| ;)
| cryptoshit wrote:
| I think most of HN are atheists who don't buy in to the
| cryptocurrency religion.
| 0des wrote:
| Bad look to be silencing negative opinions about YC backed
| companies. Seeing this more and more lately, and am assuming my
| comment noting this will be gone soon too.
| ascar wrote:
| Just to be clear: I downvoted this because I sincerely
| believe it is not true. I have seen enough negative things
| about YC backed companies here, especially about Stripe, that
| I don't buy support spreading this kind of narrative without
| any evidence. It's not helpful or healthy for this community
| to spread false accusations.
| rvz wrote:
| > I downvoted this because I sincerely believe it is not
| true. I have seen enough negative things about YC backed
| companies here, especially about Stripe, that I don't buy
| support spreading this kind of narrative without any
| evidence.
|
| What narrative? What false accusations exactly?
|
| I see _" Crypto is scam"_ comments on here from time to
| time and I'm looking for an explanation about Stripe's
| entrance into using crypto-currencies [0] themselves
| without any answers.
|
| It's interesting to see that all the replies here have
| deliberately avoided my question into where the actual
| scamming that Stripe is doing in offering crypto payouts,
| since others like to scream the same _" Crypto is scam"_,
| _' snake oil'_ nonsense.
|
| [0] https://stripe.com/blog/expanding-global-payouts-with-
| crypto
| ascar wrote:
| > Bad look to be silencing negative opinions about YC
| backed companies.
|
| That narrative. I wasn't replying to you, but to the "am
| assuming my comment noting this will be gone soon too"
| statement as his comment was bound for a lot of dislikes
| and I wanted to give him an explanation that that has
| nothing to do with his perceived reality.
|
| I don't care about the Stripe feature and it's not
| related to the topic of this post, except that both is
| crypto. If you haven't gotten any satisfying replies in
| the actual submission you linked why do you think it's
| necessary to ask about what Stripe is doing in an
| unrelated story just because it's about bad crypto
| practices and then complain that you don't get answers to
| the derail?
|
| If you post a story that details that Stripe is actually
| scamming with crypto (more than just offering the option)
| I'm sure it would get traction.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| A fool and his money are soon parted
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Everytime this happens in the cryptocurrency space it makes me
| want to laugh and to cry a little.
| adam12 wrote:
| Where can I view git blame?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Crypto once again showing it's a solution to a problem that
| hasn't been found
| vmception wrote:
| The reason why thats an odd take is that it scapegoats poorly
| run companies when we should be just shaming the specific
| project team and organization and doing post mortems to make it
| less likely to occur. Just like we do on this very forum when
| not talking about the crypto space.
| RyanShook wrote:
| Blog post with more context: https://bowtiedisland.com/akudreams-
| griefed-careless-code-le...
| analognoise wrote:
| How much money needs to be lost or stolen before it's declared a
| bad idea?
|
| Like at this point I'd take my chances in the wild west with a
| stage coach, a shotgun and a handful of friends over...whatever
| is going on with crypto.
| RVuRnvbM2e wrote:
| Some variant of this kind of disaster with smart contracts seems
| to do the rounds on Twitter every couple of days. Why does this
| keep happening?
|
| Since software will always have bugs, how do developers of smart
| contracts intend to fix this kind of problem? Does anyone
| actually have a solution to this?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| They will certainly fix it if you give their startup another
| metric fuckton of money. ;-)
| lugao wrote:
| The academy have developed tools for code verification, state
| modeling and formal proofs. The choice of using a javascript
| fork for financial contracts is deliberately dumb and will
| result in the craziest bugs we could imagine.
| 323 wrote:
| Formal proofs will not save you if the assumptions are wrong.
| You can formally prove a bug that you thought is a feature.
| [deleted]
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Approximately $300 billion of value is secured by on-chain
| smart contracts. What makes it to the front page of HN probably
| gives a distortionary perception, in the same way that watching
| sensationalist news makes you think kids are being abducted
| left and right.
|
| Only bad news sells. A $35 million bug makes it to the front
| page, but how often do you hear about Uniswap processing $1+
| billion in trading _every day_ without a single hack in 5
| years.
|
| In general, there's actually been a sustained improving trend
| of fewer hacks, higher likelihood of recovery, and lower losses
| as a percent of assets. The headline numbers may be higher, but
| that's largely a denominator effect of the meteoric growth in
| on-chain assets. It'd be like judging New York City based on
| how many murders are in the paper instead of the murder rate.
| supernt wrote:
| Bar to entry is extremely low; copy-paste existing contract,
| change a few variables and launch. Yet, the contract must
| resist state-sponsored attacks, eg. https://rekt.news/big-
| phish/
|
| Maybe one day there will be a sort of unhackable template that
| everything derives from, or an automatic software-prover.
| weare138 wrote:
| IMO the APIs are overly complicated and there's no proper dev
| tools to test and debug the code. There's a few testing
| frameworks out there but I'm not really sure how well they work
| considering how often this happens. I don't get why there isn't
| some straight forward way to build failsafes into these
| contracts.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I imagine the process of "building a failsafe" is just as
| bug-prone as writing the main contract. It's just more code,
| after all.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Some variant of this kind of disaster with smart contracts
| seems to do the rounds on Twitter every couple of days. Why
| does this keep happening?
|
| Because it's code which means errors are a fact of life, and
| the goal of crypto pushers was to spread the scam so instead of
| looking at formal methods in order to make "smart" contract
| ironclad, they started from ECMAScript so that any idiot could
| go from a frontend widget to deploying a smart contract with
| minimal introspection or reflexion.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| At this point I just want to know why it's considered news.
| This site is called hacker _news_ , after all. The sun rises in
| the east, another smart contract eats people's money, another
| shitcoin goes to zero. Here's your coffee, sir.
| fsflover wrote:
| I guess crypto haters are trying to prove to themselves their
| vision.
| meibo wrote:
| This kind of code is usually contracted out to the lowest
| bidder because the people that want to pull the scam/MLM/NFT
| project/whatever you want to call it don't have the technical
| skill, but can do the marketing.
|
| This leads to bugs or exploits often ending up in these
| "contracts". The concept is inherently flawed, as they can't be
| updated and can't be reevaluated or reinterpreted by e.g. a
| court. The money's just lost.
| kjrose wrote:
| To me this almost seems like an argument to insist on legal
| level protections for development of contractual code. As in,
| you need to have qualifications like a lawyer, liability
| coverage like a lawyer (or bank) and have to be approved in
| some fashion before you can publish a contract that deals
| with more than a certain amount of capital.
|
| Theres no difference between a badly codes contract and a
| badly written one that doesn't do what one signer intended.
| Short of you can try to convince a judge to adjust it or
| handle it differently.
|
| In this case. There is no judgment system to allow for
| reversal of badly coded or misunderstood contracts. Which
| means that the standard for the development should be far
| higher with considerably more insurance and coverage for
| risk.
| RVuRnvbM2e wrote:
| > The concept is inherently flawed, as they can't be updated
| and can't be reevaluated or reinterpreted by e.g. a court.
| The money's just lost.
|
| This is the way it seems to me too, but I just can't
| understand how a flaw this obvious could be overlooked by so
| many people? Surely we are both missing something?
