Bitcoin Forum

it is hype for scam purpose only

I see the DAO as a game of who can compromise it first and cash out the funds to themselves.

I don't consider DAO as fail, give it few more months it will surely come back stronger and better after all known issues have been fixed.

Yet, to keep The DAO from capsizing, Tual said he thinks members need to accomplish three objectives – rounding out its list of curators, amending its governance model to see after the concerns of voting members and investing in sound business ideas.

Yup that is what it appears to be. But can you fathom what this is going to do to all the bagholders and to ETH.

I got your point that maybe there is some game theory to how long you stay vested. You like Russian Roulette I guess.

5. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO). Technically the idea that investors buy a colored coin which enables them to vote on how the funds (denominated in which every token was exchanged for the colored tokens) are spent, and to sell this colored coin at-will on the market. Issues:

• Note I could envision tracking investment, decentralizing the trading of the shares (colored tokens), voting on a board, and distribution of dividends. But this voting on each proposal as a flat democracy does not work. But then this would model a centralized corporation and thus be subject to investment securities regulation.

Can anyone think of any use cases for smart block chains that has any wide adoption potential  ???

So far, I can't think of any killer app that is enabled by smart block chains.

An OpenBazaar market place? Do we need a smart block chain for that?

There has been a lot of talk (and excitement) in recent months about the possibility of creating some sort of "virtual corporation" that will be completely automonous and whose existence would simply be to fulfill the wishes of its share holders. Whilst I can see the attraction of having trustless systems for decision making (such as general voting) I think we need to keep in mind that the "blind greed" of many modern corporations (especially of the multi-national variety) has lead to the "neo-slavery" of thousands of people that work 7 days per week and often more than 12 hours per day for "sweat shops" in developing countries.


So could a "virtual corporation" improve things? I think that is going to be a big "it depends" because if it has been hard-coded to *only to benefit the share holders* (and especially if those share holders themselves are actually other such virtual corporations) then you should fully expect to see such a beast to behave with no conscience at all (i.e. to be the most extreme implementation of capitalism).


Whilst I think being rewarded for useful contributions is a *fundamental* right we should want for our "digital workforce" I am not so sure that we want to end up with the Skynet situation of the world being taken over by one or more all powerful virtual corporations. To some this may seem a little "overly paranoid" but in my opinion it is best to carefully consider our digital future before just "leaping in".



So what other approach to consider if not wanting to create a "virtual corporation". One approach that I think should be given serious thought is that of a "community one". Rather than a bunch of strangers whose only concern is the returns that they can get from their investment you instead would have a group of like-minded individuals working to improve their community in a way that reflects their shared beliefs and morals.


Is this overly idealistic? Maybe so, but in general people can and do form communities for reasons of common beliefs and interests, and such communities are certainly capable of producing products or providing valuable services, and this is the direction that I would prefer to see our digital future moving towards.

gustav, I think OpenBazaar may be a valid wide adoption use case, and off the top of my head (without thinking deeply about it), appears we need the block chain to validate each state transition around transactions and listings, so that rules about reputation are enforced and validated by the block chain. Otherwise, the criticisms (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504381.msg15143801#msg15143801) I levied against CounterParty will seem to apply to OpenBazaar.

I do agree those investing in the smart block chain schemes aren't really interesting in mass adoption. They want get-rich-quick money pooling schemes.

So some dope-dealers on a tiny black market is your "massadoption", huh?

Buy and sell ads are very popular.

Unlike Craigslist, the idea is to add some reputation and escrow, to make it more reliable.

Having many different websites, each with different reputation schemes, is not as efficient.

Yeah I guess illegal products will be listed. But the government can't prosecute the decentralized block chain. It will have to go after the users who avail of those products.

The thing with smart contracts is that they bloat up the chain really fast and once the chain is really big the node-count collapses and the coin stops being decentral. So to make smart contract viable you'd need new technology for compressing data and that's not happening currently.

I can fix that.

Please do. You could win a nobel-prize with it.

Although Silbert is excited about Ethereum, he does not agree with the vision held by some of Ethereum’s most-ardent supporters. He explained:

    “I sense there’s a certain utopian view of society, which I may or may not agree with philosophically, that I just don’t see from a real-world application perspective happening anytime soon.”

Silbert went on to explain that a world where there is no regulation, lawyers, contracts, or SEC rules is not going to exist in the near future. He then clarified, “It may solve some problems. The idea of a decentralized autonomous organization, it’s super interesting.”

