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What the young man is unable to comprehend is that an immutable, non-reversable blockchain is more valuable than fixing a $60 million loss for people who actually deserved it due to negligence and an inability to put forth proper security protocols while having a fiduciary responsibility to ensure the funds safety.

Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns come to mind.

I am sure to Vitalik, $60 million is a lot of money and he wants 'to do the right thing.'  What he has done however is unwittingly and unknowingly removed himself from the helm of Ethereum.  Ethereum simply can't be trusted any longer as its community may reverse transactions that "have been executed by Muslims, or French people or maybe blacks," especially if the 51% consensus is a gathering of 19-32 year old white males?  Where does it end?

It ends with Ethereum Classic.  Kudos to the visionaries who understand that the betterment of the many lies in an immutable blockchain which stands the chance to make trillions.

Subsidizing idiocy is not a valuable proposition.

What a crock load of FUD.

We understand that you are bagholding ETH, but that doesn't change OP's fact being right.

Vitalik Buterin acted as a central banker when he tried to stop all trading to avoid people panic selling after the DAO "hack". From that very second I knew Ethereum was doomed. Then all those morons like Brian Armstrong saying hard forks are not a problem because there would never be 2 result coins coexiting buried it.

I don't like either version but i agree 100% with the OP.

And yup good point it was doomed back when he demanded exchanges stop trading via request.
..it also does not say a lot good for the exchanges either.
Don't forget their centralized role for profits in this people !

ETH is manipulation like we have never seen in crypto before.. in many ways.

@Minecache
You are a Fraud.
And you're once again crying FUD for bucks $$$
..get a job kid.

Besides people..
Since IBM, Microsoft & "Big Banks" are USING Ethereum what do they think of this ?
How do you "use" ETH with out buying them ?

And how is it we have heard nothing from those 3 ?
Unless..
They..
aren't ACTUALLY using them ROFL  :D

What am i suppose to forget the 1,000's of comments saying that on Poloniex alone ?
You expect me NOT to bring it up ?
When was the last time anyone brought up Big Banks, Microsoft or iBM "using" Ethereum ?
Been a looooong time hasn't it ?

Wonder why ?
No ?
Well when is the last time anyone in Crypto mentioned "using" a DAPP ? (not including the ponzi DAO)
What percentage of comments on ETH are about APP's  1% ? 0.5% ? 0.01% ?

Why was the scammy ICO launched in 2014 ?
Ponzi Platform ? ..shit like DAO ?

Hey you want to invest REAL CASH MONEY $$$ into ICO "schemes" like this then go hard people.
Let me know how it works out for you..
Or..
Dump + Hide !

After all that is what the entire community behind Doge did.. where are they now ?
They left way before the dev himself left after saying the community failed to support the coin.

Yup..
I will be around long after the mETH heads smoked their last rock ..saying, I TOLD YOU SO !
..again.

Frankly I think the pro-fork people need to watch Inside Job and the Big Short to understand anti-fork people. Additionally, it might help them to look at other historical economic disasters such as the one created (on purpose) in the late 70s and early 80s to slap down working people.

While I don't disagree with their viewpoint that the DAO hack was theft (no matter the situation taking something that belongs to someone else is) they seem to completely not understand evil and corruption in a political or economic system. Their philosophy has unfortunately demonstrated a complete disrespect for the cryptocurrency scene, the technology and what it wants to achieve. ETH is no different than fiat as a result. 

Paranoid much?

Topic poster seems quite desperate, probably sold his ETH for tokens on the abandoned chain hoping to get rich. I advise you to sell back at a loss otherwise you'll end up eating dirt haha.
Stick to your principles in your perfect world, unnatainable perfect blockchain and let real people work their ass off improving and fixing one of the most ambitious projects in IT world. Everyone can be a critic, like iamnotback and many others, it's easy to criticise ambitious projects while sitting in the peanunt gallery telling everyone that they know best and better than the actual developers, while sitting on the side speculating on cryptocurrencies, that;s really hard.

No I just think it's a good thing for people to educate themselves. Hopefully you can agree with that.

Minecache is the ONLY FUD in here!

Keep fixing your BROKEN ETH ship...it is still going to SINK anyway! :D

So far the market is still wrong as ETC is nowhere near overtaking ETH never mind simply gaining parity.

And hopefully you do realise that if ETH is broken then ETC is even more so. Double spend, replay attack vectors, DAO attacker hodling 10% supply, etc. The list is endless.

funny, you guys discussing which of the two shitcoins to hold on to...

ETC and ETH will both fail... again...

You guys are only here for the fiatgame anyway, so go ahead, and lose it with both hands...

best regards

The fiat game has run for 500 years.  It has achieved a 51% success rate in my opinion, lifting people out of the dark ages by diluting the money supply and incentizing everyone with the proverbial carrot.

Vitalik has rendered Ethereum's value regardless of its human utility, to something like the Argentinian Peso, or the Chillean Escduo, or Romanian Lei.  Each Country had something in common.  A dictator or communist.

Vitalik has joined their ranks and will be remembered in Wikipedia for it sadly, the sad part is that he did do it with 'good intentions,' on the paved road to hell.

In what way is playing by the rules, even if you didn't understand them that way, "taking something that belongs to someone else" ?
The "DAO hacker event" is somewhat similar to you playing chess against someone else, and suddenly that guy applies castling and you are check mate.  You had never heard of castling and you call him a cheater.  However, you had subscribed to the official chess rules, and castling IS part of the chess rules even if you didn't hear of it.

However, in what way is CHANGING the rules, and undoing your castling, not cheating ?  Now, who were the thieves here ?  The DAO hacker who played by the DAO rules (using a feature nobody had thought about, using infinite recursion and a funny property of Solidity - castling) or the forkers who decided that, against everything that was announced "the code is the law", changed the rules, and undid the castling by the hacker-player ?

WHO took property from someone else ?

So you support the reversal of transactions and blocking of smart contracts by minorities?  You are a disgusting human being.

how did race/religion/ethnicity enter the equation?  you're making a decent argument about immutability. don't let your regressive leftism ruin your argument.

Absolute rubbish. A thief is a thief is a thief. It's the equivalent of hacking into a bank terminal via the web, transferring a shedload of money to your own offshore account and then claiming that because the bank has a security department and security policy posted online, and you've been able to breach it, that you're somehow now the rightful owner. It's only because crypto is under the radar right now that this joker isn't sitting in a cell somewhere being mocked by local police.

Pseudo-intellectuals on this site think they're showing brainpower by backing a thief. Idiots who want to raise their profile but have little brain power join them (like unknowing sheep) in declaring this thief/hacker a genius who legitimately found a flaw. For every genius crypto hacker from a higher level you bet me, I'll raise you two Nigerian identity theft scammers and four Russian NFC card crackers.

Absolute bullshit. If I ever meet this hacker goat I'll tell him to his fat pimpled face that he's a thief and I'm one individual who's not convinced by him.

A thief is a thief is a thief

 ::)

You clearly do not understand what is a smart contract, where the code is the law.  A bank doesn't say that the code running on their terminals is the law, on the contrary.  The human law for banking is such that there is an intend, different from the code.  That intend is written in human language in legal texts.  And doing what you suggest with a bank terminal is AGAINST these human legal texts.

But in a SMART contract, the ONLY law is the code and there is no other intend or human legal text.  So ALL aspects of the code are part of the legal system you set up, including all non anticipated behaviour, which you would, in other circumstances, call "bugs".  The bugs are part of the contract.  If you can't accept that, you can't accept the concept of smart contract, and then ethereum has no meaning because it is a tool to make smart contracts.

The worst is that the ONLY "human" contract terms *clearly stated that the code was the law*. 

It is as if the bank had said that the software of their terminals was the law in a human legal document (which is exactly what the DAO website did).  In that case, if you succeed in transferring money, then you played by the bank's declared rules, and if they take it away from you THEY are the thieves.  But, as you say, that is NOT the law that goes for banking.  So your example doesn't work.

Nonsense. Funds are to be moved from The DAO based on a vote. Everybody knows this but you defenders of the hacker goat thief conveniently say nothing about that fact.

What vote provided him with the authority to move those funds?

He is a stone cold thief. The fact that he's waiting for the right time to dump and profit seals his fate.

Absolute nonsense.

 ::)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504662.msg15717392#msg15717392

The absolute nonsense is those that won't accept the failure and the "guarantee" that was made.

