Re:$300m in cryptocurrency' accidentally lost forever due to...
by PeterisP on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @10:55AM
(#15653635)
Parity made this particular bug; but the bug and impact raise questions about:
1) Whether the Ethereum/Solidity design and implementation is good enough, because it seems that bugs like this and not like this are far too common and far too easy to make, and a better design/implementation would make such incidents less common;
2) Whether the Ethereum concept/sales pitch of smart contracts that cannot be overridden is actually something that the community wants, and perhaps there does need to be some structured way/process on how flawed contracts can be altered; as the DAO incident is some evidence that we might want a way to alter contracts in certain conditions, but the previously used solution of ad-hoc hard fork isn't a good one. Perhaps we do want smart contracts that can't be overridden in any way whatsoever, but we have to acknowledge that this has a serious price - incidents such as this one.
1) Whether the Ethereum/Solidity design and implementation is good enough, because it seems that bugs like this and not like this are far too common and far too easy to make, and a better design/implementation would make such incidents less common;
2) Whether the Ethereum concept/sales pitch of smart contracts that cannot be overridden is actually something that the community wants, and perhaps there does need to be some structured way/process on how flawed contracts can be altered; as the DAO incident is some evidence that we might want a way to alter contracts in certain conditions, but the previously used solution of ad-hoc hard fork isn't a good one. Perhaps we do want smart contracts that can't be overridden in any way whatsoever, but we have to acknowledge that this has a serious price - incidents such as this one.