This philosophy permeates the community of Etherum development.
Bitcoin disabled most of the smart contracts op codes for a very good reason.
I wouldn't recommend putting anything of value into an Etherum smart contract and find a project with more responsible developers who take a more "wait and see" approach.
If HE can't get it right, what business do you have running around saying that anyone who can make a webpage can make a decentralized application?
We are playing with money. Dealing with attackers is not as simple as rebooting your server. Mistakes mean irreversible loss.
The devs in this industry are way over their heads and nobody is willing to admit it, because doing so destroys the entire core value prop of Ethereum, the poster child of the current bubble.
"If the creator of Solidity, Gavin Wood, cannot write a secure multisig wallet in Solidity, pretty much confirms Ethereum is hacker paradise."
Parity devs may be academically brilliant, and they put out a fantastic client, but the wallet issue shows how lax their development lifecycle has been.
Though crypto has risen past the high point of each of these bubbles, each price point can be definitively classified as a bubble in it's own time, and was followed by a crash that wiped out >70% of the market cap over the coming months/years.
Though it did recover, that doesn't mean it wasn't a bubble.
I believe cryptocurrency is going to be bigger than e-commerce is today. But it's not there yet, and it shouldn't be valued as though it has changed the world. It hasn't yet, and it's still a few years away at least from doing so.
Don't short hopium.
Bitcoin is also stuck in the past. Yes, Ethereum breaks things, but for me it's not about the money but about the technology stack. We're too early in the process to have the luxury of being able to stop innovating.
If I want to play with cool state-of-the-art technology I use Ethereum. For financial transactions I use my bank and/or Transferwise. Haven't quite yet figured out why I'd use Bitcoin for something.
it should not be this easy to lose sixteen million dollars
I'm amazed that otherwise intelligence people really believe this is a better system than fiat currencies + banks.
Financial institutions are accurate to tiny tiny fractions of percentage points. Not "eh we got 99% of it right".
Now why hasn't there been as much publicity about this? Is it because Vitalik Buterin is a wunderkind genius who simply beat them to market? Nope, the Bitcoiners are simply being more responsible and making sure they get the formula right before rushing to market.
Please see this article to get an idea of the personalities involved:
http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/08/17/gregory-maxwell-vitalik-bu...
Some projects have started sharing audit results publicly directly in their repos [1]. It's a great read to see common errors and yet unsolved issues that originate in the ERC20 token specification.
[0] https://github.com/ConsenSys/smart-contract-best-practices#i...
[1] https://github.com/status-im/status-network-token#reviewers-...
It's not even in the category of weird timing attacks or complicated internal states allowing unexpected state transitions -- this is a trivial bug that could be spotted by viewing the contract in Remix (the Solidity IDE).
There are certainly some weird edge cases in the Ethereum VM programming model that are hard to UT, and I think that dev efforts in this area are under-resourced (e.g. it's currently impossible to test time-dependent contracts as there's no way of mocking out the clock in the simulated blockchain).
If you are considering writing a smart contract, read and re-read https://github.com/ConsenSys/smart-contract-best-practices, and then write UTs for each of these cases so that you can convince yourself that you've covered them.
Relevant to this bug:
> Understand that your public functions are public, and may be called maliciously. Your private data is also viewable by anyone.