(read those terms very closely - and then read them again please)

That's visibly not how the code worked, and that's the only law that was valid.  You may THINK that "funds are to be moved from the DAO by a vote."  That was maybe in one of the describing documents, but they were not the law.  The code was.  So if ever the code behaved differently from that description, it was said that the authority was the code, and not the description.

That is: you may THINK that in chess, a King may never move more than one square.  In your children's chess book.  Until you see castling where the King can move two squares.

Again, you don't seem to understand the profound meaning and the total absence of human judgement in smart contracts.

The day you will realize that, you will also realize what kind of bullshit a smart contract, written in a Turing complete language, is.  And hence you will realize what erroneous thing ethereum is.  

Totally agree with OP. Too many bankers are involved in ETH, they think that it is still possible to change history for their own good like they used to.

Whether the DAO attacker is a thief or not is a NON issue in this matter. The code is the law and that is what the attacker used. Take your loss and get over it.

I could not care less about ETH or The DAO. I will never defend a thief. If your hate for ETH will make you throw your principles in the bin, then that's up to you.

He is a thief and he is waiting to enjoy the spoils of his crime. Keep defending him. Maybe he will toss you a few.

He played by the crazy rules that the ethereum/DAO couple set fort and where they seduced so many idiots in funding a hacker's bait that they reached more than $150 million at a certain point.

Honestly, accepting the game of putting money in a "smart contract" where "the code is the law" and where you have tons of pages of source code written in a Turing-complete and rather new programming language, Solidity, is nothing else but funding a hacker's bait.

Whining because your thing did exactly as could be expected, namely that a hacker won the bait, is beyond me.

But if there's one thing that that hacker isn't, it is a thief.  The only thieves are those who didn't keep with their engagements of "the code is the law" and went as far as forking a block chain in order to undo the rightfully gained bait by that hacker.

I can of course understand the embarrassment combined with the monetary loss of that bunch of megalomane idiots that thought that they could pull the feat of writing a complicated smart venture capital firm simulation in a new turing complete language without any unexpected behaviour and pumping $150 million dollars from innocent people and themselves, but THEY are the thieves in the end.

I agree with you, but the hacker is still a thief. In the same way that the stupidity of a greedy individual losing $50,000 to scammer claiming to have 50 tankers of oil in the Atlantic does not magically turn the thief scammer into not-a-thief-or-scammer.

But on BCT funnily enough, it does!! Because scammers and thieves are folk heroes in this industry. Makes it so easy for you guys to accept a thief in your midst.

It's because they have a very low moral ground. You don't want to be friends with these people, you don't want to meet them, and if they are family, move away.

WHO invented the funny rules ?  It wasn't the hacker, it were the DAO guys !  Those are equivalent to the scammer telling you that he has 50 tankers in the Atlantic.  It are the DAO guys who told you (in their description) that DAO funds were only to be moved by a vote, and *at the same time* told you that only the code is the law (and that code didn't only allow for funds to be moved by votes, but also by tricky tricks the hacker found out).

So who was the lying scammer here ?  The hacker who saw the trick, or the DAO guys making people believe things that weren't true ?

Well, what morality is there in declaring that the code is law, but if you use the code, and it is not to your likings, you change the rules ?

I would think that keeping your engagements is a high moral standard, and scamming people, not keeping your engagements, and undoing things that happened according to your engagements, is rather low on the moral scale.

+10. Excellent summary.

All you are doing here is defending a thief. Don't you see it?? The DAO guys were stupid victims of their own hubris, but the thief was the person who broke the code to steal the funds. Yes, stole the funds.

You can call it legitimate all you want but anywhere other than crypto it would be seen as a heist. As I said, pseudo-intellectuals will forgo their principles on here because they hate this or that crypto. I will not.

A thief is a thief is a thief

For all you 'intelligent' people out there, define 'steal' for me.

Actually, I liked ETH quite a lot.  The idea of smart contract, devoid of any humanity, with a totally mechanistic unstoppable machinery, appealed to me.  I started to think it could help in the singularity transition, from humans to machines taking over.  So I was mightily disappointed with the hard fork, bringing all of human judgement, corruption, hypocrisy, unfairness and arbitrariness back into what was supposed to be cleaned out of this mess.

However, the hack, at the same time, made me realize the fundamental stupidity of the foundation of ethereum, namely Turing-complete contracts.   That's an aberration, because a contract always has to come to a conclusion, and by definition, Turing-complete descriptions are undecidable as to whether they will come to a conclusion.  No legal disposition ever is Turing complete.  No court, no judge, can ever get locked up in an infinite loop (worse, can get locked up in a loop of which it is undecidable whether it is infinite or will just take a long time).  Courts have to come to a verdict at a given date.  The number of appeals is finite.

Turing complete contracts are an aberration.  
This is what the hacker learned us, and I think it is for better.

Solidity-based contracts will always be a mess.  There's no way, apart from VERY VERY simple contracts, to ever prove that those contracts will not have infinite recursion, or infinite loops in rare cases.   Solidity is a hackers' paradise.  It is for sure NOT something in which to write watertight contracts.

This is the great service that the hacker did: to stop this madness before it made REAL damage, when real people engaged in real contracts that way.  Now, only greedy idiots lost money, and well-deserved.

So stealing back that money from the saviour from Turing complete contract madness to give it back to the deluded idiots thinking they were going to become rich quickly, is, in my eyes, highly immoral.

I do think that ETC has a reason to exist, namely as funny playground to write small, simple contracts.  One doesn't need a lot of money to pour into that.

ETH is screwed, because of its immoral precedent.

He didn't break any code.  He used it, and it was the law as to the statements made on which every DAO owner agreed.

He didn't steal any secret key.  He didn't fork any block chain.  He used the code to the full extend, as it had been written.  He didn't break anything.  In as much as you think the code was broken, then the law was broken because the code was the law.

edit: let me clarify this somewhat, because you seem to miss the point.

Suppose that I present you a contract where I say that it is a contract that allows you to live in my appartment next week, against paying me $150 dollars, and that the contract is written in Dutch, and that the Dutch text is the ultimate authority.

Now suppose that that Dutch text is such, that indeed, it describes that you can live in my appartment for a week and you pay me $150 dollars, but that if your name starts with a D and ends with a d, then I owe you a million dollars.  I didn't even know this: I wrote the Dutch text using Google translate, and Google translate fucked up.

Now suppose that a guy named Donald, fluid in Dutch, reads this, and he comes over and signs this contract with me.

Do you think that if he claims his million of dollars, he's a thief ?

UNLAWFULLY taking away other people's property without their consent.

Now, remember that the code was the law, that the hacker used the code, the whole code, and nothing but the code, and that all DAO users had consented to the fact that the code was the law.

There's a big difference. He is asking you to honour your contract and deliver a million dollars to him. Let's say that when you last wrote a cheque to someone that you were leaning on that contract and some guy sees the imprint and decides he's plundering your account.

So rather than claiming funds, he has actually taken the funds already.

See the difference?

One is a chancer, the other is a thief.

And now you show yourself for who you are. That is only HALF of the definition. Are you going to put the whole definition or do you want me to do it??

But in a smart contract, that gets executed automatically.   If he takes away a million because I am contractually obliged in any case, that's not theft.  They are his, now, even if I keep them (unlawfully now) physically in my possession.

If you OWE me 10 dollars, then I can rightfully come and take them.  It is just a matter of politeness if I ask you.  They are mine.

If I buy a house, and I pay you, then now the house is mine.  I don't have to beg you for the key now.  It is now legally mine.  I can politely ask you to hand over the key, but if you don't, I break into the front door of my (now) own house and if you try to stop me, YOU're the wrong guy.

Be my guest, because to me, stealing is exactly that: unlawfully taking away other people's property without their consent.  So I'm curious.

I still don't believe people believe the thief is right. You do this for FUD. You cannot have that low of a moral ground. Exploiting a weakness in a system that was obviously not intended to be there is still an exploit, so he stole the funds. If a law is not perfectly written it doesn't mean you should interpret it and act based on what " you think" they meant. You won't tell that to the judge.
That guy that wanted to 51% dao atack, using your logic it would be okay right, nothing wrong, i assume, right ? Or you check your credit card and because of an error, weakness in the system, you withdraw 100$ and it gives you 1000$ instead, and then you exploit it 1000 times more to enrichen yourself, but you're not wrong because you used the machine as you should. You get to keep it i suppose ?

