Having watched cryptocurrency from a distance via HN etc. for over a decade, I thought I had a general understanding, but this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized.
This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube
‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
> this made me realize I wasn’t aware of what smart contracts really were (just looked up solidity today and details of The DAO hack). The potential for irreversible losses, fraud and security holes are much bigger than I realized.
That seemed obvious from the first time I read the expression "code is law".
If code is law, any bug (whether in the contract itself or in the way the contract is called) fucks you irredeemably and with no recourse. I would expect any dev to shit their pants at the idea, even more so upon realising that the code in question is a half-assed brain damaged cousin of javascript, of all thing.
It also cannot be a legal basis for anything, because the law doesn't treat the right or ability to enter in to contracts as an absolute. Think minors, wards, power of attorney.
Contract law is one of the more mechanistic parts of the legal system, but only up to a point. There are good reasons the legal profession - even corporate law - tends to attract a different set of personality traits to software development.
there's also the concept of a contract itself being invalid even if people have some right to enter it.
E.g. if you sign a contract while hanging off a cliff to give some dude all your assets in exchange for being pulled up, it is invalid in my jurisdiction.
Or if the people signing the contracts did not actually understand what they were signing it can be considered invalid (which would be akin to the mess in TFA).
Contracts are better left to people, rather then computers.
So it's not just your jurisdiction, it's probably at least half of the entire world and I imagine even systems not based on Roman Law have something equivalent.
Even encryption algorithms proven correct later turned out to be critically flawed.
The legal system is such a quagmire because figuring out what is "right" in all scenarios is anything but obvious. That's how we end up with laws we don't enforce and technical legal behavior that will still get you into trouble. But what's the alternative? Robot justices? No thanks.
If the complexity is in the nature of the problem, then smart contracts must contain all of this complexity. But how can you ever write smart contracts that are bug free and deal with every contingency?
Instead of making systems that are buggy, cold, and unforgiving we should be making systems that are more tolerant of human mistakes.
I was quite interested in the cryptocurrency ecosystem around 2017/2018, precisely because of the talks around smart contracts. I see these smart contracts to be just (in my opinion), confusing, error prone addressable state machines. Writing smart contracts (at least for Ethereum) has so many gotchas, that it's almost equivalent to rolling your own cryptography.
I'm not sure if issues around smart contracts are just the tooling, or developers are just rushing to push something out there; but the UX and DX is bad. I was hoping that Cardano would be a blockchain/cryptocurrency pairing that would make me interested again in this space, but their Plutus smart contracts[1] are something I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. On the upside, at least testing Plutus smart contracts with QuickCheck seems to have brought improvements to QuickCheck itself[2]
I also stumbled across his channel recently (that video seems to have gained a lot of traction) and would recommend most of his content! Very thorough.
What could be more of a rat's nest than the crypto scams? As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom. It's the ultimate recepticle for scammers.
> As soon as it became possible for anyone to create a token it just became a race to the bottom.
Exactly. All enabled and caused by Ethereum. First the ICOs, then anyone can create their own scam ERC-20 tokens, The DAO (which got hacked and hard forked to reverse the funds), NFTs (which have nothing to do with ownership), which once you scale up all of that it basically becomes unusable due to the 'gas fees' for every operation. Spend $200 to swap $1 worth of tokens using dapps like Uniswap.
One can go as far as to say that the Ethereum logo is literally a pyramid. Now what does that tell us? A pyramid scheme? who knows. From the start, they are probably trying to tell us that they know it is a scam.
At this point, everyone will eventually jump on the scheme itself anyway even when everyone knows it is a scam.
I'd go back further and say that the first wave - when Dogecoin and about 100 other cryptos popped up all running essentially Bitcoin networks - that was right when it went to shit. At that time you had to still know how to compile something to start your own blockchain, but if you did you'd be a billionaire now.
Ripple and other riders on the original blockchain would be the second wave of scams. That's when large scale investors started to get involved.
Ethereum is really the third wave scam where it got so easy that people who couldn't code were able to scale it out to people who couldn't even think. It was upscale retail selling to schmucks.
That would make NFTs and smart contracts the 4th wave of ponzi. The part where knockoffs of knockoffs become cheaper than a Louis Vuitton bag on Canal Street, and everyone's mother is buying crypto, and they're running ads for it on the home shopping network.
This also lead me to this video which will now be my ‘go to’ recommendation for anyone asking about crypto and NFTs - it’s a general critique and social commentary of the issues with crypto - not specifically about this case, but I thought excellent, and the first time I think I’ve watched a 2hr vid on YouTube ‘Line goes up’ - https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g