[SystemSafety] Ethereum: the 'owners' money or reputation?

Derek M Jones derek at knosof.co.uk
Fri Jun 17 20:05:53 CEST 2016


All,

Ethereum is one of the next generation of crypto-currencies.
People can write contracts (code that transfers money or
other activity) and others can execute them.

A while back I questioned whether it would be cost effective to
create software that was reliable enough for systems like Ethereum
to work:
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2015/03/15/ethereum-is-it-cost-effective-to-create-reliable-contracts/

Lots of people thought Ethereum was the next big thing and jumped in.
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/6603/dao-creation-formally-slock-it-token-sale-has-begun
Depending on exchange rates, many millions of dollars are involved.

Guess what?  Some unintended code behavior has resulted in an
organization set up by many of those involved in creating Ethereum
loosing all their millions:
https://twitter.com/search?q=ethereum

What to do?

They could suck it up (their terms of use specify that
what the code does is the definition of how the system works) and take
the loss of nearly all their, and 'investor', money.

They could blacklist the 'stolen' money; effectively getting it back.
This would rather kill off the marketing hype that no one body controls
Ethereum.  This approach does require 51% agreement from Ethereum
miners (there are question floating around about who has what voting
power).

More discussion here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oiqj7/critical_update_re_dao_vulnerability/

All in all an interesting spectacle of vanity crashing down in flames.

-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com


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