Read
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+steal&ie=&oe=

Yeah:

"take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"

So if you HAVE the legal right, it is not stealing, right !  Given that the guy HAD the legal right (the code was the law), it was not stealing.

There's a whole page of definitions there. Read...

You are also one of those guys that don't want to see the concept of "smart contract" do you.  There's no intend in a smart contract, apart from the code, no matter how strange, weird, and fucked up it may behave.  
There are, BY DEFINITION, no bugs, holes, exploits or whatever in a smart contract, because, as I said, that would compare the actual behaviour of the code to some "intend" which is ABSENT.

It is a whole different story with a judge, because part of human justice is exactly the NON-mechanical character of law, and the need for human judgement (by a judge).  Now, that is EXACTLY what a smart contract is to do away with !

You guys really, really don't seem to understand the weirdness of the concept of smart contract.

No, the only other one is this:

"move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously" but I suppose that was not what you meant...

Is that all you saw?...
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/steal

I'm getting tired of this game, but OK:

: to take (something that does not belong to you) in a way that is wrong or illegal

: to take (something that you are not supposed to have) without asking for permission

: to wrongly take and use (another person's idea, words, etc.)

I will take it that right/wrong is the same as legal/illegal in the frame of a smart contract because in that frame there's no other basis of what's right and wrong.  So all right/wrong and legal/illegal is based on the code, the full code, and nothing but the code - that's the fundamental principle of a smart contract.

Now: to take something that does not belong to you in a way that is against the code: nope, it wasn't against the code, and the code said it was his now.

to take something that you are not supposed to have without asking for permission: the code said that he was supposed to have it.   Asking the code for permission is executing the code and see what it tells you.

to wrongly take and use: the code said it was right, so it wasn't wrong, as the code is the sole judge of right and wrong.

Next ?

Next is thief
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define+steal&ie=&oe=#q=define+thief
Happy reading...

"a person who steals another person's property, especially by stealth and without using force or threat of violence."

Ok, as he didn't steal, he's not a thief.  He didn't steal, as per all the definitions you gave above, as I showed you, because in order to steal, you have to assign yourself unlawfully/wrongly other people's property, and that didn't happen.  He assigned himself lawfully and hence rightly that property, because rightful and legal is defined by the code, and he asked the code, and the code gave it to him.

So now that we all agree that it wasn't theft, and that he wasn't a thief, were do we stand ?

Nice words. Very intelligent. I'm just glad you read what was contained in those links. The man is a stone cold thief. Defend him if you want to. I never will. I don't defend thieves.

A thief is a thief is a thief

Well said. The jumped up intellectually challenged tards on this site that think hiding daylight theft of millions behind immutability is a joke. All the while desperately trying to wrap their FUD up in a coating of morality. The attacker and these sheep that try to justify him are putting back crypto currencies investment back to the dark ages. I actually despair that these cretins can call themselves human. To me they are Untermensch.

Well, I haven't seen any argument as to why he was a thief.  The arguments you gave all indicated he wasn't, under the assumption that the code was the law, and determined hence what was lawful/right and illegal/wrong.

Is your next assumption now that the code wasn't, after all, the law ?

I see that your arguments are just as watertight as your buddy's...

If he's not a thief then where is he? Where is his legal representatives to his rightful DAO that he was denied? Why doesn't he reveal himself? I'll tell you why, because he knows himself as nothing more than a disgusting filthy thief. He knows he stole. And he knows he has no legal recourse to take. But he'll be laughing his face off at the tards of your ilk who support him.

AFAIK Vitalik wasn't especially pro-fork. I hate ETH as much as the next guy, but this thread is some BS

Time to take a closer look at the REAL dirtbags involved behind the scenes.. so which of the Devs/Foundation members had the most to lose in the DAO?

Because the only law was the code, which was running on a block chain that has been forked.  In smart contracts, there are no "legal representatives" or "judges" or anything.  There's just the code, and the substrate that is supposed to run that code in an unaltered and unstoppable way.  If you kill the substrate on which the code is running, then you are screwing the engagement you had with all participants.  That failure in keeping your engagements can of course be a bonus to those that make a profit from that, but at least we know now that the substrate providers weren't honest when they made their engagement of unaltered and unstoppable, which was the condition for running smart contracts in the first place.

That a honest man playing by the rules was screwed, is bad enough.  That you call him a thief, while he's not the one that didn't keep his engagements, is highly immoral.

Incorrect. Apparently the law is also the law. I remember him threatening legal action if he was denied his ill gotten coins. Well then where is he? Where is his legal challenge? His legal authority? Oh yes he's not here and he has none. All the characteristics of a thief. Argued you sheeple blindly follow as you hide behind immutability. Pathetic.

So if a victim of theft doesn't go to court with all the hassle, then he must be a thief ?

He probably won't attempt any legal action, because for human law, "the code is the law" is probably not a human legal concept in itself.  In which case the DAO guys where scammers because that's what they sold.

But that doesn't change the fact that IN THE FRAME OF A SMART CONTRACT where the code IS the law, the full law, and the only law, he didn't steal anything, but obtained perfectly legally his coins.

Yes if someone steals from you that person who stole from you is a thief whether or not you report it to the authorities.

And you can quit fudding already. The only reason he's not sought legal action is because he knows that he stole and that he's a thief. Otherwise he must be a very rich thief not to seek back his rightful, in your immature eyes, $60,000,000.

I get it. You define him as a thief. Now please tell us how you define a community that says the code is not the law after all when they don't like the outcome of the law.

I will agree he/she/it is a thief if you admit you are stupid and know nothing about what you are defending. I think we could all agree on those terms.

Exactly.. they love to warp the truth !

The DAO attacker simply exploited the system as it is..
He did not "Hack" into the system and "steal" anything.
He simply exploited the platform for financial gain by playing within the rules set out for the system.
And this my profiteer friends is EXACTLY what your whole entire Crypto Scene "Profit Game" is all about !

All of you out there are using ANY means you can think of to get an advantage to profit from this stuff.
You are simply jealous that the guy found such a good way he managed to make more than you !

There was nothing hacked nor anything stolen.. you ETH Fork supporters are simply jealous.
You wish you thought of it and did it first  :D

You fork fans are full of shit big time !
Your making it sound like the guy put on a ski mask and broke the lock on the bank vault.
He simply exploited the system fairly just like the hacker did when he exploited Cryptsy's Points market..
And yeah Cryptsy also swiftly did a role back on it too.

This rollback / fork type shit simply erodes the credibility & integrity of Crypto.
Yeah the losses in a DAO incident can be huge but it's the price you pay when doing the right thing.

You fork fans are like guys playing a board game and when someone playing the game by the rules wins big you want to flip the board over & start all over again.

Maybe taking a big loss is a painful lesson but it's the risk we take playing the game.
Want to corrupt the game ? People simply won't play anymore !

Correct and the thief is Vitalik.

The DAO beneficiary followed the rules of the contract exactly. He did not break any rules.

You thieves want to break the rules because you decided AFTER THE FACT that you didn't like the rules you had agreed to.

But stealing the authenticity of an asset from its thousands of holders does not a crime remedy.

Shame the ETH devs hadn't studied history.

https://i.imgur.com/EeksqTs.png (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-protected-vericoin-stolen-mintpal-wallet-breach)

My opinion in all this is that Vitalik has set a precedent in that transaction history in blockchains can be changed or rolled back. Now every platform will think this is ok if the Ethereum fork becomes a success. They only way to negate this is for the original Ethereum classic to live on and let the competition between them kill the fork. I am confident the original will win.

nice op heh.

and WBB / 1EX is the one on the true right path.

all will be seen in time (not to long either) ;)

their new tech chain that NOBODY HAS EVEN DEVELOPED is coming and will blow minds.

The story of Joe Ritchie comes to my mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ritchie

Joe figured out that Black-Scholes was incomplete and he 'completed it', he syphoned off over a billion dollars in the 80's through algorithmic computer [TI SR52] trading.  Was he a thief?  The hacker of DAO took advantage of an incomplete, unthought-out, dreamy hack of a promise.  I cheerlead him and applaud his efforts.

These children playing around with smart contracts, currencies or in Ethereum's case on their website, offering the ability to form one's own Central Bank is absurd.  Years and years and years integrating dozens of people and dozens of disciplines can possibly make for a smart contract, not a child in a basement who does not understand the consequences or repercussions.

