Re:153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack
by cookiecaper on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @07:40PM
(#14808940)
I don't ridicule the need to have senses of justice and moral righteousness fulfilled. I think they should be accommodated by legal systems. My point is that systems must at least pretend to do so if they want public credibility.
Ethereum, as well as things like IPFS that say "Your content is permanent and irrevocable, don't publish if you don't like that", are non-starters because they overlook this core desire to operate under forgiving systems.
Many unfair or distorted legal regimes exist (including, to some degree, the American one), but they all make overtures toward these principles in some form or another. Ethereum et al must correct this if they want widespread adoption.
A system of laws devoid of all ambiguity and emotion isn't even possible, let alone desirable, because at some point these contracts have to come into contact reality, and the humans in it. And these humans happen to be, well: human.
I guess there's an ideology at play that would love to change humans to fit within their neatly arranged algorithms. And if that means some grandmother loses her house because she signed the wrong smart contract when buying cat-food, there'd be a lot expressions of sympathy on Twitter, but she really needs to understand that it's just not possible to do anything about, because principles etc etc.
Here and there, some of these people may, very privately, consider it a feature of the system that others less intelligent than them sometimes happen to die on the streets because of that one Saturday morning where they didn't audit all 500k lines of brainfuck in that contract for chinese takeout.
With less snark: the idea of ambiguity or emotions as being something negative is a somewhat naive view of reality, somewhere on the spectrum between Star Trek's ideal of Spock and the social darwinism of Ayn Rand. It's most often seen in the currently popular misunderstanding of how judges should behave, and how journalism supposedly used to work.
For an example that maybe is a bit less inflammatory than anything about journalism, check any recent threat about the Google vs Uber lawsuit: the presiding judge is almost a legend for his diligence in learning the technology in the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit a few years back. Yet people criticise him for a lack of decorum whenever he uses language that doesn't pretend to be a robot following an algorithm: "This judge is clearly biased! The contract clearly only says $50,000, and there's no law that gives him the authority to say those are USD. When the defendant says it means Canadian Dollars, it's he-said-she-said and undecidable"