PayPal also refused to help me out when i was defrauded. I went to my bank and reversed the PayPal charge and then PayPal sent me to collections. I had previously spoken to them multiple times including the day of the fraud, when they could have stopped the transaction and refused. Fuck PayPal.
> In their complaint, lawyers for Kellar and Day argued that two particular steps of the attack violated statutes against market manipulation and computer hacking. One was swapping almost all the UNI tokens out of the DEFI5 pool, the otherwise irrational trade that distorted the pricing such that Medjedovic could buy tokens out from under Indexed users, who were forced by the algorithm to sell. “The only purpose of that trade was to mislead token holders to part with tokens on terms they never would have agreed to,” says Stephen Aylward, a lawyer representing Kellar and Day. “We say that's a form of market manipulation.” The same argument applied to Medjedovic's interaction with the CC10 pool.
> The second illegal transaction, they argued, was when Medjedovic overwhelmed the pool with free Sushi, thereby tricking the algorithm into letting him bypass the size limit on certain trades. Aylward calls this “an intentional act by Andean to disable a security measure, like disabling the security system at a bank.” He argues that this falls under Canada's “extremely broad” legal definition of a hack, which can be interpreted as “subverting the intended purpose of a computer system.”
If the law is held to have supremacy over “smart contracts” and implicit intent is held to be more important than explicit terms, than this undermines not just a major argument for smart contracts but a major argument as to why crypto as a whole is valuable.
Enforcing a contract through a written contract & traditional finance vs a smart contract becomes a mere implementation detail since in either case somebody can come crying to the courts when they lose money. Smart contracts are only interesting if they’re a form of binding arbitration. If smart contracts are not binding, they just become poorly written contracts.
Smart contracts being binding honestly might need to be legislated.
> If the law is held to have supremacy over “smart contracts” and implicit intent is held to be more important than explicit terms, than this undermines not just a major argument for smart contracts but a major argument as to why crypto as a whole is valuable.
No, it really doesn't. There are 2 questions that you are conflating here:
1. Can the courts force a user to return funds made via a valid smart contract transaction?
2. Can the courts force a blockchain to reverse a transaction that was made.
> Enforcing a contract through a written contract & traditional finance vs a smart contract becomes a mere implementation detail since in either case somebody can come crying to the courts when they lose money. Smart contracts are only interesting if they’re a form of binding arbitration. If smart contracts are not binding, they just become poorly written contracts.
Can you elaborate on why this would be the case? To me there is a large difference between a system (like credit card settlement) that can have transactions revoked easily after settlement, and one that can only be revoked by another separate transaction that the sender makes. To me it comes down to a mix of probability of reversal, and who can actually do the reversal (only the sender in the case of a blockchain system).
>2. Can the courts force a blockchain to reverse a transaction that was made.
The courts already can't necessarily force a transaction to be reversed as it is. The money can be gone long before they get involved.
>To me there is a large difference between a system (like credit card settlement) that can have transactions revoked easily after settlement, and one that can only be revoked by another separate transaction that the sender makes.
There's a good deal of irreversible transactions, such as inter-bank transfers in traditional finance. It's also my understanding that most "Reversals" are just new transactions or cancellations of pending transactions. I don't see a HUGE difference in how an inter-bank wire transfer works and how sending somebody crypto works except that in the case of crypto it's the wallet/account holder in full control.
I'll acknowledge there are differences, which impacts the probability of reversal and who can do the reversal, but I still feel it borders on the edge of "implementation detail". It only feels like a truly profound difference if you want to make a transaction a bank would normally interfere with, like a ransom payment, payment for fraudulent goods/services, drug deal, money laundering, funds being sent to political dissidents, or similar. Whereas the idea of smart contracts bypassing the expense of the courts entirely seemed like a much more broadly useful notion.
Even then, a binding contract is still subject to what is contractually enforceable, which could break the functionality and purported benefit of a smart contract.
The funny thing is, based on the architecture of these types of systems, they aren't the operators. Arguably the miners are the operators, otherwise only the users are the operators.
