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Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

It’s so funny to me when everyone touts crypto + smart contracts as revolutionary™ then when you follow a system implemented with them to its logical conclusions you have analogs to everything that already exists. Lawyers to audit the contracts for bugs (and yes there can be bugs in a formally verified spec as well), courts to arbitrate disagreements, and an authority to enforce rules when someone finds a security hole. Hmm maybe the entire federal bureaucracy is not entirely redundant, and there were reasons that it grew to what it is today. Maybe we should understand the existing system before advocating complete disruption.

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> Maybe we should understand the existing system before advocating complete disruption.

This is a great point. One name for it is 'Chesterton's Fence' [0]

[0] https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

In 2011 a new Bitcoin exchange called Bitcoinica launched.

I deposited 100 BTC to test it out.

First thing I did was to try to withdraw negative 100 BTC.

It sent me 100 BTC, but instead of a zero balance in the exchange, it said I now had 200 BTC.

So then I withdrew a negative 200 BTC, and it sent me 200 BTC and increased my exchange balance to 400 BTC.

I contacted the owner and returned the funds and he sent me a 100 BTC bug bounty.

Was entering a negative number in a web form "hacking"? Should that be illegal?

> Was entering a negative number in a web form "hacking"? Should that be illegal?

Many hacking laws were drafted in the 80s and are exceptionally broad. What you did was almost certainly illegal hacking, as the laws define it.

Of course, whether the victims would care to complain; and whether they could get the police to take them seriously; and whether they can find you; and whether you and they are in the same jurisdiction; are other matters. I certainly wouldn't recommend you rely on the CFAA to protect you from ransomware gangs.

$4 million bug bounty! Eclipses anything here... https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-huge-bug-bounty-payouts

In 2011, so the value of BTC at the time was between $1 and $32.

I dunno whether it would be considered hacking, fraud, or plain old theft, but if you hadn't returned the BTC, this would be a clear example of exploiting a bug for financial gain. if nothing else, the operator should have some legal recourse to get their money back. if it can be shown that you did it deliberately, I don't think it would be unreasonable to consider it a criminal offense.

of course, this is not quite the same as misunderstanding some subtleties in an explicit contract. for example, the mere fact that I did not understand an auto-renewal clause in a lease does not get me off the hook for payment. although I might have some recourse if the lease stipulates something absurd (eg, notice to vacate must be hand-delivered to office in antarctica).

crypto does not necessarily mean you get to do a complete end run around the laws of sovereign nations. what it might mean, if designed well, is that you don't have to depend on those nations enforcing things.

Yes, but the point of a digital contract is that everything doesn't hinge on proof of a meeting of the minds. If lawyers and the digital contract can now be so far apart that one says you get the money and the other says you get jail time that isn't an improvement over local law.

They need to go back and wrap all this stuff in actual legal boiler plate to have a meeting of the minds limiting what any individual digital contract can mean, if anything, rather than pretending this is orthogonal when it clearly is not.

You were exploiting a bug, an egregious one, and I don't think any reasonable person would think that behavior was the intent of the service provider. In other words, "the code let me do it" isn't going to fly in court.

To your original question, entering a negative amount in a web form should not be illegal. That's silly. But you're responsible for the effects and what you do after noticing the odd behavior. If an ATM machine vends me an extra $20 because the bills were stuck together, I should return the extra $20.

Just because there are similar mechanisms doesn’t mean they haven’t been improved on in some way. Lawyers and courts are notoriously inefficient if this implementation achieves efficiencies, even if the mechanisms are analogous, seems like progress.

> It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time. First of all, you probably don’t even have the same programming team that worked on version one, so you don’t actually have “more experience”. You’re just going to make most of the old mistakes again, and introduce some new problems that weren’t in the original version.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

The irony whenever someone references this article is they always seem to forget that he was arguing against the decision to rewrite Netscape, specifically, to create version 6, also known as Mozilla.

Looking back, updating Netscape may have been the correct choice.

This is an impossible counterfactual to figure out. Microsoft crushed Netscape, and it's far from clear that continuing Netscape as it had been going would have had anywhere near the success that Mozilla ultimately had.

