TheDAO attack / Ethereum is a Weird Machine
(some ethereum historica. formative, circa 02016)
“ I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this reward”
http://pastebin.com/CcGUBgDG
imperative programming for contracts?!
distributed governance
-
soft fork vs “libertarians in a crisis”
emergent regulation
intent and code (i.e. difference between assumed meaning of contract and behaviour enabled, specifically the recursive call split draining as computationally valid and thus (or not) contractually valid.)
bugs & vunerabilities in immutable contracts
ethereum promises to favour the 'letter' of the law (i.e. “code”) over the 'spirit' (i.e. intention of contract authors) yet the response to the attack shows one way a partially decentralised group can favour the 'spirit' over the 'letter' (i.e. softfork/hardfork)
smart contracts and smart humans
TauChain
“The descriptions didn't matter; only the code did. The descriptions didn't allow for today's hack, but the code did. (By definition! If the code could be hacked, the code allowed for the hack.)” in http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain-company-s-smart-contracts-were-dumb
“Now that it has turned out that The DAO was also a huge multi-million bug bounty program”
“There are also a class of total languages (Coq, Agda, Idris) that are guaranteed to terminate but admit (polymorphic) recursion. This is stronger than FOL but weaker than turing-completeness, and certainly sufficient to implement any feasible contract.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941758