Silbert also noted that many of the earliest applications built on Ethereum are related to gambling, Ponzi schemes, or pyramid schemes, but he also admitted that this isn’t necessarily a problem. He added, “That’s OK because that’s an interesting way to experiment; it’s certainly what happened with Bitcoin.”

What Does the World Need from Ethereum?

One of the main criticisms of Ethereum up to this point has been the lack of useful applications that solve real-world problems. On a recent episode of Unconfirmed Transactions, host Dan Anderson and Wall Street veteran Tone Vays described how Ethereum supporters were unable to provide any use cases for the project to them at a recent meetup in New York.

During his panel appearance on day one of Consensus 2016, Silbert seemed sympathetic to the idea that practical applications of Ethereum are yet to be found. He stated: “I don’t think the world needs a decentralized Uber, which is one project. I don’t think the world needs a decentralized AirBnb, which is another project.”

Having said that, it’s important to remember that Ethereum is a platform on which a developer is essentially given the power to build any decentralized application they wish. It’s possible the best use cases of Ethereum have simply not been thought of at this point.

During his final comments on DAOs, Silbert questioned the role these decentralized organizations can play in the real world. He concluded:

     “These DAOs that are raising money from the masses with — basically it’s a blank check. It’s a pool of capital that’s going to be deployed in a way that I think will be very democratic. I’m skeptical because I don’t know the role it needs to play in society. I don’t know, in the capital formation process, what’s wrong with our current system that it’s solving for. I’m philosophically supportive. I hope it’s successful, but I don’t see the problem it’s solving yet.”

There are few blockchain use cases (mostly revolving around finance or registries or anon).

EVERYTHING not anon is better centralized...
And the market for anon is tops 5% of the global economy (mostly grey markets).

But nobody cares about the specifics...
Just show me the next bubble... with a cool whitepaper... and excellent buzzwords.

The Bitcoin bull run is going to spawn a new orgy of ICO scams.

btc would be worth nothing if it wasn't decentralised. I have no idea why a distributed network should have any value at all.
If it's not decentral it doesn't have any more value than a facebook-token.

Women's lib:

https://steemit.com/active/girlsgonesteem-nsfw

Now, thanks to blockchain tech, women make more money on average than men!

The challenge is creating a system capable of identifying what contributions are needed and
their relative worth in a way that can scale to an unbounded number of people.

A proven system for evaluating and rewarding contributions is the free market. The free
market can be viewed as a single community where everyone trades with one another and
rewards are allocated by profit and loss. The market system rewards those who provide
value to others and punishes those who consume more value than they produce. The free
market supports many different currencies and money is simply a commodity that
everyone finds easy to exchange.

Since the free market is a proven system, it is tempting to try to create a free-market system
where content consumers directly pay content producers. However, direct payment is
inefficient and not really viable for content creation and curation. The value of most
content is so low relative to the cognitive, financial, and opportunity costs associated with
making a payment that few readers choose to tip. The abundance of free alternatives means
that enforcing a ‘paywall’ will drive readers elsewhere. There have been several attempts to
implement per-article micropayments from readers to authors, but none have become
widespread.

Steem is designed to enable effective micropayments for all kinds of contribution by
changing the economic equation. Readers no longer have to decide whether or not they
want to pay someone from their own pocket, instead they can vote content up or down and
Steem will use their votes to determine individual rewards. This means that people are given
a familiar and widely used interface and no longer face the cognitive, financial, and
opportunity costs associated traditional micropayment and tipping platforms.

Bitcoin is not decentralized, as it is controlled by the Chinese mining cartel + Blockstream (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15216870#msg15216870).

Yet Bitcoin has value.

Fiat money is not decentralized, yet it has value.

imnotback, what are you talking about?

Steemit is free to join, they give you free steem to join, and you can only make more money by posting and upvoting. oh, yeah, and they pay the girls we know, to go wild!

I would say it's still decentral but there is a trend to less decentralisation, that is true. Sadly that's an issue not many seem to care about.
It was even suggested to raise the blocksize when it was clear that would lead to even faster centralisation.

My quoted link explains that it is just an illusion of decentralization. It is by now already centralized, as evident by China+Blockstream making the decision to kill XT and Classic (i.e. a form of 51% attack control).

lol, you complain about centralization and in the same sentence complain about not getting bigger blocks. That's a contradiction because bigger blocks cause even more centralization.
Your views are invalid.