Mozilla’s success had a lot to do with Microsoft practically abandoning internet explorer. IE6 which came out in 2001 was only replaced with IE7 coming out in October 18, 2006. Meanwhile Mozilla 1.0 came out in 2004 which was effectively the perfect time to gain market share.

Not really. Netscape wasn't trying to be Mozilla Firefox, it was trying to be The Internet.

I think this a lot about our politics now, we seem to want to tear down all the institutions and values that got us here.

This was at least an observed property of some modern reformers in 1929:

> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

In Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson dedicates the first chapter/rule to this:

"Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement."

Really confused by the initial -4 votes on this comment... If that's not sufficient proof downvotes are misused..

> we seem to want to tear down all the institutions and values that got us here.

Strike a "we", replace by "rich elites". "Small government" means in practice that most of what governments are doing now with taxpayer money at no-profit will be done by private for-profit companies, at a worse service level, or that regulations/regulatory agencies will be torn down.

For the first, just look at private prisons - make a lot of profit for their owners, while the level of care for the prisoners (access to healthcare, drug withdrawal treatment or education is often spotty, human rights abuse claims the norm).

For the second, look at how e.g. environment regulations were "relaxed" during the 45th.

It's all about the grifting opportunities.

Strike a "we", replace by "rich elites".

I don't agree. My 'poor' leftie friends are all about tearing shit down, while most 'rich' people I know are pretty happy with the way things are, wanting only to make small tweaks here and there.

Yeah rich people are (usually) Tories, also known as "Conservatives" here in the UK

Sorry to invoke a No True Scotsman here but if you ask an advocate of truly small government (of which I am one) I very much doubt private prisons would be an example they’d accept as a fair representation of their position. The expansion of criminal law is often in pursuit of and to justify growing government and its reach. By all means end private prisons, they’re only needed at that scale because big government is violating its position and the rights of citizens by criminalising actions it should have no part in.

"The purpose of a system is what it does".

Maybe you didn't mean for your position to lead to private prisons. But it does, anyway, and that is all that matters.

Contracting out the running of prisons by the government is a recent innovation[1]. Are we to say that government was historically small in 1983 and has remained small and then notice that somehow there are more private prisons in the US now? That's not a description I'd want to defend.

The US is also not the only place where prisons are private[2], there's the southern hemisphere's Sweden a.k.a. big government paradise, and it has a private prison.

To say either "public" or "private" and ascribe some sort of good or bad to them without providing any reasoning is presumptuous in the least, but to then tell someone what their actual position is - in your view - after making such a presumption would only be to compound an error.

I know what I meant, try to focus on what you mean and fixing that before mischaracterising my views again, thank you.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-amer...

[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/crit...

You claim to know what you meant, but that isn't clearly the case. GP's post was short and to the point. Your posts are long and confusing.

We do have private prisons. As you note, they started under Reagan, in response to Reagan's "anti-crime" policies. Reagan is notorious for claiming to support small government and balanced budgets while actually spending us deep into deficit in order to purchase boondoggles. How are your preferences different than Reagan's?

> Your posts are long and confusing

What’s the average length of a post on HN and where does that post stand?

> How are your preferences different than Reagan's?

You just stated that he acted contrary to his claims, if your position is that I say I’m for small government but wish to spend, spend, spend, then I can see why you’re confused. Try dropping the assumption I’m lying, the principle of charity is a wonderful thing.

More to the point, as you are confused by sarcasm in the service of proof by contradiction, I’ll rephrase:

Would you claim that the government was historically small in 1983?

Is today’s government smaller or bigger?

How do both of your answers correlate with the increasing number of private prisons?

Finally, since your answers should be no, bigger, and bigger government correlates with more private prisons, what on Earth are you on about?

Correlation is not causation (I hate having to post this.) This is an awful lot of words to avoid the question of whether the small-government philosophy you personally subscribe to, whatever it may be, would prefer that government contract out prison services, or run them itself. If you prefer contracts, stop arguing, if you don't, explain why you think the operation of prisons is a proper function of a small government. It's not hard.

