Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by eek05 on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @06:09PM
(#14808457)
Not necessarily. Without judging the suitability of Ethereum for this, if you have something that does automated contracts at e.g. 9 nines reliability (fails one time in a billion), it may be very much worthwhile even if you have to fall back to the court system for the one in a billion occurrence.
Now, I'm skeptical of Ethereum's suitability in this space - the design doesn't seem to be geared enough towards correctness. However, they've also done some things that I really like (e.g. rolling back The DAO), so I'm not counting them out just yet.
Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by empath75 on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @06:43PM
(#14808643)
Rolling back the dao set a terrible precedent, and people that were ripped off in the latest hack should rightfully be asking for another fork. If there isn't one, then it'll be apparent that the developers will only protect their own interests.
Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by youdontknowtho on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @09:22PM
(#14809387)
That's a great point. It will be interesting to see what they do here. My bet is that they cover their interests, with an outside chance that they make up some kind of BS about percentage of ethereum in circulation vs the size of the fraud.
Software in general doesn't exist in a vacuum - it's backed by all the centuries-old meatspace institutions like common law, courts, and lawyers that provide a recourse when something goes wrong. As I understand Ethereum's whole purpose is to replace a lot of these institutions with "smart contracts" (correct me if I'm wrong). If Ethereum has to rely on the same institutions as every other piece of software to deal with contract disputes isn't it just adding more complexity to transactions?