Do you have any idea of the standard operating procedures, security checks, audits, and governance that is employed when a single line of code is changed at a Bank?  Nothing could be further from the truth for the DAO project or Ethereum for that matter.

The 'hacker' like Joe Ritchie will hopefully be able to use those spoils to help keep this technology honest and do some wonderful things.  Vitalik is the criminal in this circumstance, literally counterfeiting the Blockchain of Ethereum for his own personal beliefs undermining the very core principal that makes Bitcoin the only network with which you could have any reasonable expectation of security and validity.  Immutable.

I thank Ethereum for what it did for myself and my family.  I purchased it on the very first day of its pre-sale at 2000ETH for 1 Bitcoin, I was in Toronto, I was at Decentral.  I bought alot of Bitcoins worth for the equivalent of 25 cents.  I sold every last one of the them between $12 and $13 the first time it spiked.  I am happy.  I am satisfied and as far as I am concerned (I'm only a single opinion) Ethereum is over and it has taught us all lessons, similar to World Coin, Aurora and all the others that have come and gone.  As there is no way to know the effects of these instruments unless they are tinkered with in real-time, each one has provided priceless knowledge that will keep making these instruments better and better.

More importantly it will allow legislators to begin to craft the frameworks for their proper oversight.

I for one do not believe this extremely intelligent person is a thief.

Here is a thought, and hopefully the intelligent young man is listening out there.

What if he were to distribute 50% of his Ethereum Classic holdings equally to all existing addresses as an offering to everyone who believe in the actual purpose of the technology thus reducing his ownership to 5%?  I think that that gesture is more valuable than Satoshi's quite frankly.  He would equally be rewarded as 10x 50% which is much more valuable than 1x 100%.  He even stands the chance to become the head of the organization.  I am dead serious.  There are no charges that can befall him for exploiting an error that was advertised to be complete, secure and tested.  Again remember the CFTC, SEC, CBOE, CBOT all told us that the Black Scholes models were complete as well.  They were wrong.

Ethereum Classic will spike and Ethereum will take a VERY hard dive, eventually Classic will win in the end as immutability is the single greatest value proposition of this technology.

Full disclosure I currently own even more Ethereum Classic below $1 than I purchased initially years ago, for the second round!  Thanks Vitalik and Mr. Ritchie II.

Visibly it is difficult to talk to the logically impaired.  I wanted to come to a logical Socratic reasoning, but there are some for whom logical reasoning and just repeating "he's a thief, he's a thief, he has stolen stuff" are indistinguishable.

I do agree that from a certain, human, point of view, one could call him a thief.  But the whole point is that in order to call someone a thief, there has to be a law that tells you what transactions are lawful/right/just and what transactions are illegal/wrong/unfair.  Human law is made up of different sets of rules, the most prominent is of course the law from state and court, but also unwritten moral laws.   All these laws need a form of human judgement because they are not deterministically precise, and in some border cases, different people judge differently, but in many "obvious" cases, most people judge the same.

Now the whole point is that if the DAO had been a paper contract, then by almost all accounts, what the guy had done, would have been theft.   THIS is probably why people call him a thief.  The reason are multiple: 1) the large majority of contract subscribers, even the authors, would never have considered that what he did was part of the INTEND of the contract  2) there would have been no REASON, no thinkable advantage to anyone, to allow for such a contract.

So, there's almost no doubt that *if the DAO would have been a paper contract*, the guy was a thief.  I perfectly agree upon that.

BUT.

The whole point of a smart contract is that ALL human rules, legal ones, moral ones, .... are to be REPLACED by one single, deterministic entity: the code.  If one thinks about it, that is EXTREMELY WEIRD.  This is why I was insisting on people not understanding the concept of smart contract, and not seeing the mind boggling implications of that concept: there's no legal law, there's no moral law and there's no INTEND any more.  The code is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.

Because it is the ONLY way of coming to a verdict mechanically, on a computer, without human judgement.  If you do not accept EVERY SINGLE strange bizarre immoral consequence of "the code is the law", then smart contracts have no meaning.  (as every contract has to come to a verdict, Turing complete smart contracts are an aberration BTW).

And in the frame of THOSE rules, the guy wasn't a thief.  He applied the strange, weird, immoral law perfectly and played by the rules.

Visibly, the ETH people were in fact not ready to accept the concept of smart contract, and to replace human, legal,moral law by the code, and nothing but the code.   Visibly, the pioneers of smart contracts weren't ready to accept the concept they were tauting.  Given the huge difference between human judgement, and "code judgement", one can understand that.  We see it here: the same action (by the guy) is judged theft without the slightest doubt if it had been under human law, and is perfectly legal under code law.  People don't, finally, accept "code law".

However, this makes smart contracts impossible, and hence, its platform (now ETH) useless apart from a trader's toy.

If one cannot accept "the code is the law", then there must be human judgement.  However, judgement by whom and on the basis of WHAT PAPER CONTRACT ?   And with what corrective action ?  Each time a hard fork ?   You can be sure that almost ALL somewhat involved smart contracts will, at a certain point, make decisions that might potentially be considered as not in agreement with some human judgement.    What is to be done in that case ?  Who will judge ?  A court ?  In what jurisdiction ?  What paper contract describes the INTEND on which the judge is to base his judgement ?  Or is the vote a majority vote of the ETH stake holders ?  Is that a reliable judgement ?  Are shareholders not going to vote for their advantage and not for human fairness or legality ?   Is this justice, or just "the mob voting for lynching or not" ?  If the code is not the law, and the legal system is not the law, and morality is not the law, but "the vote of the mob is the law", are you sure you're better off than with "the code is the law" ?
But EVEN if one can come to a form of human judgement against the code, is ETH going to hard fork each time that a smart contract code does something that someone judges not fair or legal ?  Is it going to hard fork every Saturday for all the funny things all the smart contracts did on it during the week ?  Or is it only going to hard fork for "important people" or Vitalik's buddies ?  Is there only a form of justice other than the code, for the rich and the powerful, but not for the normal small contract writer ?   

What's the value and sense of such a strange system, where the ultimate contract IS a paper contract describing intend ?  Why not stick to a paper contract and a normal court then ?  What's the use of this thing ?

The ONLY way of implementing smart contracts, is to accept "the code is the law" even if that law is weird, inhuman, looks unfair, and does totally unexpected things.  If you cannot accept that, you shouldn't be in smart contracts.  Because otherwise, you end up with a non functional system and even much less "legal basis" than with a paper contract, where "the majority vote of the mob" is making the unpredictable law, every day.

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

Why would that matter ?  We don't know who Satoshi is, but we can use bitcoin, can't we ?    There were at least 10 different opportunities to do funny things with the DAO, so if THIS guy wouldn't have done it, the next one would.  What that guy did was a normal aspect of complex smart contracts: they will not run as intended.  That's normal: written code deviates from intend.  People call that "bugs".  If the code is the law, then the bugs are the law too.  What the guy did was just illustrating an aspect of smart contracts, nothing more.

The whole question is this: can you accept that bugs are the law ?  This is what the guy illustrated (and again, if it wouldn't have been Joe, it would have been Jack).  If you cannot accept that bugs are the law, then you should get out of smart contracts and of ETH.  If you accept that bugs are the law, then you should move to ETC.  So in any case, ETH has no meaning any more.
Because there will be many more "bugs" in smart contracts.

We know who he is. He told us on his website. It is MPeX. We revealed that during the attackexploit.


MPeX is not a young man.

If you don't know who MPeX is, then you are not fully knowledgeable about the history of Bitcoin.

Yes it does. We should not take it lightly and forget about him. We do not want this hapenning over and over. We want to know who it is, how he did it and why. So in the future it can be prevented. I also think Vitalik would love to know. So yes again it will really matter to him. :D

Yes I read about it and his interview. But is it confirmed? I am not updated in the issue with him. The others I ask are in denial and say it isn't him. They say he just seeking publicity.

He claimed it. And he is the one capable. And he is the one with the motive, since he hates shitcoins (but he doesn't waste his time destroying them unless they proclaim to challenge Bitcoin).

He is the guy who told the SEC to fuck off in a public letter after they demanded information from him.

He destroyed Vitalik for an ideological reason. He didn't need the money.

Of course it will happen again, over and over.  It is in the nature of the concept of smart contract.  He's just the pioneer. 