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| It's mostly neglect on behalf of the teams. In this case,
| the code was never audited and was created by a rather
| immature team that was rushing for production. So recupe
| for disaster.
|
| In truth you can write code that is upgradable or
| ammendable, but always within limits of Ethereum
| transactions being immutable. However, when a project wants
| to emphasize that immutability, because that's perceived as
| the need by the users and the devs, then you end up in this
| situation.
|
| So, as usual, the problem is solvable with a little
| diligence. The challenge is for crypto culture to get over
| itself and mature and actually perform that diligence.
|
| I will say that there are very mature, very well developed
| projects that you don't hear about getting hacked, because
| they take advantage of the wealth of experience that's been
| built on this subject.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >So, as usual, the problem is solvable with a little
| diligence.
|
| If you're going to potentially lose tens or hundreds of
| millions, you need a lot more than a little diligence.
| Formally proved code (something along the lines of Ada
| with Spark Pro) is the bare minimum for something with
| some much money on the line, and even then I'd still
| prefer a traditional contract and leave things to the
| courts.
| cinntaile wrote:
| If you code it properly you can release a new version and
| disable the old version, forcing your users to use the new
| contract. It doesn't mean you can retrieve the money locked
| by this particular contract though. If the logic doesn't
| allow it you're out of luck.
| emerged wrote:
| Each time I've given crypto a chance, I get about 5 minutes
| into looking at Ethereum contracts and the EVM and end up
| walking away because it's such a mess IMO. It really all
| feel very junior.
| everfree wrote:
| What do you dislike about the EVM?
| otterley wrote:
| This is admittedly secondhand knowledge, but my
| understanding is that the EVM was written with 128 bit
| words, and consequently cannot be implemented using any
| common general purpose computer hardware. All of its
| operations have to be implemented in software, making it
| significantly slower than it could be as a result.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Isn't the whole point making the decentralized network
| itself the computer...?
| otterley wrote:
| Market makers need the ability to process transactions
| quickly. There is indeed a network of computers involved,
| but each computer is, well, a computer, and needs to make
| computations in order for transactions to process.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Does a zkEVM by Loopring+Vitalik consulting on it scratch
| your itch?
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| At this point I wouldn't bother with smart contracts and
| just use it as a medium of exchange or investment.
|
| However, if Ethereum sticks around there will be
| standardized, off the shelf contracts for people to use
| that have wide-spread testing/adoption. Once we reach
| that level of maturity then it could make sense to use it
| for things like escrow on a contract/purchase.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How do you use ETH on a contract to purchase goods? How
| does the contract know when it has been completed?
|
| I can imagine using ETH for escrow; but there has to be a
| human in the loop for escrow, to direct escrow funds to
| be released. I guess one could contrive a situation where
| a "contract" could autonomously determine when it had
| been completed. But that's not the general case.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > How does the contract know when it has been completed?
|
| Escrow, or an oracle (checking, say, FedEx delivery.)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| You put $10k in escrow to buy a house. Either both
| parties agree (human intervention) that the requirements
| have been met and the escrow is released to the seller,
| or the funds are returned to the buyer after some
| deadline.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Always good to have a consultant around to explain the
| tough words ;)
| Icathian wrote:
| True believers think court interpretation is inherently
| corrupt and a systemic flaw, while these are just
| implementation bugs and ultimately fixable. Everyone else
| is either running a con, or a mark. There's really only
| three categories here and very little to miss I think.
| exdsq wrote:
| It wasn't overlooked - someone noticed the issue and
| reached out to the team just before launch but it was
| declared 'FUD'. Ultimately it's a junior team - this should
| have been caught. While not perfect, smart contracts are
| starting to mature - well-tested contracts become
| templates, access to 100% control flow fuzzing becomes
| easier, more people are releasing testnet versions with bug
| bounties... it is going in the right direction but only if
| you can be bothered to put that effort in. Ive worked as a
| contract test engineer in crypto for over three years now
| across several projects & blockchains, and yet to have a
| project have an issue like this.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > Since software will always have bugs, how do developers of
| smart contracts intend to fix this kind of problem?
|
| They don't. I doubt most are even thinking about it, and of
| those that are, most probably think it can't happen to them.
|
| Crypto tries to make financial programming more like web
| development, and less like writing code for a bank, but there's
| a reason writing code for a bank is such a pain in the ass: it
| has to work more or less perfectly, every time, at least on the
| backend.
|
| If you trust your financial framework to someone who took a
| UDemy course last weekend, you get what you deserve.
| kelnos wrote:
| And when there inevitably is a problem with the code at a
| bank, you call a real person who investigates and then fixes
| the problem and makes you whole. This process is far far far
| from perfect, but at least it exists.
|
| When a smart contact developer makes a mistake, your money is
| just gone, forever, with no recourse.
| wpietri wrote:
| I know a lot of smart, professional software developers. Many
| of them, me included, have taken a look at this stuff, or even
| been recruited to join a cryptocurrency-related project. Some
| of them even tried it out. But very much on purpose, none of
| them are currently involved.
|
| So my guess as to why it keeps happening is a sort of Dunning
| Kruger effect combine with a selection filter such that the
| people most eager to get involved are the ones least likely to
| be able to spot the problems.
| dada78641 wrote:
| I've never seen whatever code this is, so correct me if I'm
| saying something stupid, but do they really use uint256 for their
| number variables? Like a number that goes from 0 to 1157920892373
| 16195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639935
| ? Are they trying to keep track of the number of atoms in the
| universe or something?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Vitalik has said using 256-bit word sizes in the EVM was his
| biggest regret from the early days of Ethereum.
|
| As others have mentioned, it was largely chosen because of the
| ubiquity of 32 byte hashes. But overkill for regular math. One
| pernicious issue is that it makes translating existing smart
| contracts into ZK rollups really challenging because 256 but
| arithmetic blows up the circuit size.
|
| https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/116413/vitalik-buterin-r...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's to prevent any possible chance of brute forcing the value.
| 64 bits is vulnerable. 128 bits is impervious, and probably
| won't ever be vulnerable. But 256 bit crypto keys are common.