> One was swapping almost all the UNI tokens out of the DEFI5 pool, the otherwise irrational trade that distorted the pricing such that Medjedovic could buy tokens out from under Indexed users, who were forced by the algorithm to sell. “The only purpose of that trade was to mislead token holders to part with tokens on terms they never would have agreed to,” says Stephen Aylward, a lawyer representing Kellar and Day. “We say that's a form of market manipulation.” The same argument applied to Medjedovic's interaction with the CC10 pool.
Shame you can't manipulate an unregulated market. It's not illegal to do irrational things. Hell, even the regulated markets say, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
So for the first claim, they are arguing that forcing a leveraged short squeeze is market manipulation? There seems to be lots of straightforward counterexamples that it's not - that's an extremely common tactic the big guys use to squash little guys in the regulated markets. The little guys "would never have agreed to part with those securities on those terms" and the squeeze is often deliberate, transient, and leveraged.
Their complaint hinges on an interpretation of what the correct level of abstraction for describing the transactions is. Their argument, "to mislead token holders to part with tokens on terms they never would have agreed to," is literally a counterfactual that presumes both fictional market conditions as well as intentions of anonymous owners.
The second argument is an analogy, "disable a security measure, like disabling the security system at a bank," and the limit expressed in the code was definitely an expressed preference by the contract author, but if they wanted it to be a legal contract subject to human interpretation, they would have specified this in English. Instead, they created a software tool, and they did not take into account how that tool might be used by the public.
The argument about this is whether code written for the express purpose of partipating in risky transactions can be imbued with any other coherent intention. The closest analogy would be that Medjedovic was at their gambling table and was counting cards, except there was no policy keeping him out of there, or against card counting.
I'd tend to agree with you. People with money and power will push for laws that protect them though. But this situation is why I'm skeptical of these kinds of contracts - too much potential for problems.
If you discovered a significant shortcut to hashing and then went back to block 1 and re-mined every block until your branch was the one with the most proof-of-work, I'd have a hard time trying to claim that your branch wasn't the legitimate one, according to Bitcoin's own rules.
I suspect in this hypothetical scenario, however, the bitcoin developers would write a new rule.
Uh... yes? Are you seriously trying to imply that would be legal?
If someone ever cracks modern encryption, that doesn't mean they can do whatever they want with everyone's accounts everywhere. If you find an exploit and exploit it, that's illegal.
No, but that's not the same. Signatures and checks are covered by terms & conditions (and law) that you must follow.
A better anology is if you figure out a mathematical advantage within the rules of a casino game, are you allowed to win? I believe you are, as long as it's within the rules of the game. And the casinos are smart enough to create rules against any lasting mathematical advantage.
I know how to pick locks. The locks are designed to open when pins are raised by a certain amount. Doesn't mean I have a right to anything I can unlock.
The intention of the system is to work to as security. Just because you find a way around the security doesn't mean that you are now immune to the law regarding ownership. When SHAX gets cracked, that doesn't give the person figuring it out a right to transfer all the money out of your bank account just because they figured out the math.
If private keys are proof of ownership then what's the difference between keys generated before vs keys generated after. If both keys are valid then both have then both are proof.
Private keys are not proof of ownership, they are a technical implementation detail. That crypto has been poorly designed so that keys are all people have to prove ownership is a failure of design but doesn't fundamentally change the divisibility of ownership and access. This is easily observed with a shared wallet, for example coinbase's. If an employee stole their keys, I assure you that employee would enjoy a jail yard view for the next lifetime.
He was in communication with the IF team, and contributed something to their system, so it's possible that he defrauded them and inserted malicious code into the protocol, not just interacted with the protocol.
I find ddg is an improvement on google because it’s more like google 10 years ago plus a quick !g tosses it back to google for the occasional topic google does better.
I suspect It’s a Chinese or Russian sub floating a balloon that specifically does things to capture information on our radar systems.we used to do it to them too.
