Hacker News Reader

Comment by daylightsavings | Hacker News Reader

To assume those code bases don't contain bugs or go through multiple revisions and iterations is just naive. Just because bugs have not been exposed does not mean they are not present.

Smart contracts have people actively snooping and trying to exploit bugs for gain. Oh, and they are publicly accessible.

Also, IOT...pwned many times over ;)

View on HN

> To assume those code bases don't contain bugs or go through multiple revisions and iterations is just naive.

To assume smart contracts don't go through multiple revisions is equally naive. Now we're arguing about implementation, anyway, which is not the point. Implementation and best practices can be iterated on. The fact that the ecosystem isn't mature yet isn't an argument against getting it there.

I think there's a difference between what you're saying (doing it right is possible) and what the critics are saying (doing it wrong needs to be impossible). There's nothing that best practices can do to prevent a motivated novice from throwing together a minimum effort contract that "works" by whatever test criteria they thought up over the past five minutes.

Imagine surfing the web, but instead of showing a 500 error a broken page would withdraw a random sum from your checking account. It doesn't matter how good the best pages are, no one in their right mind would ever open a browser.

> I think there's a difference between what you're saying (doing it right is possible) and what the critics are saying (doing it wrong needs to be impossible). There's nothing that best practices can do to prevent a motivated novice from throwing together a minimum effort contract that "works" by whatever test criteria they thought up over the past five minutes.

You're absolutely right. There's also nothing to prevent a motivated novice from writing software to control a mars rover. Just, nobody's going to send his rover to Mars. Nothing stops anyone from writing a smart contract, but common sense will (eventually, once the dust settles) stop people from throwing money at them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com