What you are essentially saying, is that future smart contracts will have code that coincides with intend in all possible border cases.  In other words, future smart contracts will not contain bugs or exploits.  Now that's good news: you know how to write complex code that matches perfectly with intend (doesn't contain bugs) right off from the start.  I think that many software companies will hire you !

Here, here. They undermined the entire idea of their system by doing this rollback. ETH is all hype.

Eh, you don't need a strong motive, do you ?  If I would have been capable, I would have done that too, just for the fun of it.  Crypto is there to be challenged and to be played with, right ?  If I would know how to screw up the bitcoin block chain, I wouldn't hesitate to do so.  Crypto being a system that has to function in a trustless and hostile environment, there's nothing even morally wrong with challenging it.  I would assume that there are many, many people out there with the same sense of making fun as I do, and who are way way more capable, so I wouldn't look for a motive.  It is normal.  It is a fun game.

Of the people with the balls to stand up to the potential legal risks and the resources to do it well, he is one of the few with the motive, given he promised to destroy any fork of Bitcoin which didn't agree with his principles. Ethereum was touting to challenge Bitcoin. He put his foot down. Vitalik was squished under his big toe.

I Agree.
And as I see it this can only lead to one conclusion. Eth and other coins with "global" smart contracts will fail. Smart contracts can not be used in a system that can overrule the contract by forks or any other way. This does not mean that smart contracts are not useful though. We use smart contracts in BitBay for our double deposit escrow, and they work like a charm. In one of the next releases we will add the option to write your own smart contracts in phyton. That will create a potential for badly written contracts with unintended outcomes of course. But it will not create a DAO scenario for the simple reason that the contracts are only between two parties. I have been pushing for an expansion of our multisig from 2/2 to n/m to combine with the contracts to open up a much wider use range. I'm reconsidering that now. For now I think smart contracts should only be used for agrements between two parties. Thank you Eth for the lesson.

This is the important lesson indeed, and this was the true lie of the ETH/DAO promotors: they explicitly said that this was not a thinkable scenario, while it is, of course, because of the consensus nature of a block chain.  That said, and that is why, if there is one immoral and dishonest party in this whole affair, it is the ETH foundation, because it was THEIR initiative to call for a hard fork.  Of course, they needed suffiicient weight from miners to be able to pull the trick, but if they had stated, from the start, that the essence of smart contracts, and the value proposition of a smart contract platform such as ETH, is exactly that the code is the law, including unintended behaviour, there wouldn't, most probably, NOT have been a hard fork, even if the potential desire for it existed.

So, as you say, the potential for the code being overruled by a hard fork is an inherent flaw of the whole system of smart contracts, but on top of that, the very founders of a smart contract platform pushed for that potential to become reality, and as such betrayed all their claims concerning "unstoppable" and "immutable" and "the code is the law" themselves.


I think the issue is not so much the number of participants, but rather the weight of the value of a contract with respect to the value of the whole chain.  The fundamental flaw in the DAO was that it was "too big to fail" and the main / sole ETH project.  In other words, in the same way as having all the mining power in the hands of a few, having a large chunk of the chain value in one single contract is a centralization problem that will lead to corruption of the rules.  If there would have been 20 000 little DAO on ETH, a fork to save one of them would never even have occurred in the minds of anybody.

I think your two-party smart contract will suffer even more from that if you consider that the code has to be the judge.  Each party can fork off and do as he pleases.  In fact, your two-party smart contract is probably just a cryptographic way to sign and date actions on both sides, *with the idea of going to court if one of the parties thinks that the contract was broken and got screwed*.  But that's not a smart contract, that's a secure logbook. The only thing you're probably doing is introducing non-repudiation signatures on actions, so that you can use this as proof in court.  I think that's a useful way to use cryptography, but I wouldn't call it a smart contract.

But I fully agree with you: thank you, eth, for having screwed up so royally and to have shown the limits of smart contracts, namely people messing with history and hard forking over it, before people taking contracts seriously, lost money.  Now, only gamblers lost money, and even got it back, which is not dramatic.  So, thank you again for showing the uselessness of ETH before it did real damage.

In fact, the ETH fork showed us one thing, as Munti explained: "the code is the law" only works to the extend that the mob accepts it, and the mob can always overrule it.  So maybe one should simply accept that fact, and build it in the code.  I don't know if it is possible with Ethereum, but one could consider that there can be a majority vote of stake holders to undo any transaction on the block chain while remaining on the chain.
There could be a new kind of "transaction", with a multisig representing sufficient stake *from before a specific transaction*, that undoes this transaction in some kind of way.

In bitcoin equivalent speak, there could be block chain entries that "revoke" former transaction hashes, so that their UTXO are not considered valid, and their inputs are not considered consuming former UTXO.  It would be sufficient that such a revoking block chain entry accumulates signatures representing sufficient UTXO from before said transaction for it to be recognized as valid.

As such, the new rule would be: "the code is the law, but any stake above X is above the law and can undo anything in the past".

Instead of a multi sig of accumulated stake, one could also introduce a few hard coded "god signatures" of specific people (say, Vitalik and his dog) or entities being "god" and above all law, and when they sign any such revocation entry on the block chain, then said transaction is revoked.   Or this could be a multi-god signature, where, say, 5 out of the 7 gods have to sign such a revocation order.  We could assign the keys to, say, people like the president of the USA, the governor of the FED, Putin, and the secretary of the communist party in China, the king of Saudi Arabia and Vitalik. 

What do you think ?

It would avoid hard forking, the rules would be clear, and there would be a way to overrule the code in a less messy way than with a hard fork.

The number of participants is very relevant because it has major impact on how big value a contract can have. It would be insane for two parties to make a contract that is to big relative to BitBays marketcap and the amount of coins available on the exchanges. One party would have to buy the whole sell side, and the other would have to clean out the buy side. Both would lose. A contract where many people can enter over a certain (or unlimited) period of time on the other hand, could easily end up  much bigger than the contract that doesn't make sense between two parties.



?? What use would there be for one man to fork off? And how would it affect BitBay?




Our two party smart contract signs, dates, and executes actions on both sides. If that is not a smart contract, then I don't know what is.

Can't do that for obvious reasons.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood.  I thought you were talking about a private block chain with just one single smart contract between two parties, mined by the sole two parties.  You are piggybacking on an existing block chain to get the immutability.

Then you're right of course, as long as the contract value is way way below the chain value, there's no risk of hard fork.

Not piggybacking. BitBay has it's own blockchain. But we are getting sidetracked here.

Back to topic:
Does anyone in here believe it's possible to have global Eth style contracts that are immune to what we have seen happen with DAO? If so, how?

Good story here and i agree with your idea.. would be cool if he did something like that.
But what is he planning on next ?

I see this as a decentralized matter at the heart of it all.
We intend to make the most decentralized autonomous coin we can.
yet when we see a large gain by someone we want to cry for the Police (while chanting Free Market)
And then we want to have a centralized authority in charge of the coin do roll-backs or forks etc.
This is silly nonsense and really does undermine the core concept we are aiming for.
I won't budge on this issue.. and i have no motivation either way to speak up.
I never have & never will own any ETC / ETH ICO coins etc.
It's the principal to me..

I have been a massive nutcase about piracy for a decade or two now and this remind me of all that.
I was around far before there was an iTunes..
They simply seen what we File Sharing guys did and thought, Hey WOW ! What a great idea !!
Let's COPY them, steal their idea.. monetize it then declare what they are doing as illegal criminal theft
..after the fact.. EVEN if they was no ACTUAL  law broken.
THEN.. they say if you don't pay money with iTunes.. then.. LOST REVENUE !

It amounts to they don't like it.. so they are saying it's a "crime"
Ohh yeah.. my Girl-Friend does not give me nearly enough BJ's.. CRIME !!! She is Robbing me !
Lost revenue ? NO ! lost fucking BJ's !!!111
She owes me about 342 gummers and i am taking her to court.
If i have to end up going to a prostitute then SHE is footing the bill dammit !

I hate Mushrooms too ..when people put them in Spaghetti sauce i want to throw up !
CRIME ...

I also am selling Bottles of my Urine with a certificate of Authenticity.. your not buying it ?
Lost revenue ..

I also sell Spoetnik Autographs for 1 BTC each.. so if you all ever bought an autograph
of some other person then i formally here & now declare this as "Lost Revenue"
You will see me in court THIEVES !

