Re:Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabi...
by darawk on Monday June 25, 2018 @04:24PM
(#17395496)
Changed arbitrarily by the author and immutable are pretty clearly not the only two options. Ethereum lets you design whatever governance scheme you want. You can build a system in which people vote on upgrades, for instance. You can structure that scheme however you want. It's just plain lazy thinking to say "welp code imperfect, therefore we can never use it for important stuff".
Re:Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabi...
by pavel_lishin on Monday June 25, 2018 @04:36PM
(#17395582)
Sure hope that system is bug-free.
Re:Researchers: Last Year’s ICOs Had Five Security Vulnerabi...
by darawk on Monday June 25, 2018 @04:50PM
(#17395684)
Yep, it'll take time to converge on high assurance implementations of these schemes. But we will. It is possible to write bug free code, particularly for relatively well defined, small areas.
This is the fatal flaw with smart contracts as a concept.
If they can be changed by the author then they don't provide the security guarantees that make the system worth using, but if they aren't changeable by the author then a huge fraction of smart contracts will ultimately end up doing something unintended because of any of the million reasons we don't normally expect first releases of alpha software to work perfectly in all circumstances.
In a perfect world Etherium would work great, but we don't live in a perfect world. People make mistakes. Any system which expects human input but isn't designed to gracefully handle human error (including the humans who programmed the system) is probably not going to end well.