> Correlation is not causation (I hate having to post this.)

And yet you're going to avoid defending it, or even looking at, nor answering any of my questions and then accuse me of such matters. Ironic.

> This is an awful lot of words to avoid the question

What is it with those who support big government ascribing mendacity to their opponents? I'm not avoiding anything (except fallacies like ad hominem and false dilemmas).

> whether the small-government philosophy you personally subscribe to, whatever it may be

Here you admit that there is more than one possible outlook, yet you go on to produce this:

> If you prefer contracts, stop arguing, if you don't, explain why you think the operation of prisons is a proper function of a small government. It's not hard.

A false dilemma. Make your mind up, are there many types or only one?

Perhaps if my questions were answered I might feel more in the mood to answer those from people who accuse me of avoiding theirs.

> would prefer that government contract out prison services, or run them itself

My answer is either, it's irrelevant. The government is regulator and enforcer. It should promote (high) standards which it then enforces regardless of whom is running a service. Problems may arise when:

a) the one running the service is also the regulator, a clear conflict of interest and though in some cases permissible, it's not one for incredibly powerful entities like government.

b) the ones providing the service are also over-represented in government i.e. they have more than a vote, they have lobbying power (or straight up corruption) which in this case would lead to criminalising essentially non-criminal behaviours to produce whatever positive outcome for them and not for the populace they're supposed to serve. How many people are in gaol for marijuana possession?[1]

More criminals means more prisons, more tax money, more staff and budget (hence more power), more cheap labour… how does that sound anything like small government?

This[2] will come in handy for you.

[1] https://www.drugtestpanels.com/blogs/articles/jail-time-for-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Long. Confusing.

> where does that post stand

i think the bit where you talked about Sweden being in the southern hemisphere places it in the top tier of 'confusing' for me...

Ah, a helpful comment. I meant to write

there's the southern hemisphere's Sweden a.k.a. New Zealand, the big government paradise

I can't edit now but thanks for pointing out something in a reasonable way.

np, makes more sense now, tx.

The joy at a standup when you hear someone talk about fixing bugs they had to fix the first time they wrote the thing in a different language. We learnt nothing

Except in rust. There is no way to write buggy code in rust.

The program is the implementation of an intention, if the conception of how to achieve that intention was itself faulty the program does not actually implement the intention.

A program that does not implement its intention is buggy.

There is. You may accomplish preventing any memory leaks or buffer overflows but there always exist a bug in your code.

Is this the same guy that says that interns should work for free and that absolute rights to employees off-work time are OK ? from New York City ?

Counterexample: SpaceX. Sometimes, starting from scratch can be very helpful.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. The goal for Falcon 1 was to be as conventional a design as possible and save money via vertical integration. By comparison many other companies tried to reinvent things by launching from aircraft etc.

> SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. The goal for Falcon 1 was to be as conventional a design as possible and save money via vertical integration.

This is still starting from scratch. The design may be conventional, but you're benefiting from a modern approach to processes and design from the beginning.

This is one of those differences between engineering and software. For physical projects how much something is starting from scratch is kind of arbitrary. Knowing for example the ideal nose cone shapes and tradeoffs is a huge advantage.

I mean this is the best way possible, the Falcon 1 didn’t reinvent the wheel. They basically said what’s the simplest useful rocket for getting stuff to orbit copying as much of the design as they could, and built that.

You could make the same argument for software. Where do you draw the line "starting from scratch" in software? Does incorporating third party libraries make it not from scratch? What about the standard library of your language of choice? What about using the abstraction of a high level language in general vs a low level language, or straight machine code? For that matter, is it from scratch if you didn't design the logic gates on the chip itself? Or perhaps even come up with the concept of logic gates from electrical and material science principals.. etc..

I'd say that if you are gluing together a bunch of known-good components into a specific configuration that isn't a full copy of something else, you're building from scratch.

Falcon 1 also included 3rd party equipment and software. IMO, that’s fairly analogous to using 3rd party libraries. I am specifically talking about elements they where designing and building in house which where directly copied from earlier designs.

