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Comment by deltateam | Hacker News Reader

> ..contained vulnerabilities in smart contracts, the heart and soul of an ICO

> Once an ICO starts, the contract cannot be changed and is open to everyone

Many teams have upgraded their contract without an issue. The market has stopped reacting to it completely. They just release a new contract and airdrop it to all existing holders. Notify the exchanges, and it is business as usual.

This is more of a FYI. I'm not really curious about what this particular research group is doing, or why this article uses "vulnerability" without the distinction of how benign these things are.

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Airdrops don't seem like a complete solution to me. If someone sells a lot of stolen/hacked tokens, it still decreases the value of the airdropped tokens, since there's absolutely no recourse once the stolen ones are converted to something else. The only way to stop a hacked contract from becoming a problem is if every path to liquidity is immediately halted, but I'm not sure its realistic to do that. I'm sure there is always a long tail of exchanges and holders still transacting in the hacked tokens. People are still transacting in ETC, lol.

People not caring is probably just due to the crazy risk and volatility in crypto in general.

Most "smart contract vulnerabilities" don't involve the ability to steal them.

Again like I said, I don't know why this article doesn't point out how benign most of these things are.

so for the one example you presented, thats right it isn't a complete solution, and that one example requires its own individual discussion. This article doesn't distinguish about the level of severity of the vulnerability

the reality is that most of these are as benign as any random website not getting 100% in a cursory test

If that's what they're doing then why not just do an auction on a web site? What's the point of using the block chain if your solution to any problem is to go around it anyway?

The idea is generally to get to the point where minimal maintenance is necessary

The distributed ledger technology makes it easy to offload accounting and user management, which helps you quickly bootstrap the supply and demand side of a network much faster while coupling that with the capital you need or simply want.

These are typically catch-22 problems for other kinds of networks, VC backed or otherwise. It is dime a dozen in silicon valley to have a company that raised 10 million in a series A to barely have 10,000 users before ultimately closing the doors and giving nothing to its vested common stock employee/holders.

Not too much different with ICOs, except people get more than nothing and don't have to wait for it.

There are still downstream effects with this. Exchanges, financial products on top, all have to deal with this. And this also goes against decentralization.

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