| firloop wrote:
| That's not quite right. We're talking about the type of the
| integer, this doesn't have anything to do (directly) with
| cryptography. It's a bit of a silly decision but Ethereum
| uses uint256 for many things to avoid having to do floating
| point math.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sure, there are other benefits of uint256. But it does
| simplify carrying around crypto keys.
|
| 256 bit integers to avoid floats seems like a good idea
| too. I've wished for it whenever I try to represent
| integers as double. 2^53 is such an arbitrary restriction.
| Tao331 wrote:
| > Ethereum uses uint256 for many things to avoid having to
| do floating point math.
|
| Wow. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Solidity, so it
| hadn't previously occured to me that it doesn't have
| floating point. It stretches the limits of the imagination
| to consider the insanity we'd be seeing if Ethereum _did_
| have floating point math.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| People keep claiming over and over that you'd not lose money like
| this with (non-smart) contracts because the court would always
| rule your way. That's absurd. If you went around making the kind
| of contract-of-adhesion offers to the general public that smart
| contracts represent, you're not likely to get the benefit of the
| doubt in court. And if you had a lawyer as incompetent as the
| devs writing these contracts, you'd have plenty of errors.
|
| I want to be clear: the devs aren't incompetent because errors
| exist; they're incompetent because they're incompetent. I hang
| out in programming help spaces for devs of varying skills, and
| 100% of the crypto questions come in on the lowest skill help
| channels with the most basic questions. It's often opined that
| programmer skill isn't a real thing. Well, such beliefs have
| consequences.
| wpietri wrote:
| > People keep claiming over and over that you'd not lose money
| like this with (non-smart) contracts because the court would
| always rule your way.
|
| If people do it that much, surely you could give us links to 3
| or 4 of them? I'm interested, as I've never seen anybody claim
| that.
| specialp wrote:
| I don't think any "people" are claiming it will ALWAYS go your
| way, and if they are they are wrong. The point is at least you
| have a shot at some sort of remediation. You can appeal to
| courts and work it out. Sometimes there can be an error so
| egregious that you end up losing your money. But in general the
| intent of a contract is strongly considered with human
| decisions. Computers have no concept of intent. Yes
| incompetence is everywhere, but how often does one messed up
| line lose millions of dollars? Even skilled developers make
| mistakes. We saw it at the very dawn of smart contracts with
| the DAO being broken, and Ethereum forking which blew up the
| "irreversabilty feature", and showed that there is great
| potential for a contract to be not what was intended.
|
| With crypto if the cryptography is secure you have absolutely
| zero recourse to get your money back. Ever. One of the selling
| points of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts is the non
| reversibility/mutability of them. However it has been shown
| many times that that causes harm more often then it has
| benefit. Loads of assets have been stolen/lost/rendered
| irrecoverable.
|
| In this case ALL parties would agree that it is definitely not
| was desired when they went into the contract so it would not
| even have to go to mediation. They could simply write a new
| contract rendering the other void in the non crypto world.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > People keep claiming over and over that you'd not lose money
| like this with (non-smart) contracts because the court would
| always rule your way.
|
| I don't think anyone is claiming that the court would _always_
| rule your way; that 's a strawman. Courts do stupid shit all
| the time.
|
| The point is that a court _could_ rule in your favor. With
| something like this, what 's the remedy? How is a court going
| to order some developer to undo a transaction posted to an
| immutable ledger? What do you do when the source of truth is
| wrong, and cannot be altered?
| erulabs wrote:
| Agreed the original post was a bit of a straw man but now
| we're just weighing risks. If a court can make a stupid
| decision with someone's assets then it flows both ways: a
| court can take as well as return. So yes crypto fails to be
| recoverable by a court - but that's obviously offset by being
| difficult to be stolen by a court too. The fact that most
| western countries don't wholesale steal from their citizens
| means it's easy to discount this benefit in the face of this
| cost.
| efitz wrote:
| The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are
| the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by
| "normies".
|
| With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute resolution
| and restitution. They are not all perfect but they work often
| enough that people still have faith in the system.
|
| Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where
| one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings
| (for example), the product of decades of work.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It IS reversible. Just whine on social media until the primary
| stakeholders fork the blockchain!
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| This will never happen during such a stable and highly
| adopted period of Ethereum, FUD.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It only works when they are the losers.
| michaelt wrote:
| While that was true for the DAO, very few people are rich and
| powerful enough for the rulemakers to bail them out when they
| mess up.
|
| If the typical NFT buyer has their 'Ape' stolen they have to
| spend tens of thousands of dollars buying it back.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Good luck with that
| omegalulw wrote:
| I would agree in any free society, where you can trust
| institutions to fix such mistakes when they happen, this risk
| of irreversible transactions is not worth the reward.
|
| But when the alternative is a dictator arbitrarily
| seizing/taxing your money, devaluing it through poor economic
| policies, the risk doesn't seem so bad eh?
| JofArnold wrote:
| My friend took a year, over 150 calls and legal intervention to
| get money back that HSBC stole. Obviously not the same but to
| say that banks are faultless just isn't true; their systems
| also have edge cases from which there is often little hope of
| return.
| ineedasername wrote:
| They didn't say it was faultless. A year & 150 phones calls
| is a significant improvement on "nope, nope, not ever ever
| ever ever".
|
| Also the current system at least has the potential to be
| improved, maybe. While irreversibility is baked into the
| ideology of many (not all) proponents if crypto.
| danamit wrote:
| You can implement irreversibility in a blockchain or a
| smart contract easily, many coins can freeze funds and
| issue funds, that's defacto irreversibility.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> Irreversibility is both easy & often_
|
| Did you mean reversibility? Because otherwise you're
| agreeing with me: I'm saying irreversibility is easy,
| often the default with crypto Yes, that is what I am
| saying. In traditional banking reversibility is easier,
| and (mostly) the norm for situations of standard human
| error.
|
| In the case of this particular contract a limited form of
| reversibility is even what was intended, but that doesn't
| matter. It's a system that doesn't allow for honest
| error.
|
| For some, that's a feature. For the vast majority
| required to take smart contracts mainstream, that is not
| a feature. Better error resistant reversibility _can_ be
| built, and that 's when things may become attractive to
| more people. But, again, many proponents view
| irreversibility as a feature so it's not primary
| consideration when building things.
| [deleted]
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Only to the extent that the code doesn't have bugs and
| your algorithm has no design flaws. (All code has bugs
| and you should assume all algorithms have design flaws.)
| azinman2 wrote:
| Seems this is a counter example.
| efitz wrote:
| I didn't say banks were faultless. I didn't say that any
| aspect of a fiat currency based system is perfect. I just
| said that redress works often enough that people don't give
| up on it.
| drdec wrote:
| I think that the point is not that non-crypto systems are
| perfect, but at least they do not have flaws which could make
| the reversal of a transaction a mathematical impossibility.