You are referring to my post at this link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15216870#msg15216870).

1. I didn't complain about not getting larger blocks. Someone else did and I was responding to their erroneous assertion that Blockstream is against larger blocks.

2. I am making the point that Bitcoin can't be scaled up for higher transaction rates without being centralized. Others have argued that Lightning Networks can scale up transaction rate off chain with smaller blocks, but they are mistaken.

3. Actually "larger" blocks do not force centralization if you have the correct design which I have devised, but Satohi's design can't achieve it.

A friendly warning to you. I am much more expert than you apparently realize.

You're talking out of your ass. Your coins' design doesn't change your bandwidth. Crypto does not scale no matter how much you wish it.

You will learn before the end of this year that you are incorrect.

Note I added some links to my prior post.

It is impossible to give away for free what isn't free.

It has to be a redistribution from some to others.

Yes you can offer it free as an incentive initially and take money from the speculators via debasement who are hoping some greater fools will buy the pump. But that isn't a model for anything sustainable that can sale up to millions of social networking users.

That same debasement is taking the money from the users of the system also, who use and thus hold the token.

Any more delusions?

SP is a requirement for voting for or against content. This means that SP is an access token
that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform.

It is impossible to give away for free what isn't free.

It has to be a redistribution from some to others.

Yes you can offer it free as an incentive initially and take money from the speculators via debasement who are hoping some greater fools will buy the pump. But that isn't a model for anything sustainable that can sale up to millions of social networking users.

That same debasement is taking the money from the users of the system also, who use and thus hold the token.

Any more delusions?

gustav, I wasn't limiting the use cases to the ETH block chain design. We already skewered Ethereum in the Ethereum Paradox thread.

Of course, I am assuming someone doing correct engineering, not Vitalik, Tual, et al wasting $millions on being technobullshit rock stars. When I was age 21, I coded WordUp in my bedroom for a year. When I launched a shipping product to the real market, my father invested $30,000. The company was profitable and helped 1000s of users with a real use case. I don't produce bullshit software.

https://www.google.com/search?q=neocept+wordup

Now I promised myself to not waste time attacking others, so let's just leave it at that. I hold Vitalik to the same standard as I what I was able to do at his age. I worked hard and quietly and produced real s/w. Not roam around talking and promoting pie-in-the-sky delusions to n00bs. Even the one Comdex show and another San Fernando valley usergroup I did, I was very frank with the audience about the capabilities and limitations of the s/w. I guess I have to thank Ethereum for creating so much hype in the market that investors are ready to hand over so much money. So perhaps I should be praising them for promoting crypto. So I guess I will take that perspective and HODL my engineering nose about the level of delusion and lack of frankness about the technological (game theory, economics, scaling, etc) bullshit. Everyone has their freewill and their own choice. They should be free to reap what they sow.

The DAO is really unreal. But it makes perfect sense why n00bs can be lead to that delusion. And the audacity of Tual to say he thinks it will be good for crypto even if all the money is wasted. Well in some sense, I have to admit he is correct, because everyone should be free to learn and experiment and waste $150 million. More power to them Lol.

So any way, back to OpenBazaar that seems to be potentially a valid use case if engineered correctly.

gustav, I am more Hero account than you. If I had stayed with one account, I'd be Legendary already. I don't think we are arguing, are we?

tokeweed, it is always about the marketing...

My talent is that I am am adept at technology, people motivation, and economic theory. I can often combine those three into new paradigm shifts. I am still trying to create my first big paradigm shift in the altcoin arena. I think I may have finally discovered it last night while I was sleeping. I awoke and realized I have figured out the killer app for smart block chains that millions of investors and entreprenuers really need which can not be serviced by a centralized solution such as Seedr or Kickstarter! The key insight came from studying my own insight into the key macro economic flaw of The DAO.

Stop comparing yourself with Vitalik
Homer Simpson doesn't compare himself with Albert Einstein either.

It's all about the game.

...

P.S. I originally underestimated either how ignorant or insouciant CC investors are. They either really believe in nonsense, and/or they really only care about trying to form as much pump excitement as possible regardless of any realities about actual user value created. It also appears to be a difference of perspective on what constitutes value with many here I guess thinking that enabling more investment vehicles of any form is an advance of value. I haven't yet determined the mix between naivete, insouciance, and different valid perspectives. I am still trying to determine if I missed some key factor about value being created. And I am not trying to tell them to change. I am trying to understand this altcoin investing market and where it will lead.


