And that’s basically what happened here: Someone read the fine print of the trading platform and realized they could use a flash loan to push the system into a space where the trade would default and the attacker would profit. So they pressed the button and the system worked as designed.
If you want your gains/losses to be reasonably bound, you have to limit yourself to buying and selling stocks directly. Unfortunately, there's not enough money in that to make a living day-trading.
It is like when Kim Kardashian gets paid 50M for a 30 second add on Instagram. I may think that is unreasonable, but I don't have any contract with anyone implying that she be paid a standard actor's wage.
Intent is literally the heart of criminal law. You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. In this context, this means that you had to intend to do things that would legally constitute a crime, even if you did not know that the actions/result would be a crime. For some crimes, specific intent is not required for all of the factors (for example, for statutory rape, you do not need to have intended or even known that the other person was underage; for many manslaughter charges you do not have to have intended to kill someone so long as you intended to do things that could reasonably have been expected to cause someone's death).
Intent is also a fundamental factor in tort law, where intentional acts can literally quadruple the amount of damages the plaintiff may receive.
And in contract law, intent is a basic foundational element of a contract. And indeed, a number of contractual disputes arise over one party intending to make money, not actually making money, and suing their counter-party as a result. And many times, the plaintiff wins...
This situation is probably governed by contract law. Since those disputes turn entirely on the specific facts proving or disproving mutual intent, it's hard to say who would win in this dispute since only a small subset of the relevant facts are publicly known.
it is literally not. Though it is a requirement of some crimes.
> You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act.
No, you don't, in general. You have to have intended a particular outcome if the particular crime requires that, but plenty of crimes do not have such requirements (or specifically do not apply if intent is present). E.g., “depraved heart” murder, involuntary manslaughter, and any strict liability crime or crime of negligence or recklessness.
Even if intent isn’t written into a specific law, the whole system is built to specifically allow intent to be considered in so many stages. Sometimes they don’t even decide to prosecute.
Laws exists specifically to create a functioning society. Laws do not exist for the sake of having laws. Any sane person enforcing any kind of rule understands this.
This take is like programmers getting angry when businesses don’t care about the quality the the code or something, forgetting that the whole reason people hire programmers is to solve business problems, not to write text on a computer. Total miss of the point of the exercise.
Mental state (which is much broader than intent, though intent is an aspect of it) is an important consideration for criminal law and most offenses have a required mental state (strict liability offenses are a small minority). And mental state is, yes, considered broadly beyond the formal requirements, too.
But to say that “intent is literally the heart of criminal law” is both literally false and substantively misleading.
Intent is certainly a big part of law.
When examining classic contracts, a judge will try to also deem intent.
Contracts have been thrown out, interpreted by intent of parties.
An example, are the comments in the source code for this smart contract? Did everyone have opportunity to see them?
It could affect a court battle...
If your plan is to rely on the court system, then just rely on the court system. You can write your contract on paper; smart contracts serve no purpose whatsoever then.
But just as in real life, an executor can make mistakes.
Traditionally, a judge may return or redistribute assets in such a case. Or claim the will was not interpreted correctly. In such cases, determining the intent of the contract is the goal of the court.
Like it or not, smart contracts are not immune to contract law, civil law, courts.
The first court cases, which will undoubtedly happen, will be very interesting.
And moreso, different legal jurisdictions will interpret things differently. If I was writing smart contracts, I'd want some sort of boilerplate, insisting upon legal jurisdiction, maybe like an open source license, but for smart contracts.
After all, once your identity is known, normal courts can compel you to do things...
The intent (in legal sense) was to make a specific stock trade, not to make money.
If the execution price was obviously incorrect, the trade will be voided for example.
Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder.
Try googling "mens rea"; e.g.:
"A mens rea refers to the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime. See, e.g. Staples v. United States, 511 US 600 (1994). Establishing the mens rea of an offender is usually necessary to prove guilt in a criminal trial. The prosecution typically must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the offense with a culpable state of mind." [0]
> Maybe, but the crime wouldn't be first degree murder.
The felony murder rule disagrees.
https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-mur...
Whether or not one accepts that use of “normal”, it remains a rule and the claim that murder without specific intent is categorically not first degree, even in broad general terms is false (even before looking into all the variations in specific statutory schemes in the US, which really frustrate this kind of generalization, which takes common law rules and overgeneralizes the way things that are not part of the common law are mapped on to it.)
That's too macro. Multiple steps.
The intent of a stock trade is to exchange currency for share(s). That intent was fulfilled.
Your _desire_ was to make money, but that's not an inherent function of the stock trade.
What is a 'smart contract' in that universe and how is it different than a 'contract'?