| In non-crypto systems if you convince the right humans,
| things can be reversed.
| hderms wrote:
| But he got it back, right? P(recovery) = 0 is a whole
| different ball game than flip a coin and maybe the bank will
| relent
| wpietri wrote:
| > to say that banks are faultless
|
| You are replying to somebody who said literally the opposite:
| "They are not all perfect"
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Hey, are you still using Keybase?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's terrible. I've only heard bad things about HSBC,
| although that's true of most banks to be honest.
|
| However, it's going to take more than 150 calls and a lawyer
| to hard fork the ethereum chain to roll back this contract.
|
| Perhaps a class action lawsuit can force the auctioneers to
| pay back the money despite not having access to it
| themselves. Either way, there's literally no way for the
| misdirected cryptocurrency to ever return.
| Veen wrote:
| The point is not that banks are faultless (no one claimed
| they were) but that remediation is possible, as you have just
| attested to: your friend got his/her money back. Your story
| shows the system is working--that's precisely what "legal
| intervention" is for.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > as you have just attested to: your friend got his/her
| money back
|
| Missing the point.
| Veen wrote:
| How so?
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| They didn't get their money back. The bank lost money,
| but they have a lot so they don't care. In cryptocurrency
| every sat or Wei is accounted for. You can't make them
| up. A loss can never be undone.
|
| People need to look at this as like chartering a 17th
| century galleon. It sank. Gold was lost at sea,
| unreachable by todays tech. Maybe in 200 years someone
| can crack ECDSA and recover it.
| netsharc wrote:
| Ah yeah, thanks to 21st century tech, now you emulate
| 17th century risks when holding wealth! Progress!
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| It approximates a different risk game, and as such has a
| different reward schedule. Some people like to play games
| on hardcore mode (eg: permadeath, 1 life) too.
|
| Not everything needs to be sanitized for one's safety.
| netsharc wrote:
| Well, are you advocating crypto for investing, or for the
| future of money? If the future of money, then you can't
| ask everyone in society to "well it's going to be more
| risky! But it's better!". If it's for investing, go
| ahead, I can also suggest putting all your money on black
| and have a 50-50 risk of doubling it or going home empty
| handed.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Only if you truly, and I mean truly, understand the depth
| of chaos that has been brought on by "progress".
| all2well wrote:
| The problem you're describing with physical coinage is
| one of the reasons why paper money was invented in
| Europe, among other places
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Right -- however it was always an abstraction. Lose gold
| at sea? Well just because the bank ignores this event and
| issues more paper doesn't mean the ship didn't sink. I
| understand that the concept of reversibility is highly
| desirable, but that bank can not raise the sunken ship
| right now. It has to take the loss and not just pretend
| it didn't happen. Reversibility is always an illusion.
| Most things in this universe are actually permanent.
| danamit wrote:
| The issue with banks is that the battle is legal/social,
| for example as someone who get paid by international wires
| often let me tell you that sometimes (rare cases but when
| it happens it happen to many) the money just disappears for
| months, and there is no way to troubleshoot it as a normal
| individual, you just go to the bank and ask about your
| money and either they just deny there is anything they can
| do and blame it on the sender, or just give you looks and
| question the legitimacy of what you are doing.
|
| Sometimes banks freeze international wires until the
| government investigate the source of the funds to make sure
| they are not funding terrorism, this happen to any sum
| higher than $5k in my country for example. I just wish to
| never be in such a position.
| bogota wrote:
| Not to mention when doing large wires with countries that
| have to do exchanges through a national bank your third
| party can just forget to accept it. Then you get a wire
| reversed for a large amount in some cases and the bank
| freezes your assets because you just got a huge amount of
| money from some random place. The thin vail of freedom is
| quickly lifted whenever you want to do anything
| international from sending money to getting married.
|
| This happened to me when purchasing a house in another
| country.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| None of those issues are resolved by crypto.
|
| If crypto is to be legitimized, the government isn't
| simply gonna say, too bad, the stuff we think is
| absolutely necessary to the point we suspended civil
| liberties for, that stuff we will ignore for you.
|
| Whether you agree with what the govt is doing or not,
| they aren't gonna stop doing it because it's crypto.
| zelon88 wrote:
| And in those cases you escalate or you lawyer up.
|
| You can't sue a typo.
| caiomassan wrote:
| it depends on the country u are in. in Brazil the law is a
| joke. I prefer to risk a typo then be entangle in any legal
| battle here. I know people that won cases 30 years ago, and
| are yet to see any money.
| fidrelity wrote:
| But there is insurance for smart contract integrity already
| deployed and in use for a multitude of projects (see
| unslashed finance for example).
|
| I don't need to sue as long as I get my money back.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That is the best Web3 quote I've heard all year.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The "oracle problem" is the reason why I lost interest in
| crypto after the 2017 boom, when I really got into the nitty-
| gritty of crypto.
|
| The trust built into crypto is rock solid, the problem is that
| it's scope is so narrow and limited that even after a decade
| it's still searching for a major trust problem to solve. In
| this case you cannot reverse crypto payments because there is
| no oracle that can do it. You would need to find God's own API
| for reality.
|
| I was however totally wrong about the future (monetary) value
| of crypto in early 2018. I guess sometimes it pays more to know
| less.
|
| Edit: Also of course every single crypto org obfuscates and is
| opaque as possible about the oracle problem. I'd venture that
| most investing in the space don't know what it is.
| imtringued wrote:
| The obvious problem with Blockchains is that they can only
| manipulate things that exist inside of them. This means even
| something as basic as the interaction between blockchains is
| troublesome.
| biztos wrote:
| There is a lot of "hidden oracle" going on in the upstart
| "level one" blockchains too, hidden in the sense that an
| outsider would never guess that's part of the deal.
|
| I find it kind of fascinating to, for (made-up) example,
| place real-money bets not on the future of the price of gold
| but on what the contract at $ADDRESS will say it is in the
| future. Do people understand what they're actually betting
| on?