I wish i thought of making the internet first.. so well.. i am saying i did anyway.
For now on you all have to pay $50 a month to use the web or i will call the cops.. THEFT !
Lost revenue ..

Pay me or i am taking my ball & going home  >:(

Utter utter bullshit. You are such a sad spiteful individual you clearly have limited intelligence to think that a thief of millions can be right. If so where is he? He did no legal wrong and is an unstanding citizen of us all. Where is he? Where is his legal representative?

I'll tell you where. Nowhere. He is a dirty thief and knows he is. Nothing more.

Irony 101

Original chain, ETC trading volume (24 h): $ 41,402,300
Forked chain, ETH trading volume (24 h): $ 25,392,300

Predictable or not? If it was predictable, why they have forked the whole chain?

Answered here (https://steemit.com/ethereum/@toknormal/the-ethereum-circle-dance-more-conscious-than-it-looks).

Thank you. I'll read it.

I think you're wrong, that this was "planned".  This is like so many conspiracy theories, and so many religions, that think that because something happens, there must have been a Planner or a Maker behind it.  What we have actually witnessed, was "emergent intelligence from a distributed interacting system".   We are so terribly indoctrinated by thinking that if something (good or bad) happens, it must have been hierarchically organized or thought off, and hence "at the top" there must be a genius or an evil brain.   All of our history courses are full of Kings, Emperors, Presidents and Leaders of revolutions, having determined and thought off the great things of society.  For evident reasons authorities want us to think so (and most of the time, they think honestly themselves that they are the brains).  But, exactly like a free market assigns resources in the best possible way without anyone planning it, a distributed system of interacting agents has emergent intelligence without anyone planning it.    We thought that the only thing such a "community" could do, was to "vote".  We only know of one way for a community to express itself, namely to "democratically vote" and then have it the majority way.  We should know better: the market doesn't vote with a majority.

To the evident, but impossible riddle that the ETH/DAO guys lead themselves, namely that they wanted to have smart contracts (code is law) LOOK LIKE human contracts (legal, moral, contract, judge,...) - which is outright impossible, they didn't know the solution.

The DAO illustrated that a perfectly legal act according to code law, is considered, without the slightest doubt on the human legal and moral level, theft, and it was not on the test net (well, one excuse was that they had actually put $150 milion in a beta test...).   The impossible choice of the ETH/DAO community was this:

- do we stick to the fundamental tenet of smart contracts (code = law) and hence demonstrate that smart contracts are totally different from human contracts (sounding the end of the illusion that smart contracts are similar to human contracts, like bitcoin is similar to dollars as a monetary asset) ?

- do we apply human law in extreme cases like this, and break the foundations of smart contracts, unstoppable, immutable and all those nice words that are still present in a comical way on the ethereum foundation website ?  (and do we also break the human contract that we had with our customers doing explicitly what we told them would never happen) ?

This impossible choice was given to "the community" for a VOTE, because this is how "leaders" think that the community should speak (they want to preserve unity in the community for sake of power of their leadership).  

The interaction of all independent agents came with the BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION even though nobody in his right mind planned this:  a genuine fork.  Indeed, this was the technical possibility that resolved the riddle in the best way, by having it both ways.   In the same way as a free market does: the market doesn't go for a "majority vote" on whether Apple or Samsung are to make smartphones, after which the minority accepts the majority vote and we all buy only Apple or only Samsung phones.  The market has diversified offer, and people take what they want.

This is something that no "leader" planned.   This is something that was anticipated as a potential catastrophe that hopefully never would occur.  It was the best thing that could happen, and it emerged AGAINST ALL leadership.

Emergent distributed intelligence.

This is not planned. This is a result of panic from Vitalik, the foundation and slock.it. They were in such a hurry to fork it before the hacker could dump his coins and now they have created more problems. Ethereum fork is possibly going to be not the longest chain as the original chain gathers momentum and support. I'm sorry guys but this is reality.

Oh really Einstein. So explain how Vitalik is a thief. Bare in mind that what you post can be construed as slander and open to legal process.

You seem to have missed the important point, that calling someone a thief because an act he committed is theft, is depending on the law system under which the action is taking place.

As such, under the "law of the code" the hacker was doing legal things.  The same action, most probably seen under human state (which state?) / human morality/sense of fairness law, is most probably seen as "theft".

Consider the following situation, to illustrate that:
in country A, there's a law that says that if you are laid off from your job for other reasons than misconduct (say, economic reasons) you are entitled to take the personal tools that your employer gave you (computer, smartphone....), with you when you leave.
in country B, there's no such law.

Now suppose that Joe gets fired from company C because C made a bad deal and has to face serious losses (a bad deal with which Joe has nothing to do, but the CEO of the company can't keep all personnel and has decided to lay off Joe).

Joe puts his company's telephone and laptop in a cardbox which he takes home.  Is Joe a thief ?

In country A, he isn't and acted according to the law.
In country B, he's an outright thief and stole company property.

In the DAO, it was said that the code is the law, and according to the code, the hacker could take the funds he took, like Joe took his laptop.  The terms of the DAO were written clearly to anybody: it was the code (and NOT, explicitly NOT, the explanations given on the DAO site).

But almost with certainty in any jurisdiction, where the DAO website explanations would have been the paper contract, what the hacker did was theft, under state and even moral law.

Now, is Vitalik a thief depends on under which law system we look at it, but things don't look good.  The reasons are:
- everywhere, the DAO guys and Vitalik engaged in writing (on their website) that "the code was the law".  If afterwards, they did something so that the code isn't the law any more, they are breaking their own contract.
- you can argue that under state law, the hacker was a thief.  But then, under state law, you are not supposed to go and "steal back".  ONLY A JUDGE can decide whether a thief was a thief, and whether someone needs to take some action to break his own contract terms to take back what belonged to someone else.  YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO APPLY HUMAN JUSTICE YOURSELF.  You must go to court.
- finally, I think that Vitalik is probably a stake holder in the DAO.  As such, his actions (taking back the funds of the hacker) are FOR PERSONAL GAIN.

These three things make that Vitalik is not in his right shoes according to human law either, and indeed, he stole back the hacker funds by breaking his own engagement/contract ("that the code is the law, that code is unstoppable, that the past is immutable...") for his own gain.

In as much as "taking back the funds" would have been the normal thing to do under human law, it would also have to have been ordered by a judge.  Otherwise, it is theft.

Oh dear God give me strength. I could write "The Pope is a wanker" on my website but that doesn't make it correct nor legally binding. The DAO attacker is a thief. End of. And it's fuckin disgusting how idiots of your ilk try to justify it hiding behind your immutability bullshit.

You mean that if Amazon puts on its website "Apple i-phone 6 to to sale for $1000", and you pay them, they are not contractually liable for sending you an i-phone you paid for because they only put that on their web site, like you wrote something about the Pope ?  Only a paper contract engages any legally binding stuff ?

But then in what way could the hacker possibly be a thief, as these were just electronic things with no paper contract or engagement and he was just playing on the net ?

You are really logically challenged, aren't you ?

We will have to agree to disagree. If you think poorly written code is an excuse for taking the property of others so be it. My morality requires doing no harm to others......it's as simple as that.

If you re-read my statement you'll discover that it in no way supported the fork of ETH.

This inability of some to not understand both that funds were stolen and at the same time the fork essentially broke ETH as a cryptocurrency is surprising. Essentially ETH might as well be put on a single server now because the blockchain serves no purpose.

A far better solution would have included catching the thief and suing the creators of the DAO (along with various associates). This would have allowed DAO purchasers to get their money back, encouraged due diligence in future contracts and penalized all guilty parties. Additionally one of the purposes of a blockchain over a centralized data base (malleability) would have been preserved.

Ok let us call him a thief. He is a bad person. Ok. Now whos fault is it that the DAO was poorly coded? Do you think a low dirty thief would not take advantage of this? Of course any smart person would know a thief will find every opportunity to do his job. Now who is at fault that investor's money got stolen?

So ok they tried to fix it by tweaking and tinkering with the transaction history thru the hard fork. After that what happened? ETC was born. Now you all cry in the forum blaming the thief for doing his job well when it is really slock.it developers and Vitalk's fault because they did not do theirs well.

If Vitalik started an antivirus company I will laugh hard.

Then you are one of the (visibly many) ethereum supporters who don't know what is the mind boggling idea of a smart contract, which is somehow strange, as the whole value proposition of ethereum is to make smart contracts.