I am not hating these guys. More power to them to have created so much investor interest in altcoins.

I am just sharing my analysis of the possible outcome. I am bit perturbed when people idolize this stuff so much. But I am learning to realize it is necessary. I am okay with every person having their own free will.

Exactly, and what is the value to the business (market cap) when there are 9x more "Preferred" holders than "common"

And your first statement is incorrect, the common shares are debased and the preferred shares (vested) collect interest but only enough to offset the inflation of the common

What are you going to do, it's BitShares at heart, they come from the western corporate structure paradigm. So if you want more control, then buy more stake, while the business carries on with or
without your involvement.  The decision is yours.

Or copy them and try to do it better.  But you know how cool and buzzworthy everything is the second third fourth time around.

Also notable was that all of the winners – as well as several other participants – chose the Ethereum blockchain platform on which to develop their prototypes.
...
The judges assessed the projects on a number of criteria, including the relevance of the problem being solved to supply chain challenges, its use of unique features of blockchain technology, the commercial potential of the application, the technical feasibility of implementing the application in the real world and the quality of the presentation of the project.

The only valid use case for the DAO so far has been to steal shitloads of ETH

Democracy is a top-down structure because it is a winner-take-all power vacuum (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984).

Btw I agree that there haven't been really serious achievements from altcoins. Ethereum is an unfinished and highly unpolished work, that doesn't yet have a killer app. The DAO is an unmitigated disaster in the making.

It's been a known problem publically since June 9th. If I can find the link I'll edit this post.

Additionally (I could be wrong on this) the DAO requires two weeks of voting to correct such flaws.

In the case of DAO, Slock.it, and Augur, then that seems to be the case. There is no valid use case which isn't game theory broken for those. Expect The DAO to eventually collapse in a massive clusterfuck of theft and waste with most losing their money. Wise people would get the hell out of The DAO as fast as they can, because the DAO is broken in the sense that you can be jammed from exiting (http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/05/27/dao-call-for-moratorium/).

Decentralized crowd funding might be viable.

Companies (even multi-nationals and some oligarchies) steal and waste $trillions all the time. Nation-states also. The goals of decentralizing the behemoths is orders-of-magnitude more valuable than some $millions experimental losses along the way.

Unless something else replaces Ethereum as the leading marketcap for smart contracts, then Ethereum will recover as Bitcoin did after the decline to $7 or $1. Litecoin apparently lost its main raison d'etre which was those who were pumping BTC to $1200 needed a highly liquid coin to exit into and it had served as a home for displaced GPU miners when Bitcoin ASICs appeared.

This is assuming there isn't some insoluble technical issues, such as this one I opined about:

I practically wrote the Ethereum Paradox thread, so you are preaching to a former member of your tribe.

I don't intentionally promulgate technological bullshit.

So be careful. I think there is something very important coming as a use case in the smart contract area. I will be writing more about this soon.

DASH does seem to be a functioning DAO where D is distributed but sure if it is decentralized control. The stakeholders apparently vote on the actions or management of the development of the open source. The stakeholders apparently approved to have % of the mining rewards paid to a foundation which then distributes the funds according to projects approved by votes of the stakeholders. However what is not clear to me is to what degree this is all enforced by smart contract protocol or done manually by the foundation.

There are allegations however that the distribution of the DASH tokens were highly concentrated by an alleged instamine and subsequent masternode ROI scheme which may have further concentrated the tokens held by the core insiders. But I don't know if anyone has been able to prove conclusively that DASH is not really decentralized, although the suspicion is apparently strong amongst some especially Monero supporters.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/

Note Vitalik's conceptualization is actually not wrong, but too abstract and what The DAO codified is what I think is incorrect. I like Vitalik's chart except DAOs have humans in control ("in the center") but they are governed by protocol (which is probably what Vitalik means by "automation"):

https://blog.ethereum.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/dao-quadrants.jpg

An interesting read from a guy reddit.  He gave compelling arguments and it does make you think twice about the viability and security of the current smart contract plaforms and DAOs currently in circulation.

Source:   The bug which the "DAO hacker" exploited was *not* "merely in the DAO itself" (ie, *separate* from Ethereum). The bug was in Ethereum's *language design* itself (Solidity / EVM - Ethereum Virtual Machine) - shown by the "recursive call bug discovery" divulged (and dismissed) on slock.it last week. (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4opjov/the_bug_which_the_dao_hacker_exploited_was_not/)

Here's an excerpt of the post.