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The vast majority of gold speculation (well before
| blockchains existed) is not based on the actual price of
| gold, but rather what $EXCHANGE says is the price of gold.
| Very few gold investors are holding physical gold.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| The actual spot price varies city to city and even dealer
| to dealer, just like any other physical commodity. But
| because gold is relatively liquid it is unlikely that
| this difference is too big, otherwise it allows for an
| arbitrage opportunity
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Agree and disagree. Yes, you're right that in many cases you
| have to rely on an external oracle, so a protocol can't be
| fully "trustless".
|
| However the difference is that we can abstract away the
| oracle from the rest of the value transfer mechanism.
|
| For example if we want to bet on the winner of the Super
| Bowl, in the old days we'd have to find a trusted third party
| to hold the money for us. Essentially a bookie. Finding a
| trusted bookie, especially one who's licensed in multiple
| jurisdictions is really hard.
|
| In contrast, we can probably find a trusted "oracle" for the
| Super Bowl much easier. For example AP is extremely
| trustworthy (largely because they're _not_ in the legally
| dodgy business of sports betting). As long as AP
| cryptographically signs the outcome of the game (as they do
| for all HTTPS served content), we now have a highly trusted
| oracle. We can handle all the other mechanics around betting
| and payoffs inside a trustless smart contract.
|
| In fact we can take this even a step further and use
| _multiple_ trusted sources in a multisig setup. The chance
| that AP, ESPN, NBC sports and Google all collude to lie about
| the Super Bowl is extremely small.
|
| So while the oracle problem means we can't completely
| eliminate the need for trust, it can _drastically reduce_ the
| surface area of risk by abstracting away the informational
| layer from the value transference layer.
| milkey_mouse wrote:
| > As long as AP cryptographically signs the outcome of the
| game (as they do for all HTTPS served content)
|
| I looked into this use case before and came to the
| conclusion that it can't work because TLS is not non-
| repudiable. Once the initial public-key handshake is
| finished, the rest of the session uses a symmetric cipher.
| Because anyone with the symmetric cipher's key can encrypt
| their own data with it, you could encrypt your own spoofed
| response from the server in any transcript of the session.
|
| https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29751/are-
| https-w...
|
| One solution to this is to use the site's public key to
| sign a Web Bundle instead of using TLS:
|
| https://web.dev/web-bundles/
|
| https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-
| origin-...
|
| Web bundles can be served from any origin (and I'd imagine
| can be verified by oracles) as the data itself is signed.
| However, this requires the server to use web bundles in the
| first place, which likely isn't happening any time soon.
| Mozilla considers the proposal harmful: they expect Google
| will serve the majority of web bundles, allowing them to
| see what sites the user is visiting.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/264
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/30/google-proposed-web-
| bundle...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The problem is that it inherently places an ever growing
| bounty on corrupting those "trusted" sources which are in
| fact human, not cryptographic.
|
| The bounty in crypto is only in cracking whatever chosen
| cryptography, and this is the very heart of crypto's
| provably rock solid trust. This bounty is worth _trillions_
| , but we known with a (very) high level of certainty that
| no one can claim it. You would have to have broken
| cryptography, or developed a sci-fi level computer chip in
| total secret.
|
| How much can you trust a handful of news sources when the
| bounty for gaming them reaches the billions or hundreds of
| billions in value? What kind of person suddenly wants to
| become an editor when they get to wear one of the rings of
| power? (sorry I've been reading LOTR lately)
|
| There is a simple calculus here (and everywhere) that shows
| that as the value of trust grows, so does the value of
| breaking that trust. Crypto solves this by making the cost
| of breaking that trust far outside human's capability. It
| probably would be be asking too much to introduce an
| element that suddenly makes that cost practically
| obtainable compared to cracking crypto.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Same here but I had a much more cynical view of the oracle
| issue that it is _by design_ aimed at eventual and total
| financial destruction of most participants. This cynicism
| were fueled further by the ideology that justified this for
| some great adoption that was promised even further back.
|
| You can have decentralized systems but because monetary
| wealth accumulation is centralized by nature, and any
| decentralized system that introduces monetary accumulation
| and inflation reverts to a centralized state.
|
| A good example of this is Bitcoin. Those with the most liquid
| currency (fiat) can buy more hardware that centralizes
| wealth. You simply cannot have an MLM scheme without a
| pyramid.
| cinntaile wrote:
| > it is by design aimed at eventual and total financial
| destruction of most participants.
|
| Your entire post is about inevitable centralization but
| that is not the oracle problem. The oracle problem is about
| providing access to real life data on the blockchain, but
| the issue is that you still need to trust someone to
| provide that data. Maybe I am misunderstanding you but I
| don't get how that by design leads to the total financial
| destruction of most participants?
| 323 wrote:
| The DAO debacle showed that it's not really irreversible.
|
| Thought experiment: a bug is exploited tomorrow which locks
| forever $50 billion worth of ETH, including of prominent
| VCs/users/exchanges.
|
| You will see suddenly how consensus crystalizes to do a hard
| fork reversion of the exploit.
| ironSkillet wrote:
| So things are only reversible when the vast majority of users
| get impacted? That does not seem like a recipe for a stable
| financial system. Too many individuals will get screwed over
| in edge cases to drive mass adoption.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> So things are only reversible when the vast majority of
| users get impacted?_
|
| Close, but not quite. It's not a democracy, it's a
| plutocracy. Things are only reversible when those few who
| hold the majority of the wealth are impacted.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| The Parity multisig bug locked 509019 ETH, which is around
| $1.5 billion today
| zapdrive wrote:
| The DAO fork was exceptionally sinister. In essence a new
| transaction was inserted into the Blockchain without an
| accompanying signature!
| fidrelity wrote:
| Since The DAO incident 'the code is the law' ceased to exist
| on Ethereum. It became 'the majority interpretation of the
| code is the law'.
| mylons wrote:
| try to reverse a wire transfer
| skybrian wrote:
| Apparently, it's done by having professionals in the loop who
| will usually send the money back. (There are exceptions.)
|
| <https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/>
|
| > Of course wires are reversible. They were not designed by
| children, but by professionals who live in a society which
| has systemically important institutions, and in the event of
| malfeasance or mistakes society does not tolerate a bank
| failing or a state missing payroll simply because someone
| said "no takesies-backsies" fast enough.
|
| > Mistakes happen! By, conservatively, the hundreds of
| thousands daily across all payments systems, millions
| depending on your definition of mistake. Wire transfers, like
| almost all payment systems, explicitly contemplate them and
| have a sociolegal ritual to quickly reverse them.
|
| > The ritual is called "hold harmless" and comes from a soft
| guarantee about the wire transfer ecosystem, which is that
| transactions are largely between sophisticated counterparties
| acting in good faith, intermediated by institutions whose
| probity is almost sacrosanct. Importantly, wires are in
| expectation worth having a human in the loop for; that is
| very not true of most payments.
| SilasX wrote:
| Correct, if you have two powerful participants, who can
| hold mutually assured destruction over each other, then --
| stars above! -- they play nice.
|
| Now try the same scenario when you're an ordinary Schmoe
| who wired money to an obvious scammer, and then tell me
| whether you still believe Patrick's model of the banking
| system as a giant kumbaya circle run on gentlemen's
| agreements to Do The Right Thing.
| tyrfing wrote:
| This seems to be a description of how coordinating
| counterparties can reverse transactions made over any
| medium, with a bit of argument alchemy to shift the
| discussion from individuals to banks representing them.
