Jeremy Clarkson published his bank account details in his column to back up his assertion that you can send money to a bank account but not withdraw any. However apparently anybody can set up an automatic payment from any account to any other account...

Those were not legal automatic payments

This exploit wasn't legal either. It was blatantly fraud. I've asked a lawyer for their opinion and it was a very simple question to answer. Contracts are never entirely literal and usually there are implied clauses in contracts. There is a very simple test called the "officious bystander": if there had been a neutral bystander who had asked "should we allow anyone to take $50 million dollars without our consent" then unless both parties would've said "of course!" then it isn't considered to be a clause of the contract and it is just simply fraud. The developers of theDAO wouldn't have said "of course" so it's fraud.

So, you are trying to be a great libertarian by doing without the courts of law and the state but then, when everything goes wrong with your money, you call for the opinion of the courts of law and for the state to enforce that opinion.

Oh the hypocrisy.

Right I would tend to agree. They really went out of their way though to say that the "code is the contract nothing else matters" I think that is where some of the doubt comes in.

Right before the theft they would have said "off course", so sure their code was perfect... They made it abundantly clear the truth was in the code, and that men justice was an obsolete concept.

It's effectively legal because a lot of financial fraud is not pursued.

For example, people from different countries scamming old people out of $1000 for Prince Abu to free his millions.

That being said, I can understand why you think something being legally exploitable is something new. Just like a loophole in a contract is a loophole in a contract.

In the case of smart contracts, there is no recourse unless built in to the contract. This is by design.

All that's going to happen is people will start writing smaller, more testable, less damaging contracts. This regime is different from legal contracts because many lawyers specifically write contracts to create problems later. In this new world, good contract writers will be gods.

So if you're a good software engineer, there is potentially a huge market about to open up for you.

> It's effectively legal because a lot of financial fraud is not pursued.

That's not what "legal" means. Just like killing people without leaving traces to find you is not "effectively legal". It may simply be not worth pursuing because of gain/effort trade off.

Scamming old people isn't a bug with the bank.

It's a bug in the system though.

No it isn't. People are meant to have free control over their money. Are advocating that banks should be required to protect people from themselves?

Exactly.