Take say all those identical looking highway overpasses. Even if one of those projects started with a blank file, applying standard solutions to standard problems isn’t starting from scratch.

If you're going to just quote someone and pretend that serves as a cogent argument you'll probably want to pick someone a little smarter and more well-rounded than Spolsky.

Is your only objection towards the argument that it was made by Spolsky?

Have you ever made a happy comment on HN? Not like ecstatic or anything just.. not this sort of thing

You alright?

If it is already so, your comment is equally lacking.

> Lawyers and courts are notoriously inefficient

Inefficiency implies that we can fathom a way to navigate the same space more efficiently. Do we? Or do we, for this mental gymnastics to work, actually have to change the space, to one where people are kind and the whole complicated system is less so?

Certainly having lawyers in big business must be efficient enough that they beat not having lawyers or else the market would adjust around that, no?

If instead of lawyers running around with reams of paper and reinventing legal wheels every time (and then testing those every time in various court), the parties could use a website where they can customize the standard business contract that might help clear and speed up things. Ideally, in an advanced economy a kind of centralized/trusted entity, like the state could provide this, like it provides the system for filing taxes. Oh wait...

>Lawyers and courts are notoriously inefficient if this implementation achieves efficiencies every if the mechanisms are analogous seems like progress.

Lynching/mob justice is much more efficient than lawyers and courts, and that is what comes to mind seeing how the crypto reacts.

Depends what your aim is, and how long your time horizon is. You might feel better today but when new information comes out showing the mob was wrong, that's the kind of guilt that can lead you to a very dark place.

by its nature the mob action being right or wrong is akin to a dice roll.

My point here is that it happens time and time again - people do revolution, be it real bloody one like French or Russian or just a tech one like crypto, and from the very beginning dispense with the old mature system and replace it with what they see as a very efficient new one - like the "emergency committee" system of Russian revolution which was able to quickly execute millions of "counter-revolutionaries" - yet with time the system again matures into what is perceived as a very inefficient one.

> doesn’t mean they haven’t been improved on in some way.

In what way specifically ?

In that the specifications are formally specified, and thus can be objectively and automatically verified.

> automatically verified

The implementation can be formally written and verified, but the specification itself cannot be automatically verified.

That's effectively what a contract is anyway - it's a specification for a 'legal agreement' which is this sort of invisible obligation that is created after it is signed (for instance, the time spent in contract negotiations is usually spent debating what should happen in edge-cases).

You're right, I meant automatically executed/enforced, without human involvement.

Like in any good contract.

"Smart contracts" that lock up all the money because of a = rather than <= bug doesn't seem "efficient" it seems brain dead.

It turns out some of the inefficiency is necessary for everything to function, and ultimate efficiency is a dumb idea. Who knew?

> a formally verified spec

A formally verified X is just a reliable X.

If X is wrong, then you just have something that will reliably do the wrong thing.

See also: many Black Mirror episodes.

Just because a fart can propel a person, doesn't mean it will take you to the moon...

i.e. just because analogs exist, don't expect their performance characteristics to be invariant

Cue the lost in space movie with beans, instead of potatoes...

> It’s so funny to me when everyone touts crypto + smart contracts as revolutionary™ then when you follow a system implemented with them to its logical conclusions you have analogs to everything that already exists. Lawyers to audit the contracts for bugs (and yes there can be bugs in a formally verified spec as well), courts to arbitrate disagreements, and an authority to enforce rules when someone finds a security hole.

Tech people tend to think of technology as computerized things, but all those things you listed are also technologies that solve real problems that people encountered in the past.

IMHO, crypto is like a new car with the revolutionary new feature of not having seat belt technology. Maybe the inventor has some dumb idiosyncratic or ideological hatred of seat belts, and maybe some people buy into it... Then the new cars get popular, people start crashing them in numbers, and we realize, "hey maybe seat-belts weren't so dumb after all."

Of course, when that happens someone in that community will call it a seat-strap and claim it's a revolutionary new invention.