|
| > It took the combined forces of several agencies of the
| federal government more than five years to reverse ~$4.5
| billion in Bitcoin transaction
|
| Unlike the Bangladesh Bank hack, for example, which they
| were unable to reverse.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You're only illustrating the fact that given an honest
| error in crypto, reversibility tends to be the exception,
| not a rule. While in traditional finance it's the
| reverse.
|
| Taking any one scenario where it didn't work out that way
| is highly selective cherry picking. There is not
| functional equivalence between "almost always impossible"
| and "almost always possible".
| SilasX wrote:
| It's only the rule in normal banking if you restrict your
| domain to large, powerful banks. Anyone else is on their
| own.
|
| Elaboration:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31139114
| tyrfing wrote:
| It's a counterexample, not an attempt to prove
| equivalence. Banks-as-middlemen allow reversing just
| about anything on the basis of firm handshakes, with
| little regard to the wishes of the parties they stand in
| for. Taking "reverse" to mean "do it again in the other
| direction" and "reversible" to mean "untrusted parties
| delegate control to intermediaries who trust each other",
| both of which are true here, means it's perfectly
| compatible with crypto. It does render any advantages
| moot, but avoiding the latter is typically the goal, and
| this linguistic sleight of hand obscures it.
|
| For the actual topic, I don't have any respect for these
| ICOs/mints/[newest renaming], they're shameless cash
| grabs with 98% marketing and 2% upwork-tier code.
| However, you can burn a million quid; I don't think it's
| a big deal that you can burn 34 million in digital
| currency due to extreme negligence.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _counterexample, not an attempt to prove equivalence._
|
| That's fair, I just see lots of discussions where single
| examples are used to (often literally) say "that's no
| different from other finance".
|
| And I agree reversibility can be built for crypto, it's
| just that right now that is not the norm, and defi
| probably won't see wide adoption until that changes a
| bit.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > However, you can burn a million quid
|
| KLF much?
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, I think it's pushing back on the overly binary idea
| that transactions are always/never reversible but it does
| it by being overly binary in the opposite direction.
|
| A better summary might be "transactions are reversible in
| more cases than you would expect."
|
| Also, transactions that aren't reversible at a low level
| are often reversible at a higher level in the stack.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The Bangladesh hack was unable to be reversed because the
| attackers exploited holidays in multiple countries to
| create a multi-day window where they could be reasonably
| sure that people wouldn't be auditing the transaction.
|
| And of that hack, I think something like 90% of the
| transactions for stolen money _were_ reversed, but a
| significant portion got through because of the timing.
|
| edit- and IIRC the whole thing was caught because of a
| typo?
| [deleted]
| esjeon wrote:
| Welp, at least, the wire transfer process itself delivered
| the money to the correct recipient.
|
| Now, imagine this: an error in a transfer contract locks away
| funds, not only from victims, but also from phishers. What a
| beautiful world to live in.
| atchoo wrote:
| Linus from LTT recently reversed a $90k wire he was tricked
| into sending after a contractor was hacked. It's not like the
| destination of a fraudulent wire is an anonymous blackhole.
| In this case it was a wire to another Canadian bank. The
| money was frozen during an investigation and then returned a
| week or two later.
| politician wrote:
| That only worked because the funds didn't bounce somewhere
| else first. Wire transfers are final.
| multjoy wrote:
| Until the two banks agree that it isn't. Errors happen
| all the time.
|
| https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/
| politician wrote:
| "The finality of wires is path dependent" is a statement
| that I would agree with.
| otterley wrote:
| The wire transfer transaction may be final, but that's
| not the end of the story. A court can subsequently compel
| the receiving bank or party to send the funds back to the
| sender.
| politician wrote:
| That's true, but depending on the path, funds might end
| up in various jurisdictions, complicating the recovery
| story.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The same thing applies to crypto.
| otterley wrote:
| Do you always know who you're trading with in crypto? How
| do you identify the counterparty to make the demand from?
| This isn't a problem with ordinary transactions, where
| the two parties have regulated organizations making the
| trade on their respective behalf. Even in stock trades,
| where the counterparties are anonymous, there is a
| mechanism for reversing trades because the system was
| designed for it.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Linus heavily implied that he had an "in" at a senior level
| that could make an investigation happen and get the funds
| frozen before they were moved. I don't know about you, but
| I certainly don't have that level of power.
|
| The destination of a fraudulent wire will be known, but
| that money is practically unrecoverable if it takes another
| hop or gets withdrawn.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Ah, but you can go an entire lifetime without doing a wire
| transfer, and even if you don't the risks are well known at
| this point.
| yonig wrote:
| You're right but I find it funny that before this thread I
| was reading this one
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133963
| gpvos wrote:
| In Europe you can't, wire transfers are the main way of
| transferring money.
| gst wrote:
| In Europe you have SEPA transfers where the reversibility
| after a transfer is comparable to a wire transfer. You
| can't really avoid them because they are the standard way
| of transferring money (if you don't pay by card or use
| direct debit).
| ineedasername wrote:
| That, vs this situation, is the difference between
| "difficult, maybe costly (legals bills) & time constrained"
| vs "impossible"
|
| I don't want the later for anything I consider a large
| financial transaction.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| You could design a contract that could be bug-fixed and
| upgraded provided some % of stakeholders consent to the
| upgrade. These platforms are still in their infancy so
| upgradability or even just thorough testing and auditing is
| rare.
| layer8 wrote:
| It also works the other way around: When in conflict, law (and
| force) will always have precedence over smart contracts.
| nathias wrote:
| Layer 1 is not for normies, but abstractions on that can
| provide any functionality that they need.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I think this is a good point to go deeper on. Layer 1 should
| be immutable and irreversible, while Layer 2 can have public,
| multi-sig/vote-based upgrade processes.
|
| In this case, on a layer 2, the contract code could be
| updated, but only if those with locked ETH vote for the
| upgrade to be processed. Better yet, the Layer 2 could allow
| ETH to be withdrawn from the contract by the owners and the
| contract itself could be deleted.
|
| I think the general, technically-informed public often miss
| the distinction between Layer 1 and Layer X and how they
| differ in the need for decentralization and censorship
| resistance while still providing users with security.
| nathias wrote:
| Even the industry isnt quite there yet, what we will
| probably see, will be a truly post-maxi crypto that will
| focus on interoperable dapps and other higher abstract
| decentralized entities that will be agnostic towards their
| L1 and will just plug them in as needed ...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system
| where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life
| savings (for example), the product of decades of work.
|
| This might be true without mattering much -- most people don't
| have decades of savings. If you're not willing to lose the
| product of decades of work, but you never have more than a year
| worth of savings, what does your unwillingness mean?
| progman32 wrote:
| Just because savings won't last more than a year doesn't mean
| those savings aren't the product of a decade of work.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Most people do not have savings that are the product of
| more than a year of work.
