Re:Thoughts on the DAO Hack
by mtgx on Friday June 17, 2016 @11:37AM
(#11923264)
> I believe that Ethereum overall will emerge from this in a few weeks, having been made much stronger as a result. It will have a newfound direction and charter that involves a slight pivot, away from "let's get DApps at all costs, let's make front-end programmers into smart contract writers," towards "let's build up the science of secure, smart contracts."
You know how they always say "if only we knew then what we know now about Internet security, then we would've definitely made the Internet secure by default in the 90's!"
Except, even if they did know, they probably wouldn't have gone that path. There's always a strong incentive towards making stuff "easy to use", and the more secure you want to make it as well, the more work you have to put into it, to a point where the developers may think that it has "enough" security and they shouldn't waste too much funds on making it more secure (even though it's not really enough).
The "advantage" something like Ethereum has now compared to the Internet in the 90's, is that thousands of sophisticated attackers could try to hack it from day one, thus showing Ethereum developers how naive they are early on.
This is good news, because we'd rather have something like this happen early on, then 10-20 years from now after all of the world's banks and governments adopt it, and instead of a $40 million heist, we have a $4 trillion one.
You know how they always say "if only we knew then what we know now about Internet security, then we would've definitely made the Internet secure by default in the 90's!"
Except, even if they did know, they probably wouldn't have gone that path. There's always a strong incentive towards making stuff "easy to use", and the more secure you want to make it as well, the more work you have to put into it, to a point where the developers may think that it has "enough" security and they shouldn't waste too much funds on making it more secure (even though it's not really enough).
The "advantage" something like Ethereum has now compared to the Internet in the 90's, is that thousands of sophisticated attackers could try to hack it from day one, thus showing Ethereum developers how naive they are early on.
This is good news, because we'd rather have something like this happen early on, then 10-20 years from now after all of the world's banks and governments adopt it, and instead of a $40 million heist, we have a $4 trillion one.