
Blockchains and Buzzwords - kgwgk
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-20/blockchains-and-buzzwords
======
kordless
> I find this all a bit depressing. This is not the future of finance; it is
> the past of finance. It is a harsh world of naked caveat emptor; it demands
> the enforcement of trickery just because it was tricky enough to trick
> people. Consumer protection is a relatively new idea in finance; it has
> caught on because it is a good idea. You can debate how far the law should
> go in protecting people from the consequences of their own mistakes, but a
> world in which at least some mistakes are fixable does seem nicer than the
> alternative.

What I find depressing is the ongoing rationalizations around legacy business
practices. It is these models that ultimately harm the consumer. Using weakly
biased arguments that government or business is responsible for "protecting"
the customer is ridiculous, especially in light of recent revelations of
corruption in our government and business sectors. It's time for a change and
there's not a damn thing you can do about it, Matt.

~~~
rpgmaker
> Using weakly biased arguments that government or business is responsible for
> "protecting" the customer is ridiculous, especially in light of recent
> revelations of corruption in our government and business sectors.

I don't think it's even close to funny that someone could potentially have
their entire life savings stolen because of some zero-day so luckily, not
everyone shares your libertarian utopia dreams.

I believe that p2p currencies are here to stay in some form or another but I
don't think they will supplant our traditional banking system.

~~~
kordless
So I hear you think it is serious that someone could have their life savings
stolen. While I would agree with the fact it is a serious matter, I see a
dissonance following it where you speak for my "dreams" being a "libertarian
utopia".

Not only do you imply my political alignment, but you insult my proposal that
we might improve our processes by embracing these new technologies instead of
low trust legacy systems. In short, I think you are blaming me. I also think
you are wrong.

I can't speak for others, but my idea of utopia is continued marginal
improvement over the performance of the current solutions done with
centralized control by starting to decentralize the bits that deal with
trusted infrastructure. I don't expect utopia to be perfect. I don't expect it
to be functional all the time.

The current problems with the DAO have very little to do with the base
infrastructure provided by Ethereum. In fact, the hardware Ethereum is running
on currently has even less to do with with the DAO. The point being that
infrastructure boundaries can be assigned levels of responsibility to them.
You want most of Ethereum's code managed by the guys who wrote it, at least
for a while. They'll fix stuff where is needed, but their responsibility ends
at the service level. The DAO code itself should be managed by other groups
responsible for it. Perhaps there could be a third group that insures the
investment in a DAO. And another that insures that group, etc.

Point being, social structures in place today are probably a good guide for
instantiation of contracts that insure loss to errors in the code RUNNING ON
TOP OF Ethereum. Ethereum promises immutable data structures for the runs. The
runs themselves remain uncertain at some level, given all states of the
contracts it issues may not be computable. It may be similar in nature to the
dissonance you show in your statements - where some contracts literally get
into an argument with themselves. If that happens, perhaps they get a gas tax
for wasting other DAO's time with questions that can't be answered in a
reasonable timeframe.

That is what biases are, after all.

------
mjfl
Commenting specifically on the DAO part of the article: What's annoying about
the Ethereum hard fork is not that they are implementing their own version of
consumer protection, it's that they _certainly_ will not take the same action
in the future when it's not their own money on the line.

------
pipermerriam
This author did not do their research. They are likely quoting from a fake
letter that is not from the actual attacker. I did not personally attempt to
verify the signature, but others did and they report it being invalid.

The letter in question can be found here.

[http://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG](http://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG)

The Reddit post where it was submitted to `/r/ethereum` here

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_le...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oo1io/an_open_letter_from_the_hacker/)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
He wrote

> The hacker! Or, at least, someone claiming to be "The Attacker," who wrote
> this:

which makes it clear enough that he knows what he's talking about.

~~~
pipermerriam
An invalid digital signature is a pretty strong indication that it is the
fake. I'd consider this poor journalism as it gives this letter credibility
that it doesn't deserve.

My statement was merely to try and point out that one of his quoted sources is
likely a fabrication.

~~~
Dylan16807
Sure, likely a fabrication, but it's being used as a way to explain the
schools of thought, not as an actual source of anything.

------
chollida1
IMHO The best part about today's note is this quote about Marissa Mayer

> Mayer grew up at Google, a lucrative and founder-controlled company that
> doesn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about shareholder activism, or
> shareholders generally. It's possible that Yahoo -- a mess with no
> controlling shareholder and a new CEO hired from the outside -- called for a
> different managerial mentality. And yet she was hired to be a visionary, not
> a bureaucrat, and to turn the company around. It's a tough spot to be in.