| progman32 wrote:
| Think I'm missing your point. Are you suggesting that
| most people have total savings < one year's income?
| ddingus wrote:
| Most people do have savings considerably less than a
| years income.
| rvz wrote:
| Well:
|
| > The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency
| are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by
| "normies".
|
| Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or
| gained significant adoption by normies?
|
| > With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute
| resolution and restitution. They are not all perfect but they
| work often enough that people still have faith in the system.
|
| Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is good
| as well? Is that why when the payment processor encounters tons
| of friendly fraud in a merchants account they lock up your
| account and you're unable to accept payments anymore,
| effectively killing your business.
|
| The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or
| not and will take the money from you regardless of you wasting
| time countering the disputes to prove that it is fraudlent.
| Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer and that
| system can be abused.
|
| > Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system
| where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life
| savings (for example), the product of decades of work.
|
| Yeah, most businesses and banks are doing just fine with the
| _reversibility_ of wire transfers aren 't they? [0]
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Companies like Visa/Amex don't just provide a transaction
| network, they provide insurance for a fee. You know when you
| use your Visa debit/credit card that certain assurances are
| made. Among other things you can do charge-backs, and they
| will debit the merchant. The merchant pays a % cut to the
| network/insurer and it's built into the price of goods and
| services.
|
| If such insurance/service guarantees are of interest to the
| market, they will be provided.
|
| The weird thing is people associate Visa transactions with
| business that are real legal entities that have contracts
| with Visa and you could sue, but as soon as you say Bitcoin
| they assume every transaction is like a Nigerian prince scam.
| These associations are the result of effective marketing by
| people who want you to feel that way.
| Volundr wrote:
| > Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or
| gained significant adoption by normies?
|
| ACH has reversal built in. Wire transfers are harder but
| there are remedies through the legal system. In neither case
| is the money simply locked up and never usable again.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is
| good as well? Is that why when the payment processor
| encounters tons of friendly fraud in a merchants account they
| lock up your account and you're unable to accept payments
| anymore, effectively killing your business.
|
| >The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or
| not and will take the money from you regardless of you
| wasting time countering the disputes to prove that it is
| fraudlent. Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer
| and that system can be abused.
|
| Merely because the US system of handling chargebacks is
| dogshit and your companies have taken to making processes so
| unpractical that chargebacks are common practice. European
| banks perform 2FA checks for online purchases, and
| chargebacks are harder to execute, while still doable.
|
| But sure, throw the baby with the bathwater, the bath, the
| house and the city's water system because you forgot to
| decrement a counter in a shitty contract.
| Crabber wrote:
| I agree completely. Even as a person who is extremely confident
| with using computers I would not feel at all comfortable
| putting my life savings in a place where one typo or bug could
| cause me to lose everything.
|
| How is the average person expected to feel comfortable doing
| it?
| mattdesl wrote:
| The simple answer is to not put your life savings into
| "Akutars"[1] untested and unvetted token contract.
|
| [1] https://www.aku.world/
| raesene9 wrote:
| The challenge is, that's just one of many examples of
| problems that would be very opaque to non-experts.
|
| Without deep knowledge of the crypto space, and excellent
| operational security pratices, putting a significant amount
| of money into these projects is a risky prospect.
|
| For many people that's not a sensible trade-off.
| mattdesl wrote:
| Users sent their tokens to a contract that is less than
| 24 hours old, with code that had no prior exposure to the
| market. It does not take an expert to learn that "sending
| your tokens to random contracts is a high risk activity."
| But I will agree that consumer education & protection
| does need to improve in this space.
|
| FWIW the risk profile is different than interacting with
| something like WETH contract, which has had an $10+
| billion USD open bug bounty for long time frame.[1]
|
| [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c
| 4f27ead...
| b20000 wrote:
| but i thought leetcode style interviews was the best way to
| screen people and nobody needs people with experience???
| vmception wrote:
| The people that sent money to this contract still received the
| NFT right? Or _can_ still receive the NFT
|
| Its more about the project not having the operating capital (99%
| margin lol) and also loosing some confidence which they can
| recreate by performing parts of the roadmap and getting the
| community their NFTs? (the verified person is already saying they
| will airdrop NFTs and reimburse some participants when banks open
| so they wire dollars, convert that to ether, and send to some
| participants)
| danielvf wrote:
| Correct, the project can just create another set of NFT's and
| "bless" them as the official ones.
| dropnerd wrote:
| the project created mint passes that qualify you to receive
| an airdrop. this hasn't changed
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Only demonstrating that the "original" NFTs were worthless to
| begin with.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Does this mean an infitesimal bump in the value of remaining
| ethereum?
| vmception wrote:
| yep! one could make a "locked clock" that predicts the
| distribution of inaccessible Ether to support their bullish
| hypothesis
| 300bps wrote:
| Infinitesimal is right.
|
| Since EIP-1559 went live in August 2021, over $6.3 billion
| worth of Ethereum has been burned since they now burn
| transaction fees instead of giving them to miners. They burn
| about $11 million per day!
|
| This $34 million is a drop in the bucket and note that even
| though all that was ETH burned, the price is still below where
| it was when they started.
|
| https://watchtheburn.com/
| toraway1234 wrote:
| dinvlad wrote:
| It seems like these systems ought to be developed with
| independent formal verification as a legal requirement. Or maybe
| that's too naive to dream about?
| vmception wrote:
| You could do that, it would still be up to the consumer to only
| choose to interact with those contracts and projects, just like
| it is now. But the consumer is undiscerning.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Code is protected as free speech by the US Supreme Court.
| There's no legal avenue by which you could prohibit someone
| from writing and publishing smart contract code.
|
| _At best_ the most you could do is setup a legal barrier to
| deploying that code to a block chain. Even then, this is
| legally iffy, since deploying chain simply involves
| broadcasting a message to the network. Most likely the court
| would interpret this as a form of published speech protected by
| the First Amendment.
|
| But even if not, you can still publish the smart contract code
| on GitHub and say "I sure hope no one outside my jurisdiction
| or an anonymous address takes this code and puts it on-chain.
| dinvlad wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with these points (although these are
| good insights). There are regulations that apply to code in
| other domains, like HIPAA/FedRAMP/banking compliance etc, so
| why cannot they be applied to blockchain providers as well?
| danielvf wrote:
| I've worked with using formal verification systems to secure
| smart contracts. It's less useful than you would think, for two
| reasons:
|
| 1. It's extremely hard to come up with the correct rules for
| expected behavior. It's like making a safe wish versus an evil
| genie. It's also surprisingly easy to make a rule that doesn't
| check anything, or what you think it does.
|
| 2. In the areas that deal with the most money, DeFi, there may
| be thirty program involved, most of which were not made by you
| or under your control. Current formal methods can just handle a
| single program. The common way to handle networks of contracts
| is to test each in isolation, making assumptions about what the
| other contracts can do. But it's really easy to make a wrong
| assumption here.
| dinvlad wrote:
| OK, that makes sense, thanks for the insight! I do still
| think it would be "helpful" to apply formal methods, even if
| they don't solve the problem 100%, just like some testing is
| better than no testing. Better than the current wild west at
| least, it would seem.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| $34 M worth of Ether at today's prices is lost. The dollars spent
| on them (probably a lot less than $34m) are almost all still in
| circulation.
| archibaldJ wrote:
| so the ether went into the ether ;) & nothing is lost
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Agreed. The $34M goes to all current ETH holders (in the long
| term of course).
