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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002

Courts will absolutely use intent to judge contracts.

The interesting thing with the DAO though, was the explicit INTENT of the contract, was for it to be entirely governed by the code.

As in, the announcement website, and all the marketing for the DAO included a whole lot of lines like "None of the information here is binding. The only thing that it binding is the code. The contract is the code".

So, it is arguable, that allowing people to exploit "bugs" in the code was actually intended.

Of course, they didn't think there were going to be any bugs, but I bet that if you asked the DAO people ahead of time, before the bugs were found, something like "Hey, if I find a bug and exploit it, is that within the contract?", then i bet that the DAO people would have said yes.

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The intent of all smart contracts is to be exactly what the code says. That is why they exist. For any case where you want to consider intent you should not use smart contracts.

People using smart contracts when that's not what they really want are going to cause damage to the ecosystem that will take years to undo.

The question becomes, under what circumstances would you EVER want to use a smart contract for a non-trivial amount of money?

Since smart contracts are software, and all software has bugs, and to a first approximation nobody is interested in having a significant amount of their money, time, or goods erased by a software bug, of what use are these things other than as a curiosity?

They would be useful for making agreements across a large imbalance of power. For example, if I am a one-person operation selling on Amazon, and they screw me over in a clever way, I could not afford to fight them in court. Even if they would have lost, I might simply be incapable of pursuing the case to the end.

I personally would much rather use smart contracts for making deals with employers, the overlords of the marketplaces, foreign clients, etc. Maybe it's just because I'm a programmer, but I would rather fail because of my own bug, than get screwed over and Nelson-laughed at by a bunch of powerful people. I can improve my contract-coding methodology, but I can't do much about other people's shadiness.

Employers, "overlords", etc with considerably more power than you are practically by definition going to be able to spend more money finding exploitable bugs in your code than you would be able to put into bug-proofing it.

The odds that you can improve your contract-coding methodology to such a degree that you write no bugs is most likely nil. You haven't been able to do that in your non-contract code, and the stakes there are much lower.

Besides, how many mistakes will you be able to afford to learn from while avoiding complete financial ruin?

Edit: you've also got the threat model wrong. With a traditional contract, your only concern is the other party (your employer, say). With a "smart" contract, you also have to worry about any 3rd party who can wander by, notice a bug in your contract, and use it to avail themselves to your income.

You've got all the same second-party worries (my employer will use their resources to find a way to screw me) plus a whole new 3rd party attack surface.

As it happens, there is currently an article near the top of the HN list concerning a buyer on Amazon who was scammed, but cannot convince Amazon of that fact [1]

As a programmer, imagine the complexity of the smart contract required to make this sort of transaction work when things go smoothly (including getting information about what has happened in the physical world.) Now imagine proofing it against this scam. Now imagine proofing it against scams in general, including ones you have not thought of yet...

Either you are going to spend a lot of time verifying the contracts you participate in, or you are going to take someone's word for it that it is OK.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14993216

When you trust the code more than the courts. All courts have bugs. Your trust or distrust may be unfounded, but I think that's the biggest reason.

I suppose the hope is that eventually somebody will come up with a smart contract that:

a) Does something useful...

b) ...in a way that's somehow significantly preferable to "dumb" alternatives;

c) gets adequately battle-tested in the real world;

d) can be reused ad infinitum, maybe with trivial variations

It seems to me that it's not out of the question that that will happen, but it's also by no means certain. It seems to me that once you get far beyond simple remittances it becomes extremely difficult to reliably codify intent.

I think it'd be far more useful to work on tools for reliably codifying agreement and intent, in order to make it easier to generate and parse contracts agreed by humans. The aim should be to restrict what it is possible to say in a contract, not expand the space to infinite possibilities as a Turing complete language does.

I'm not convinced powerful languages will ever be suitable for this - the language used for contracts should be less flexible and powerful than human languages, not more - we attempt this with legalese and conventions associated with contracts already (they don't really use english say but a limited subset of it), why not take it a step further and define specific and incredibly limited axioms which can be connected to form immutable contracts with limited ambiguity and no room for error.

Smart contracts assume that incredibly difficult problem is already solved and then start attaching money directly to the contract (why!), that in my view is far too optimistic about the state of software and the capability of humans to manage it.

ERC20 Tokens (the ICO market) fit this description. Though they are basically just creating new currencies.

Id love to live in a world where the intent behind a piece of code and the actual functioning of a piece of code were invariably the same. Unfortunately we're not there yet.

While this isn't about DAO, its true that recourse to courts undermines a central tenet of smart contracts, hence as you say DAO people would probably insist the code is the contract, until a problem occurs.

In fact the DAO fork brings up another problem which applies to Bitcoin too - the developers (and miners if a POW coin) are de facto arbiters of the fate of millions, and if this sort of system were to gain widespread use, would have enormous power, in fact they already do even if you think the coins are overvalued. They decide if a fork is justified, a change will be adopted, or a tweak to algorithms to discourage certain behaviour. They become in some ways a parallel system of government/law without accountability. For all the pretence that people can just fork the project or choose another client, we've seen how hard that is to pull off, and how much influence is retained by the central developers of such a project with the recent Bitcoin Cash fracas.

this is the original sin of bitcoin. Either the protocol can't be updated even for legitimate technical reasons or there exists a group of people who can change bitcoin arbitrarily thus defeating the purpose. Right now the answer seems to be that a bitcoin politic exists but it is an extremely conservative politics. The miners know that if they are seen to be a centralized body in control then the value of bitcoin (and thus their own wealth) vanishes. Thus the miner cabal must pretend it doesn't exist. As more "normie" users join the miners might get more embolden and Satoshi's vision lost. What is to stop miners from creating a fork where the block reward never goes down?

Agreed. This cuts to the heart of my objections to bitcoin.

This article is not about the DAO hack.

Not specifically, no, but the topic of the article applies equally well to the DAO hack as it does to the more recent one.

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