> Ethereum has had lots of these hacks, due to bugs in the smart contracts provided.

Code is law, bro. These aren't hacks or bugs. They are inert chunks of code that all play by. Even "bugs" in the execution engine are fair game when code is law...

The fine folks who carefully investigated the DAO smart contract and transferred lots of its value to their possession are just as entitled to that wealth as the people who possessed it in the first place. There was no hacking and no thievery. The smart contract was executing exactly as it was written. I argue the only people playing in bad faith were the makers of ethereum and the DAO, who rolled back the blockchain and stole the funds back into their hands.

Now this argument sounds silly, but I stand by it. Code is law is a horrible idea. But if you want to live in that world... all "bugs" are just as much of the "law" as the stuff that isn't a "bug".

The Ethereum core devs didn't unilaterally decide to roll back the blockchain, that's not how the governance system works. The majority of the community decided to return the funds, the dissenters left and formed Ethereum Classic. The community decides what is law, not the code or the devs.

Next they’ll learn why we have this thing called democracy and how it’s used to enact laws and oversee enforcement.

Wait, what is crypto about again? I can’t figure it out.

These days it is about anything can meme and get people to make fomo-driven buys of crypto at spot prices.

It used to be about decentralized peer-to-peer money that is highly resistant to censorship.

Then that got blown to bit because satoshi didn’t possess enough foresight to realize that one day it will get owned by a handful of people who will leverage the artificial scarcity to conduct endless pump-and-dumps to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.

How do you think Satoshi would have reacted to the current state of affairs? You think he would see this “cryptocurrency” space as the path to solving the problem of money and corruption in finance?

It’s almost like the finance system we have today is the result of complex adaptation. It’s not perfect, but it seems less corrupt, more stable, more approachable, and more useful than the crypto space.

Definitely. Cryptocurrency had a chance to be very useful (to society) in a niche but then it blew up in scope. Now, everyone seems to have missed the forest for the trees.

You can’t fix fundamental problems in modern economics by fixating on the properties of money which can be altered (presumably for the better) through technology?

The governance process is essentially democratic, it's been like that since the beginning. Many, probably most, of the strict "code is law" are more aligned with bitcoin and left after the DAO fork.

You and I have very different ideas about the definition of democratic.

Community == mob rule.

Post like this are why I read this board.

Going to think about this while I walk. That is a tough argument to counter.

No argument..bro.

Still, last time they called it a bug and rolled back the chain.

"Bugs are law" :))

These aren't protocol level hacks. These hacks exploit logic flaws in the smart contracts.

Apparently, this wasn't a smart contract hack:

https://twitter.com/Mudit__Gupta/status/1425115177771405312

Ah, the old "single-key multisig".

It was a multisig.

It's not multisig if keys_required=1.

Doesn't the key compromise make it even less of a protocol hack?

Which are enforced by the protocol.

If an AWS hosted site gets SQL injected who is to blame?

Russia? /s

If your solution blindly trusts buggy user-space code due to its construction, is it not to blame?

Ethereum actually offers interesting features and possibilities as well as being a currency. Bitcoin, litecoin and especially monero are only useful when you want to spend money in a way a government doesn't want you too.

Solutions for problems that don't exist. While opening up a huge attack surface.

Blockchains don't need to be turing complete, for reasons like the contents of this article.