On the actual contract, it's possible a court would find that the contract was between parties x and y, and therefore party z inserting themselves into it is not valid. Often law comes down to intent, so the hacker could well find themselves in trouble, even if technically all they did was play by the rules allowed by the contract.<p>There is another interesting point here, which I think applies to Bitcoin too - if the blockchain/smart contract is the distributed source of truth and lets you deal with untrusted third parties without a middleman, it shouldn't require external arbitration.<p>If you need external arbitration in the event of problems, which requires verifying identity, intent, etc, why not have a central system with strong identities and regulatory bodies in the first place and forget the distributed system (which is slower and another point of failure), since the centralised system is what you fall back to anyway when the distributed trust fails.
One of the problems with Ethereum smart contracts is they are trying to do something that is basically impossible.<p>A contract is an explicit set of rules as to what the involved parties are supposed to do in every relevant situation that could arise. The problem is that in the real world it is very often simply impossible to anticipate every possible relevant situation. That is because the real world is so complicated, and we lack much of the needed information about what might happen in the future.<p>The consequence is that in business, unanticipated situations arise all the time where the signed contract either calls for something that would lead at least one party to suffer, or it is not at all clear what should be done.<p>%99 of the time, the involved parties simply decide informally what to do. 1% of the time one side sues, and in most of these cases the lawyers settle before trial. And if it goes to trial, the judge decides on things like intent and fairness that can't be clearly specified in a contract.<p>It is just not possible for smart contract coders to solve this problem that experienced business people can't. And let me add that this is similar to the problem with bugs. A bug arises when commands and/or data are encountered by the program that the coder had not anticipated, and so the program does something other than what is intended. It is the same basic problem of not being able to anticipate all possible situations, and so this is why all programs have bugs.
What is with the smart contract propaganda.<p>Let's put everything in a legal perspective using the DAO as the example...was what occurred there a "hack" or just a proper function of the contract which all parties agreed?<p>let's assume, all things being equal, the DAO smart contract wasn't a smart contract on the block chain but a regular contract, which included a provision allowing any single party to unilaterally take all the investment funds of the other parties to the contract...is that enforceable? No.<p>In fact with the SEC report on the DAO, we know the contract was likely an illegal offering of a security. Therefore, the entire contract is void and unenforceable and every party is entitled to their investment back, nothing changes because it was a smart contract on a block chain rather than a written contract.
This logic is the same as saying that an ATM has a software bug and if it spits out too much money it's okay to keep it. The reason being that the "intent" of the machine was programmed to dispense that amount of money. That still feels like stealing to me.<p>I also think the author misrepresents that the only purpose of the blockchain is to eliminate the central governing body. There are many other value propositions and uses for the technology. Here's just a few:<p>- Eliminates financial overhead and operational complexity for banking.<p>- Personal information control. Like profiles or identity data.<p>- Distributed network to sell things with trust<p>- Access to public records<p>- The author shoots down the value of ICO's. But the blockchain can offer a significantly cheaper alternative to clearing costs for equites.<p>And there so much other potential...
>When you own a cryptocurrency, you can’t really “hold it in your wallet” like you could have a $100 bill in your physical wallet. In crypto, your wallet is actually a key which is used to control the associated account number on the Blockchain.<p>This is misleading. "Owning" cryptocurrency comes down yo controlling the private key. Cryptos exist solely as information. The bank analogy is a poor one because it implies that there is a single physical collection of value, which is fundamentally opposed to the premise of a distributed ledger. I'm not sure that the author really grasps the function and utility of Cryptos based on this mischaracterization. I didnt read any further.
It seems we have some mismatch between the abstraction layer where we want to talk about cryptocurrencies and how their actual implementation goes.<p>IMHO, we are venturing to the domain of lawyers; most people are not just going to be saying computer code == what-we-agreed-here because most people are just normal people and they couldn't care about computer code. And let's face it, cryptos are already full of normal people, it's not for the early nerds anymore.<p>However, always keep in mind that cryptos are not regulated, they are not always too compatible with current regulation regarding normal money and they are extremely valuable when considering the fact that they are not regulated.
"The smart contract is the authority"<p>Not sure that's as clear as the article suggests (at least to the extent you are dealing with entities within the reach of U.S. law (which is a whole lot!)).<p>See my thoughts on this here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14820950" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14820950</a>
The previous owner of the $30M ought to create another smart contract that says something to the effect of: if $15M is sent to this wallet, all rights to press charges will be waived.<p>They recoop half the money and the "contract executor" can step above ground with no worries.
Oh come on, a blockchain isn't an improvement because you can call lawenforcment and they'll try to catch the hacker? This was 100% illegal, even if you consider the law article he linked.
It was a hack, clear as day. I really don't like this mindset of "code is law" that has arisen by calling the code being executed on the blockchain "contracts". I think people sometimes forget that these "smart contracts" are just code, no different than the code running HN or any other web app. This is a hack in the same sense that dumping a database from web app vulnerable to SQL injection would be considered a hack. Even though the code allowed it, it clearly isn't intended behavior.<p>It just seems so silly -- no system is perfectly secure; any developer can attest to this. There is always going to be a way skirt around the smart contract owner's intent, especially as the apps being run on the blockchain grow in complexity. To not blatantly call this malicious activity just doesn't sit well with me.