And that we all told them back in late 2013 not to do it. I personally told Charles. Vitalik invented "gas" and thought that was sufficient.

Quoting myself from 2011:

I haven't studied the specific vulnerability in this case[1], but I think it has to do with the contract code doing mutability aliasing on global state. So this is an issue of synchronizing mutability aliasing.

For example, imagine if some intended to be atomic operation[1] of a check for sending of ETH out of the contract had not set a global count of sent before some recursion which enabled sending more ETH out, thus exceeding the threshold.

So the Reddit post seems to be somewhat clueless about the actual issue. Functional programming and static typing is orthogonal to the issue of dealing with global state and mutability aliasing. I had just finished analyzing this issue at the Rust-lang forum and in my private discussion with keane recently. Although Rust can statically check mutability aliasing, this is restricted to disjoint data structures. We concluded that some semantics can't be modelled with a static checker. Mutability aliasing is thorny issue and I am not familiar enough with Coq to know if it can model it. I would need to really dig into the details of this and study it before I can comment with high degree of confidence.

[1]

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=730 https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/master/GasEcon.md#case-study-the-crowfunding-contract-example https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/#what-about-the-recursive-race-problem-in-thedao

Vitalik
https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/

"However, it does show that there is a fundamental barrier to what can be accomplished, and “fairness” is not something that can be mathematically proven in a theorem"

well yes it can:

If you hold a system will function in a particular way and it does then that is fair, and you can mathematically prove it
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4opjov/the_bug_which_the_dao_hacker_exploited_was_not/
TL;DR - Complexity and "Turing completeness" are not the real culprit here...

Another attack occurring?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/4ot3vi/warning_another_successful_attack_recursive_split/

Published on may 18th


http://vessenes.com/ethereum-contracts-are-going-to-be-candy-for-hackers/

Okay. That is too technical. It is beyond my understanding. Do you mind explaining it in layman terms or, at least in bachelor's level?

Does this help?

http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/01/19/how-dr-suess-would-prove-the-halting-problem-undecidable/

Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem

Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of Edinburgh

No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can’t predict whether a program will stop.

Imagine we have a procedure called P
that will snoop in the source code of programs to see
there aren’t infinite loops that go round and around;
and P prints the word “Fine!” if no looping is found.

You feed in your code, and the input it needs,
and then P takes them both and it studies and reads
and computes whether things will all end as they should
(as opposed to going loopy the way that they could).

Well, the truth is that P cannot possibly be,
because if you wrote it and gave it to me,
I could use it to set up a logical bind
that would shatter your reason and scramble your mind.

Here’s the trick I would use – and it’s simple to do.
I’d define a procedure – we’ll name the thing Q –
that would take any program and call P (of course!)
to tell if it looped, by reading the source;

And if so, Q would simply print “Loop!” and then stop;
but if no, Q would go right back to the top,
and start off again, looping endlessly back,
til the universe dies and is frozen and black.

And this program called Q wouldn’t stay on the shelf;
I would run it, and (fiendishly) feed it itself.
What behaviour results when I do this with Q?
When it reads its own source, just what will it do?

If P warns of loops, Q will print “Loop!” and quit;
yet P is supposed to speak truly of it.
So if Q’s going to quit, then P should say, “Fine!” –
which will make Q go back to its very first line!

No matter what P would have done, Q will scoop it:
Q uses P’s output to make P look stupid.
If P gets things right then it lies in its tooth;
and if it speaks falsely, it’s telling the truth!

I’ve created a paradox, neat as can be –
and simply by using your putative P.
When you assumed P you stepped into a snare;
Your assumptions have led you right into my lair.

So, how to escape from this logical mess?
I don’t have to tell you; I’m sure you can guess.
By reductio, there cannot possibly be
a procedure that acts like the mythical P.

You can never discover mechanical means
for predicting the acts of computing machines.
It’s something that cannot be done. So we users
must find our own bugs; our computers are losers!

toknormal, very astute. That is indeed part of the solution.

Minecache, the problem with The DAO is not only bad code, but also the design was game theory broken as well.

.

Too long, did actually read; now head hurts and nose is bleeding.