In a smart contract, "code is law, all the law, and nothing else is the law".  I wrote already a few posts on that, but essentially, in a smart contract, you replace totally all human law (state law, international law, morality and all that) by a piece of code, which is the ultimate verdict on "right" and "wrong".  If the code allows it, it is right/legal/fair and if the code doesn't allow that, it is wrong/illegal/unfair.

This is the whole idea: you turn "right" and "wrong" into something like a law of nature: by running the code, ALL you can do is right, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to do wrong.   As such, you do not need judges, police and prisons, because only RIGHT things can happen.  Yes, but the "right" and "wrong" in this world are very, very, very strange.  But this is needed to do a smart contract, that a computer can decide, and that no police or judge is needed.

The Ethereum foundation has scammed people by letting them think that a smart contract is akin to a paper contract, but "in software".  That is not true.  A smart contract is a piece of code that replaces all of human law and morality by a mechanical execution.  A paper contract exists inside a whole bed of human legal constructs, from state and international law, down to human morality and sense of fairness.   A paper contract is much more than what's on paper: it includes implicitly a whole environment of legal and moral rules.

The Ethereum foundation sold smart contracts as if it was similar to a paper contract and people believed it.  If they would have realized how "unlegal", "immoral" smart contracts are BY DEFINITION, then they might not have poured 150 million in something like the DAO.

Because by definition, if the code tells you that you can do it, by definition, you are legal, right, and you are not harming any one.  That is the strangeness of a smart contract.  If the code gives you the coins, then you did so legally.

All the standard arguments of "poorly written software", "exploits", "bugs" and so on don't even exist as a concept in a smart contract.

In fact, the big scam of the DAO was not that there were "bugs" in the code.  The big scam was that the DAO guys "explained" the supposed, intended workings of their code.  In fact, given that the DAO law was the code, they should have only put online the byte code of the DAO.  Not even the source code.   Only the byte code.  THAT was the law and nothing else.

This is similar to not writing a "summary of intend" when you sign a paper contract, but only the contract itself.  What tricked people was that the DAO website told other things than the code.  

In the normal software world, what counts is the intend, and if code does something else, people call that "bugs" and the code is adapted to the intend in an update.  However, in a smart contract, it is the other way around.  You should deduce intend from the (byte) code, and not the other way around.

People simply seem not to understand the weirdness of a smart contract ; in the first place, ethereum supporters, because they believe in the simplism that a smart contract is like a paper contract, but written in code.  It isn't.  At all.  A smart contract is a terribly weird idea and very inhuman.  I support smart contracts but that is because I am a fan of the Singularity, where humanity will be replaced by machines.  This is actually the only kind of vision in which smart contracts make sense.  The Ethereum foundation didn't tell you that, did it.


I perfectly understand that, but that is even another issue.  That is like bitcoin not forking over the more than 50 large bitcoin thefts (real thefts of wallets this time).  But it is still another issue.  



By saying that, you confirm that you don't understand the essence of a smart contract.  The "thief" wasn't a thief under the code=law system.  People only signed up to a contract they didn't understand (including their authors): it wasn't a venture capitalist firm, but it was a hacker's bait.   Which is normal.  EVERY COMPLEX SMART CONTRACT is a hacker's bait because NONE works as "intended".  That's in the nature of smart contracts, and what the Ethereum foundation forgot to tell you.

Only small smart contracts can reasonably well be considered more or less doing as intended.  The claim that complex smart contracts do as intended is the same claim as saying that one can write a complex piece of software not containing bugs or exploits ever.
So all complex smart contracts, being the law, will be legal hacker's baits.

He's certainly a thief, but he might not be a bad person. He might be a lovely guy to have a drink and shoot the breeze with. I just wouldn't leave my wallet unattended on the table. He'd steal it and quote possession being nine-tenths of the law.

Other drunkards in the bar, hoping to share the booty, would back his claim (while making sure he doesn't leave without buying them all a drink for supporting him!).

On another point, remember that this is probably an old school bitcoiner at work. He is protecting his investment. He hates alts, so unless you hold nothing but BTC you are probably in his sights. Hold ETC with caution.

People on here think he gives a shit about ETC. They might be right, they might be wrong. It's a hard one to call. They might end up as new world heroes for supporting the 'rebel rebel blockchain', or idiot ETC bagholders once he dumps on their asses.

Time will tell

EDIT: Maxcoin became nothing without Max, the ultimate crypto scammer. ETC might become nothing, without our beloved goat hacker thief!

I think it is much deeper than that.  No complex system of software can be guaranteed to be without a deviation, in border cases, from intend.  People call that "bugs" and "exploits" (depending on whether it happens like this, or is looked for).
As such, no complex smart contract will work as intended, and you can't correct for it, because it is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.  Correcting bugs in a smart contract is essentially breaking the law, which is unheard of in human law.

So in essence, you can forget about the concept of complex smart contracts.  That is what this story told us.

In the funnily strange world of smart contracts, he's not a thief.  In fact, in that world, there cannot exist thieves.  If you don't understand that, you've not understood smart contracts.  With a smart contract, there is no possible illegal act any more: if you can do it, it is legal, and if it is illegal, you can't do it.

Why did the creators of the DAO say it was safe to put $150,000,000 of ETH in it? Were we warned that there will be bugs or exploits? No. They said it was safe because it went thru a security audit. Who is stupid and at fault here? You know the answer.

I agree with you, that was the whole scam of this thing, but they were trying to do something impossible.  This is why they should have just published the byte code of their contract.  They didn't even need a single security audit in that case.  Just a piece of random code can be a contract.  If you subscribe to it, you have to find out how it works.

Of course, in doing so, they would not have obtained 150 million !  The only contributors would have been those that would have reverse-engineered the byte code...

If you re-read my statements you'll discover I didn't offer an opinion on smart contracts at all. The concept that the code is the law is a marketing statement of the ETH community and has nothing to do with the rule of law as applied by society.

The suggestion that poorly written code (or marketing statements) somehow trumps the rule of law in society and therefore taking the property of others is not theft would not stand in any courtroom. The theft does expose the weakness of ETH smart contracts and we are in complete agreement on that point.

What we seem to disagree on is that the funds were stolen. What I think is self evident you want to justify by suggesting that the code is law. In general the rule of law everywhere calls the taking of another persons property theft.

And you see, this is exactly where crypto gets it completely wrong. You seem to forget that we live in a real world where humans exist. If it can be coded, it can be cracked by a human. What you have just quoted is a software thieves charter. Basically, if you can steal it, then steal it (and well done for being smart enough to steal it).

Sorry, but that's not going to wash with the public you're trying to encourage to use these systems. Or are these systems simply for us to look at and smirk amongst ourselves about how great they are??

TBH, I was very very suspicious when I heard the Slock.it team were going to build a DAO rather than just go for straight funding. It made believe that they knew the smart locks they were talking about just weren't going to work so they found an alternative route to distance themselves from future failure. I guess it didn't work!

Ok.


Here we diverge: "theft" is a concept that is in relationship to a specific law system.  A given action is theft or isn't, according to the given law system.  Now, according to the code=law system, it wasn't theft.

According to probably most human law systems, it was maybe theft.  I say "maybe", because if the code isn't the law, then "property of the DAO" is also not defined.

According to most moral laws, it is clearly theft.

But normally, society law doesn't apply in smart contracts (and in as much as they do apply, smart contracts are not possible).

This is BTW why I've often argued that another shortcoming of ethereum is its transparency.  A smart contract platform should implement, as much as it can, anonymity, by having TOR-type of servers, and cryptonight-type of anonymous transactions.
It is only when transactions and network activity is essentially rendered totally opaque that a smart contract really makes sense, because there's no way for human law to intervene.  It is only when human law is totally put out of work that a smart contract can really thrive.

If ETH would have been anonymous, btw, the hard fork wouldn't have been possible.

As I said before, my main motivation for liking crypto is to prepare (in the long term) the Singularity, for machines to take over.  It is only in that frame that crypto DOES make a lot of sense.  In the mean time, it can also be used for total anarchy, which is also my liking.

Doing "normal" business on crypto, you have to be crazy.


That's essentially the idea, indeed.



