When I heard about Ethereum this was my exact fear. Programmable money sounds like a terrible idea from the perspective of business owner. Does this mean I have to check every transaction I enter to run arbitrary code with full access to my wallet? That is of course assuming the code isn't able to break out of any other protections there might be and pay for the ETH I'm getting with my data.
No, no, of course you don't have to check every contract you engage with. At least, not with the help of my conveniently-IPO'ing DAO wETH unwrapper leaser startup. We'll take care of the heavy lifting, you sit back, relax, and pay us no mind (really, please, do not look behind the curtain). We're a Series F company filling the totally coincidental grift-shaped hole where Ethereum left off - contact our sales team on Discord if you're interested!
> Does this mean I have to check every transaction I enter to run arbitrary code with full access to my wallet?
No, for the same reason you don't check the code on every website you visit, if you want to be even more secure then just stick to blue chips like aave, curve, etc you can see how much is sitting in popular defi contracts here: https://www.defipulse.com/
You also don't give an ethereum contract full access to your wallet, you need to approve access to however much you want the contract to have access first then you get a second prompt to allow the contract to run.
You're talking like one accidental misclick and all your money is gone.
If you're super duper paranoid you might want to look at something like argent wallet (https://www.argent.xyz/) which lets you do common trades, defi, staking etc from within the app so you don't have to worry about random contracts and there's no seed phrase so no need to worry about that either.
> You're talking like one accidental misclick and all your money is gone.
This is literally happening right now all over the place. Just go to any reddit cryptocurrency sub and do a search for "free token scam." People are finding free tokens in their wallets, trying to spend them and having their wallets emptied.
I don't check code on every website I visit because websites can't just empty my life savings with no recourse.
It boggles the mind that someone looked at money and thought "you know what, this is too simple, let's shoehorn in a Turing complete programming language - that'll fix it!"
Please explain to me how embedding a Turing complete programming language inextricably from a currency adds anything of value that is not offset by the pitfalls of regular users needing to not only know how to code but understand the entire ecosystem that the currency interacts with.
If you are always concerned about the pitfalls of your stupidest user, you will make a product that is only suitable for stupid users.
When you stop worrying about that, and can actually start to deploy advanced technology for your advanced users.
You can weight your argument however you want, all technology will fail some class of user. Me, I’ve been playing with this and various tech for a decade now and the sky is the limit for where this can go.
Okay, but you didn’t answer my question. I’m not talking about the "dumbest user" - I’m talking about a regular person who is currently paid in dollars and understands how to use a debit card. What benefits does making money programmable provide that is not offset by this person having to take time out of their day to audit every transaction and understand how the code making up the transaction interacts with all of the systems it touches?
You got me. The tech is useless, it’s actually a giant fraud perpetrated by public traded corporations to steal our precious fluids. The miners are actually watt vampires. Numbers don’t actually exist, it was a trick invented by the ancients. Blockchains just convert pudding into breakfast. Enjoy meat juice day!
You don't have to be so defensive. Clearly there are issues with things like what happened here. It's like interacting with the website of your bank by sending assembler programs to transfer money. People won't be able to understand what it's doing.