But seriously, thank you, that Turing completeness shit was jibber jabber nonsense until that poem. I get it now  ;D

I haven't studied the specific vulnerability in this case[1], but I think it has to do with the contract code doing mutability aliasing on global state. So this is an issue of synchronizing mutability aliasing.

For example, imagine if some intended to be atomic operation[1] of a check for sending of ETH out of the contract had not set a global count of sent before some recursion which enabled sending more ETH out, thus exceeding the threshold.

So the Reddit post seems to be somewhat clueless...

[1]

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=730 https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/master/GasEcon.md#case-study-the-crowfunding-contract-example https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/#what-about-the-recursive-race-problem-in-thedao

So any state influencing the logic of any procedure non-atomically is vulnerable to attack if interrupted by a call to an arbitrary contract.  This goes far beyond the “write functions that are reentrant” suggestion: instead write functions that either don’t call out to arbitrary contracts or make no assumptions about their control flow or state after doing so.

Smooth and I discussing (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1516067.msg15285558#msg15285558) the optimum way of funding/launching development, and the Nash equilibrium of block chains.

Ethereum, Blockstream (Bitcoin core), BitShares, DASH all break Nash equilibrium.

DASH does seem to be a functioning DAO where D is distributed but sure if it is decentralized control. The stakeholders apparently vote on the actions or management of the development of the open source. The stakeholders apparently approved to have % of the mining rewards paid to a foundation which then distributes the funds according to projects approved by votes of the stakeholders. However what is not clear to me is to what degree this is all enforced by smart contract protocol or done manually by the foundation.

There are allegations however that the distribution of the DASH tokens were highly concentrated by an alleged instamine and subsequent masternode ROI scheme which may have further concentrated the tokens held by the core insiders. But I don't know if anyone has been able to prove conclusively that DASH is not really decentralized, although the suspicion is apparently strong amongst some especially Monero supporters.

Research paper has a section that mentions some smart contract use cases:

http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939/234939.pdf#page=12

Note that paper above is claiming some classes of programming errors can be avoided in smart contracts by using dependent and polymorphic types. But as I wrote upthread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15273470#msg15273470), that won't eliminate semantic bugs such as game theory bugs. See for example §4.3 Misaligned Incentives in the following paper:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/460.pdf#page8

Generally speaking, as I explained by example (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15284692#msg15284692) of the Halting problem, the runtime entropy of a Turing-complete machine is unbounded. Thus there are an unbounded number of ways to create errors, regardless of any fancy typing system and programming paradigm.

Traditionally, contracts are instruments of torture. People agree to be married (thus entering into, of course, a Marriage Contract) and then have to suffer their spouse whether they'd like to or not.

...

The problem with this holy institution that has carried us so very far and fed us so very well is that it has costs, and those costs have the unfortunate property that they mount with use.

...

Why would the cost of enforcing a contract increase with the amount of contracts already entered into ? Well, because as people use them people also look for ways to abuse them. As these ways are found they have to be patched. As the patches are applied new holes are found, so new patches are issued. Sometimes the patches work better in some cases than others, in the end it's not even obvious which would be the proper case a contract falls into, the administration of all this has some costs and moreover due to the adversarial nature of contractsvii there's always someone with an incentive to argue absolutely anything, no matter how "insane". Besides, what's insane anymore once we have contracts ?

...

I know plenty of people who have dispensed with even entering into contracts altogether, as a point of principle. Silicon Valley deals would be anywhere between one third and two thirds undocumented to any degree - only when companies are about to go public does a mad rush commence to retroactively document years' worth of... contracts, they would be, except they weren't. Why not ? Because contracts are just too damned expensive, both to enter into rationally and then to enforce against the other party. The attempts mostly end up as a competition of "who has the largest bank account" and therefore can afford the best lawyers, and since this is known at the outset the only real believers in the entire contract-with-enforcement construct are, predictably, the very large corporations.

...

And so here we are today : contract litigation is a great way to earn a living as a lawyer, a premier way to generate that mostly fake "social mobility" and a great way for Apple, Samsung and obviously the US government to fill their otherwise idle time during board meetings. Most common claims are not pressed, and in the rare instance they are pressed would end up in something called "Small Claims", which is much akin to the lost and found box they used to keep in train stations and movie theatres.

...

