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Comment by anaphor | Hacker News Reader

What if they had used a language without the possibility of recursion and without loops? I'm being serious. Languages that disallow certain types of recursion, and disallow loops exist. You'd think they would've used something that actually allows for total functions that are guaranteed to terminate in a certain way, instead of a JavaScript clone...

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You are describing Bitcoin script.

We want to allow recursion and loops. We want to be able to run arbitrary code.

We just need to be a little wiser about how we do it.

How did this madness start? I don't want law to be turing complete. Especially programatic law. Why are people so nonchalant about this? This is not sane design. You want totality and termination proofs. At least that's what I would look for in any programatic system of law.

Biggest rock is best rock.

The DAO would not be possible without it.

Why on earth would you want that? How can such a staggering explosion of potential complexity justify itself?

TheDAO showed a $40m reason why we hackers want the complexity :-)

This debacle seems like the most obvious possible outcome for any system combining the concepts "Turing-completeness" and "cryptocurrency blockchain". What baffles me most about the whole mess is that any of it caught anyone by surprise. I guess I had vaguely (naively?) assumed that the people building Ethereum and TheDAO must have come up with some clever solution for this sort of problem, but so far I haven't heard of one.

You don't need recursion to have a useful computing system. Think about GPUs, which don't have a stack at all.

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