Public acceptance should go with public desire for total anarchy and the abolishment of state and law.  I don't know how much demand there is for that.  Outside of that demand, the only reason for crypto to exist, is to scam people, which is also a worthy way of dealing with statist supporters :-)


I think it was hubris of the astronomical kind.  The very idea of building an entire venture capitalist firm as the very first smart contract on a new platform in a new language (Solidity) is so mindbogglingly out of scale with reality that they were in fact right: IF you want to screw up royally, you have to be so incredibly over your mileage that nobody will see it, and that big money will flow in.

You are correct that in some jurisdictions that "property of the DAO" is not defined. In most Western nations though cryptocurrency has been defined and is viewed either as a type of property or form of currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country

The link supplied is for bitcoin but many countries definition includes all cryptocurrencies. The property of the DAO was ETH and as such that property has been defined.

The code would not be defined as law in any country and as such using it's flawed code to remove property from it's owners would not be justification of theft. It would be considered theft of existing and defined property.

Edit: I think denying that the removal of ETH from the DAO is theft is the weakest (and false) argument of anti-fork and ETC supporters. As I said earlier the problem could have been dealt with in a different way without requiring a hardfork and maintained the integrity of the blockchain.

As I suggested a far better solution would have included catching the thief and suing the creators of the DAO (along with various associates). This would have allowed DAO purchasers to get their money back, encouraged due diligence in future contracts and penalized all guilty parties. Additionally one of the purposes of a blockchain over a centralized data base (malleability) would have been preserved.

No, not really.  In order to be able to have property, one has to have a statute of a moral or physical person.  Now, the statute of moral person of DAO is highly doubtful, because it has nowhere been registered.  If the DAO coin holders are shareholders, then they are most probably liable for participation in an illegal for-profit company that didn't register.

And in as much as the DAO coin holders are simply COIN holders, well, they still have their DAO coins !!

Don't forget that no DAO tokens were stolen, and that the humans only possess DAO tokens.  The ether was possessed by the DAO, but that entity has not much legal leg to stand on, and is probably a totally illegal entity in any case.

In as much as the transaction of property WITHIN THE DAO can be given any statue, without referring to "the code is the law", I would like to see that !

I think that the day that the DAO token holders make themselves known, they stand more legal problems than anything else.

Moving propriety from a non-existing moral entity to another moral entity using software that has been declared the sole rule can only have 3 outcomes:
1) all that stuff is declared illegal (how are taxes collected on a for-profit moral entity ??? )
2) the software is considered the rule and then the "thief" was stolen
3) the INTEND (the DAO website) is considered the intend, and then the slock-it guys are in DEEP DOODOO because they wrote the software that was supposed to secure the intend and are probably as well held responsible for organizing illegal financial activities, as being responsible for the losses incurred.

By the time the "thief" is legally declared a thief, so many lawyers have been paid and so many time has gone by that Vitalik is retired.  And remember, nobody is a thief unless a court has pronounced that verdict if you want to play by legal rules.

No wonder that Vitalik and the Slock.it boys panicked when they realised what they were up to.


For there to be theft, there has to be an owner in the first place.  Now, a securities firm that didn't register and whose' monetary actions with the money of share holders wasn't running according to all legal dispositions is probably a way way bigger problem than a doubtful transaction between non-existing and if existing, probably illegal, entities.


The point is that if you want to abide by the LEGAL system, forget about smart contracts, and forget about most crypto.  The ETC guys promote a true crypto system, meaning an anarchist system.  If you're not in anarchy, you have nothing to do in crypto, essentially.

I agree with the principle that the DAO was likely not a legal entity in many jurisdictions. It is unknown how all that would have played out now that it has been disbanded (Or has it since ETC is a continuation of the original ETH?)

There seems little point in continuing our debate about the theft (or not).

Indeed, that was a good movie. The whole point of Bitcoin is decentralization and knowing no bailouts/ins are going to happen just because someone fucks up. In this case, the guy that coded the smart contract fucked up, and now the integrity of the project is jeopardized because big names were involved in the DAO, but they don't give a fuck and just want their money back.

The only people still defending this mess are obviously ETH bagholders.

Exactly. There was no such as DAO Thieft. He never stole anything, by strict definition of the smart contract concept. He used EXISTING code to execute the contract. This is something that some people keep failing to understand. A smart contract is presented AS IS, and you cannot complain that the code did something that you didn't expect. It is part of the smart contract.

^^ This.

Don't hate the player, hate the game... and/or the game creator(s).

According to the rules of the game the "hacker" withdrew funds while following the rules of the game: the code of the DAO. Morals aside, since this capability existed within the DAO it is a "legal" move according to the game in play.

Then... Players in the game and creators of the game didn't like this move so they took their ball and went to go start another game where the other boys aren't so mean  :'(

One can even add: in as much as a human court would recognize the DAO as a moral entity (doubtful), and a human court would recognize the intend of the contract (the written text of how the DAO is supposed to behave on the DAO website) because this is probably what investors took for granted, and in as much as the court would hence assume (against the idea of "contract is law") that the code is SUPPOSED to implement this intend, in that case, the Slock.it guys / ethereum foundation are responsible for this implementation and all the consequences of "bugs". 

Now, in as much as the court could recognize that all complex software systems deviate from "intend" and hence contain "bugs", nevertheless, the slock.it guys/ethereum foundation must do everything they can to avoid losses due to bugs.

The problem was that this exact bug/exploit was made known to them, even by academics, and *they neglected it*.

So in as much as the court does everything that is needed to even be able to recognize the hacker as a thief, the slock.it guys and/or the ethereum foundation will have to answer for abusive neglect with as a consequence, the losses.  And these losses will not be estimated in "ethereum" but in dollar.  Given that, due to the hack, ETH lost about half of its value in dollar, I think that our boys will pay for the rest of their lives, EVEN if the hacker gets in jail for theft.

Let us agree with calling the attacker a "thief". He got coins that weren't his without permission, so yes he is a thief. But let us also agree that he is a thief that will not be charged of any cases filed against him because technically he didn't steal anything. Why do you think Vitalik just left the thief alone? He knows he will lose against him. He is losing even now after the hard fork.

He's a thief regarding moral standards.  In the same way that the state is a thief when it collects taxes.
Whether he's a thief according to legal standards (which ones ?) is to be seen, and can only be pronounced by a court.
And in the system at hand, he's no thief at all, because he acted legally (the code).

So I agree with you to call him a moral thief, like the state is a thief.


Because in going to court, Vitalik was going to get much more from the whip than the thief whose identity is unknown.

Analogy: If you are the owner of a money laundering service, is going to court because they stole from you an option ?

The funny thing is the attacker knew all of this before the attack. It was carefully planed and any move Vitalik will be doing the attacker is ahead of him. If Vitalik thinks of another way to circumvent everything let us wait for the attacker's move. It is like a game of chess with the attacker zeroing in on Vitalik's king.

What is with all the talk about morals, none of the eth, dao devs or the person who took the eth from the dao have any morals.

They said that it is imutable which was bullshit, so they lied to investors.

Now if i had all the etc taken from the dao, i would slowly sell them for eth and then dump the shit out of eth so it all turns to nothing.

Or i would just move them from one wallet to another constantly and watch people try and figure out whats happening.

@bbc.reporter
You think he'd steal your wallet ?
I don't think so..

Did you see my awesome comment earlier ?

I pointed out how he was simply doing what you all are too.. trying to profit. (sort of)
But you call him a thief & hide your wallet why ?
Because he made more than you with the same rules you had ?
Your jealous.

It's not possible to steal something when you played by the rules.
You think this one DAO example is the only immoral act of profiting that goes on ?
You all have made a career out of chanting Free Market for years to cover your scammy bullshit.
Such as mass coin cloning.. and posting them here with dummy accounts etc.

What classy coins with integrity will i see on your exchange trade history records guys ?
You are all money hungry hypocrite profiteers..

I would actually trust that DAO attacker guy more because i think he did it out of principle and not greed.

I'd hide my wallet from you and leave it with him no problem..

It seems that one of the chains will fail over time. The question is, which one?

What do you mean by "fail". ETC is moving and trading. It may be declining but it still has supporters. They will both run for a long time. What's more important is who will support which chain for what purpose and what value will that bring?

If you really think one chain will die then right now ETH has the advantage. Why? Because it has more hashing power. ETC's hashing power is only about 10% to 15% that of ETH. If one chain is truly dying then it is ETC. Please observe the chain state here http://fork.ethstats.net/

Price and volume in the exchanges should not be used to judge if ETC will continue or die. The answer lies in the hashing power.