> IMHO, crypto is like a new car with the revolutionary new feature of not having seat belt technology.

Crypto is like that new car that can have a seat belt but you don't need to. The fact that it still doesn't have that seat belt doesn't means much, just that you need to be aware of it.

For sure any new paradigms will takes time to solve every indirect issues that comes with it, Rome wasn't build in one day.

> Of course, when that happens someone in that community will call it a seat-strap and claim its a revolutionary new invention.

Oh seems like you acknowledge that... but twist it like a bad thing? For sure it will be a great thing to add to cryptos, you just said it yourself that it's something lacking in cryptos...

What's amazing about crypto is the flexibility, the openness, the accessibility. Anyone can join theses networks, thus it can be done anywhere too, and because of the financial incentive, it's gonna happen anywhere. You'll probably say, but there's Western Union, Paypal, Visa, banks, etc... for all that... but check the Chikaordery story from Pleasant Green (as a Canadian I often laugh when the list include Venmo, or any US exclusive service, that just show how so many forget that the US isn't the world).

So yeah, some people will makes mistakes from time to time in their smart contract, it will happens, but we will get better each time to avoid that, when it's needed, just like we did with the previous ways of doing things. We will accept the risk when it can't be done, and that will be it (never heard of fraud using credit card, or bouncing checks? We are just used to them and accept the risks.)

>> IMHO, crypto is like a new car with the revolutionary new feature of not having seat belt technology.

> Crypto is like that new car that can have a seat belt but you don't need to. The fact that it still doesn't have that seat belt doesn't means much, just that you need to be aware of it.

You're missing the point. To put it slightly differently: crypto is like the overconfident kid who thinks seat belts are stupid because he doesn't truly realize he can get into an accident, let alone die. He actually does need a seat belt, he's just not wise enough to realize it. When he gets in an accident and files out his windshield, then he'll discover he wants to use one.

>> Of course, when that happens someone in that community will call it a seat-strap and claim its a revolutionary new invention.

> Oh seems like you acknowledge that... but twist it like a bad thing?

Reinventing the wheel when everyone else around you is riding in cars and on bicycles is not actually inventing anything, let alone anything revolutionary. Then, if you'd previously spent the previous few years mocking wheels as stupid and useless, there's the angle of refusing to acknowledge that you were wrong.

My bank API sucks. It basically doesn't exist.

It does exist. It's just in meatspace.

This is my big problem with anarcho-capitalists.

God didn't come down and give us governments.

We started without order and survival based on individual output.

And every single living thing beyond a threshold of intelligence agreed that it sucked.

The fact that some order is better than no order does not imply that more order is better than less order.

If you assume that adding more government always makes things better, then why not go all the way to complete totalitarianism?

If you agree that totalitarianism is too far, then I don't see why reasonable people can't disagree on which direction (more government or less government) is an improvement on the status quo.

indeed. couldn't agree more.

any anarchy is just one step away from despotism. when power lies on the ground, it doesn't take much for anyone to pick it up and wield it. you really need a strong government to preserve anarchy.

This is another big point.

"Liberty" is a wonderful lag measure, but a terrible lead measure.

The only thing you can really do to immediately create more liberty is deregulating. But in a world without laws, the only law is that of the jungle.

In which case we have a might makes right tyranny.

But as a lag measure you can do things like legislate worker rights, minimum wages, term limits, etc. With the long-term effect of more "liberty and freedom"

“Would would anyone need elevator buttons? There are already trained elevator operators everywhere that do the same thing.”

“Why would anyone need light bulbs? There are gas lamps and oil everywhere that do the same thing.”

“Why would anyone need email? There are post offices that do the same thing.”

"Why would anyone want your new elevator buttons? The ones we have already let you choose the floor you want without letting a stranger steal all your money by pressing it."

It's not too bad to invent the same thing over again based on some new and (potentially) revolutionary technology. It's a try, which is unclear to succeed. What are the alternatives to do? There are some, but working on Cryptocurrency is something valid (even "hot") to do these days.

Why would anyone need seatbelts? This self driving car will never crash.

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