Who today would or will be able to set aside the perhaps justified objections of the disenfranchised parties (which would necessarily exist) to create a new code, and somewhat reset the clock ? Nobody, practically speaking, it'd have to be done by "consensus" and "negotiation" which is to say it'd be much better for it to not be done at all. In short, this great dragon called Contract has flown as far as he can. He is old now, and tired. His bones ache, his mood is sour, he will soon go below the ground. We will forever remember it, or at any rate I will, but for what he was in his youth, and that youth was much, much before your parents were being born I would think.

So what now ?

Well... I'm glad you asked. There's a spiffy young fellow I'm betting on : the GPG Contract. He's also a. an agreement b. reached by willing participants. But that's all.

What do I mean "that's all" ? I literally mean, that's all. A contract which is entered into by willing participants and won't be enforced. Nonsense ? IKR!

Except not really. Obviously entering into a GPG Contract thinking it's an Old Contract is nonsense, and will get you burned. In fact the history of "scams" in the Bitcoin space is pretty much this, people behaving with what should really be GPG Contracts as if they were Old Contracts, and then discovering midway through that... well... it doesn't really work that way.

All this aside, non-enforced contracts, contracts which the participants uphold out of their own free will rather than at the behest of some third party or by the point of the sword of some blind demigoddess are a thoroughly fascinating turn of events. For one, they are fundamentally human, they're one step up on the stairwell of freedom. Do it if you think it's right is certainly a lot more empowering, civilised and overall good than "do it or else". For the other, they allow all the enforcing to happen before the actual contract is entered into. Old contracts contain unknown future costs, nobody can ever tell you exactly how much will you have to pay in legal fees to recoup this five hundred owed on whatever deal. GPG Contracts don't have any future costs at all. The cost of enforcing one after the fact is always going to be zero, pretty much because there's never going to be anything you need (or indeed can) do.

And it doesn't stop here. I have always thought the principal utility of Bitcoin is that it renders any sort of mandatory taxation model unviable. I am firmly persuaded that as Bitcoin takes holdix taxes will have to return to what they were in ancient Greece : willing donations to the state treasury, and something people openly took pride in. This shift will bring about all the improvements we were vainly trying to achieve in the old money paradigm, such as public accountability and reasonable expenditure in one fell swoop : good luck getting people to donate to the police department if they don't like the police. And good luck with the welfare programs, for sure.

Add to that a shift of contracts from the old model to the new and suddenly you have - and I mean this quite literally - a new Renaissance. Man at the center of all things. Man, the willing enforcer of his own promises. Man, the willing contributor to the wealth of an obviously much reduced, but by that fact probably much nicer, lovable and huggable cute little state.

I'm crying with joy over here, my toes are curling in untold glee, I have little doubt that I shall live to see this, all of it. And for the first time in many, many years I feel again like the world is worth living in.

I totally agree with you. More to follow...

Valid use cases, layman's explanation:

http://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-overwhelmed-layman/

For brevity it’s worth to explain that in the process of soft fork application it appeared that there’s a gas problem leading to the attacker being able to DoS miners. Shortly, the attacker could send very computation expensive transactions with declared high gas to be paid (to be prioritized), but as the soft fork would make miners reject all such transactions, no gas will be billed while computation will be performed (and empty blocks added). The network could deal with it. But the load would be high as well as a bloat of empty blocks. Perhaps other adverse effects could also take place.

Speaking about adverse effects, almost a year ago a paper was published by Luu, Teutsch, Kulkarni and Saxena regarding “verifiers dillema” (http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/702.pdf). It was discussed by Vitalik on reddit here (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3fcw0i/verifiers_dilemma_renders_ethereum_nonincentive/). While at the time it was purely academic divagation it appears that with soft fork applied it would cause really important issues. Given an example scenario when the attacker starts spamming the network, some miners could even cease processing transactions (miners cannot be considered network friendly actors by default, only by incentive). If the ratio of miners with soft fork applied would fall below the limit the attacker’s transactions would eventually pass.

The above exposes both strong and weak points of Ethereum network. And actually strong points, as ingenious gas economy and Turing completness are also weak ones. On one hand for instance gas economy precisely regulates computing, on the other it must be fine tuned and is very fragile. So fragile that can lead to network-wide problems.
In parallel, Turing completness gives enormous possibilities in terms of possible computations performed by the network, at the same time contributing to unpredictability of computations before they are performed, thus inability to halt malicious ones (in easy way).

I’m afraid that there is no good scenario for any soft fork that could cover all possible side effects. Exactly because of the two factors mentioned above.