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| That's an interesting way to think about it. No resources have
| been lost as it is a virtual thing and if we assume it to be
| worthless we haven't lost anything. Mind blown
| nikanj wrote:
| All of the resources were wasted buying power for mining
| rigs. Can't get that electricity back, and the power company
| doesn't do refunds
| erulabs wrote:
| Except people spent money in the market so - the mining rig
| companies now have the money and computers were built. The
| "waste" leaks into productivity at every joint.
| nikanj wrote:
| The power company has the money, coal was bought+burned.
| Ultimately this is a form of broken window fallacy -
| buying resource to literally burn them into thin air is
| not stimulating the economy
| lbotos wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but someone could fork Eth, and write
| code to "release these funds" back to their "owners" right?
|
| Adoption of this fork would be the critical factor, but if enough
| money gets locked up, it get more and more lucrative to "unlock
| it all" will be with your eth-unlocked fork.
| qeternity wrote:
| This has happened. It's called Ethereum.
|
| The original fork was mostly abandoned, and is known as
| Ethereum Classic.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| They already do this whenever one of the developers fat fingers
| their code and loses all their own holdings. The whole thing is
| kind of a scam.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| > whenever
|
| lol, once, at the beginning before it had traction...
| tyronehed wrote:
| Delicious. Somebody with $34 million of loose cash just got shown
| reality.
| giarc wrote:
| More like a few thousand people putting in $1000 here and there
| just got shown reality.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| 34,000 with cash to burn on NFTs, I keep up with the bigger
| projects, never heard of AkuDream and they got 34m, crazy
| michalu wrote:
| $34M are not locked. Rather the tokens some people paid $34M have
| now become worthless (untradeable). But those $34M have not
| disappeared they're on somebody's bank accounts. Such rhetoric is
| very deceptive.
| wpietri wrote:
| I am going to have your comment bronzed. It's such a perfect
| example of how in the crypto world the US dollar value is hyped
| in the good news. But once the news is bad people get all,
| "What even is money, man?"
| rideontime wrote:
| Effectively identical.
| vmception wrote:
| I think this is a strange take, sure the $34M is in the
| ethereum account but it is not in someone's bank account, _but_
| the people that sent money to that contract do have an NFT
| right? or have a claim for an NFT that can still be sent to
| them manually right? I think those NFTs don 't have to be
| worthless, there is just a temporary blip in confidence until
| the project proves they are still able to perform with less
| revenue/capital and also still motivated to do so.
| ilammy wrote:
| The car did not crash. Rather the money you paid for it has now
| become worthless (unridable). But that money has not
| disappeared, it's on somebody's bank accounts. Such rhetoric is
| very deceptive.
| michalu wrote:
| I think you've got the logic other way around.
| natly wrote:
| Excuse the basic question but what language is that? And does
| anyone have a good tutorial or similar on writing things like
| this? I know this is basic stuff but I hadn't really seen a real
| example of a 'smart contact' (I assume that's what this is) until
| now and seeing it like this is intriguing.
| danielvf wrote:
| If you are wanting to read some code, here's a an "ERC20"
| contract (a "money").
|
| https://github.com/Rari-Capital/solmate/blob/main/src/tokens...
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's Solidity: https://soliditylang.org/
| mdaniel wrote:
| https://cryptozombies.io/ may interest you
| anamax wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| Is this sort of like "I forgot my password"?
|
| If I put 100 $20 bills into a paper shredder, will someone make
| me whole?
|
| Of course not, yet when the analogous thing happens in crypto,
| that's somehow an argument crypto is fatally flawed.
| wpietri wrote:
| Ah yes. When crypto works, even barely, it's the magic perfect
| future financial system. When it doesn't work, it's entirely
| the user's fault and they are stupid doo-doo heads who deserve
| the blame. Such a classic "heads I win, tails you lose,"
| dynamic.
| jaclaz wrote:
| It seems to me like the comparison needs to be tweaked a bit
| (long before the possible recovery via the US central bank or
| treasury comes into play), this was a sort of guarantee/escrow,
| so let's imagine that you are told to put your 100 $20 bills
| into a safety deposit box, if you win the auction you give your
| key to the seller when you get the object, otherwise you can
| open the box and get your money back.
|
| Only the deposit box has a sliding plate at the bottom that may
| (or may not) be randomly pulled out and when/if this happens
| your bills will fall into a shredder.
|
| Would you make the deposit knowing how this particular box is
| made/managed?
|
| Or would you think that this particular kind of deposit box is
| flawed?
|
| Point is that you were told nothing in advance about the
| sliding plate and the shredder.
| sailfast wrote:
| That's a straw man. You're giving your money to a vendor
| expecting a return, and instead your money is just unusable
| forever sitting in front of you as a monument to test coverage
| because of a bug in code. The thing that caused the problem is
| supposedly the key feature of the system (immutability). This
| is why people argue crypto is flawed.
| jddddd wrote:
| Yes, if you can recover 51% of a bill and send it to the
| treasury they will make you whole. Not a perfect system and
| obviously can't help if both shred it and light it on fire but
| there is a recovery mechanism.
|
| Crypto has none, it's a feature to some but a deal breaker for
| most.
| pat2man wrote:
| Weird analogy because yes, if you put money in a paper shredder
| (at least in the US) the Mint will indeed allow you to send in
| your shredded money and receive cash in return:
| https://www.bep.gov/services/mutilated-currency-redemption/s...
| jfk13 wrote:
| Although they might refuse if they suspect "...a pattern of
| intentional mutilation...", so I wouldn't recommend shredding
| your savings just to demonstrate the system.
| burmanm wrote:
| Unless this has changed in the recent times, then yes you will
| get your money back as whole. If you have all the pieces, the
| bank (at least in Finland central bank will) will trade it to a
| new one and the old one is demolished.
|
| It is pretty normal for money to get damaged and reissued.
| akyu wrote:
| I think that the programming models used in blockchain are
| entirely wrong. This kind of thing happens all the time.
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