I think this goes a lot of the way in explaining why she has been so clueless
about how to manage shareholders, which as a CEO of a public company,
especially one that is attempting to execute a trun around, is really one of
the most, if not the most, important job

Also I fully support Levine's view on the DAO debacle:

> find this all a bit depressing. This is not the future of finance; it is the
> past of finance. It is a harsh world of naked caveat emptor; it demands the
> enforcement of trickery just because it was tricky enough to trick people.
> Consumer protection is a relatively new idea in finance; it has caught on
> because it is a good idea.

I really don't want the future of finance to be caveat emptor. Again IMHO,
Reason should come in and trump coding mistakes in financial contracts, if any
blockchain startups reason the other way, then I think they've got it wrong. I
really hope this gets to the courts as I think this might be the best thing
that could happen to Etherium. In the same way that corporations setup in
Delaware because the case law is known and well tested, having the courts rule
on Etherium contract bugs might actually help the digital currency by giving
it a bit of legitimacy and certainty around what happens when things go bad.

~~~
zeveb
> Again IMHO, Reason should come in and trump coding mistakes in financial
> contracts

That's not reason; it's emotion. A smart contract is pure reason (i.e.,
logic); if one misunderstands a contract, then the error is one's own, not the
contract's. And if others say, 'that's not fair: give him back his money!'
then that's just emotion.

I'm not downplaying emotion (indeed, I think that as a mover in human affairs
it's far more powerful than reason); I'm just arguing for clarity in words.

~~~
woah
Your definition of reason is different than the law's definition of reason.
Under your definition of reason, you'd lose your house because of a typo in
your name on the deed.

~~~
smokeyj
Is this any different than signing a contract that you don't know the terms
to? If an entrepreneur signs an agreement with a VC that has obscure clauses
hidden deep in legalese - that doesn't mean the terms no longer apply. It
doesn't matter if there's a billion dollars on the line - there is no
'whoops'.

~~~
dwaltrip
No, the whole point of this discussion is that those deeply hidden, "tricky"
clauses don't always hold up in court.

~~~
Natanael_L
Let people opt in to the court system, and feel free to tell people they
should always do so.

But sometimes people really do know what they're doing with the code. Courts
are slower than code, let the experts opt out.

~~~
zyxley
> Let people opt in to the court system

You can't "opt in" to a system that exerts coercive power (in the dictionary-
definition sense) over everyone in a jurisdiction. You are already in. The
system will not let you out, because that would interfere with other civil and
criminal processes (for example, bankruptcy proceedings) and in doing so harm
society as a whole.

~~~
programmarchy
The belief that a coercive monopoly is beneficial to society is a delusion of
religious proportions.

------
paavokoya
Hacker News is becoming r/ethereum as of late. Getting really tired of
everyone trying to rationalize with themselves as to why they bought into an
altcoin. Watching the front page throughout the week is like the "5 stages of
grief"

------
kmd123
The problem is with the expression, the codification of the policy, as
implemented in code; not the policy itself. It's the flawed implementation of
the policy that the attacker took advantage of. The attacker's justification
is self-serving and ridiculous. Given any non-trivial software, especially in
a new domain, there are likely to be bugs that can be exploited to undermine
the system. And that's exactly what happened here.

------
vonklaus
> Consumer protection is a relatively new idea in finance; it has caught on
> because it is a good idea.

I agree. However, it is to counterbalamce a system that previously protected
those taking advantage of consumers and less sophisticated organizations.
While this is true in perpetuity, and will be true for alt-exchanges, the
difference is that arbitration is well documented and fully known.

A consumer will need protection from a large institution with considerable
control of the market and considerable resources and influence behind it.
There does need to be a way to handle disputes and arbitration, but that is
irrespective of the actual granular question of should the DAO get to keep the
money?

I say no, in that it will serve a great lesson in recklessly launching
contracts before having them fully vetted, and also because it would
invalidate the entire purpose of the organizatons existance.

------
stirner
They cite the purported note from the attacker, despite the fact that it was
immediately called out as a phony with an incorrect signature.

------
curiousgal
I found this hard to read and quite honestly gave up midway because of all the
_excessive_ quoting.

