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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

Since "code is law" doesn't that mean it wasn't a robbery? They were just following the law.

Contracts (smart or not) cannot override the law.

I'm not a lawyer but I would be very surprised if courts in most countries would buy this argument.

Spelling or grammatical mistakes usually don't invalidate contracts in the real world and robbing a poorly secured vault is still illegal.

The thief was obviously trying to get other people's money without their consent.

If that is true then this decentralized utopia I heard so much about sure does require a lot of centralization.

You can’t bring rational thoughts and facts into an emotional conversation.

There are advantages to centralization. One may reasonably ask if trad-fi centralization is at the optimal level. This is just one way to spend money to see if the optimal level is below that. Lobbying for regulation is a mechanism to spend money to see if the optimal level is above that.

The only agreed upon contract here is the one on the chain.

I’d love for this type of thing to be tested in court. I’d invest in popcorn futures ahead of that trial.

Contracts are invalidated all the time.

If they do that and if they get hold of the individual (or their assets) the court can force compliance in the usual ways.

"I can't access it and never will be able to" is not a believable excuse unless you can prove it.

A "smart contract" isn't a contract in any sense of the word, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here.

Make sure you do it with a defi flash loan

"Intent is 3/4 of the law" https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea#:~:text=The%20mens%....

> Contracts (smart or not) cannot override the law.

The Law allows people to agree to stupid things, no?

Yes but the argument would (perhaps) be that they didn't actually agree to the implementation (including bugs) but rather to the intended/advertised functionality

Sounds like you want to solve the oracle problem with a... central authority?

It's so poetic.

How is one supposed to know who can and cannot take money from the smart contract, if not by consulting the contract? If my sign says "Apples $0.00" and you take an apple, can I sue you (or have you arrested) on the grounds that you should've known the sign was wrong and the apples weren't free?

Yes. Systems in the real world are supposed to have common sense. That's why we have judges to decide if it was clearly an error, and people taking advantage of $0.00 should have known this, and therefore acted with malice.

Only cryptocurrencies are trying to have it both ways. They boast that big bad governments can't touch their money scheme, until someone finds a loophole in the code-is-law. Then suddenly law is law again.

Grammatical mistakes cause vulnerabilities in contracts that are then pwned:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha...

Nope - It's not a robbery.

The old mantra of possession is 9/10ths of the law is and always has been false. If i have something i own it. That is the one fundamental truth. Now someone can come and try and take it back from me by force (Person, Court System, Rebels, Corporations) if they can exert more violence on 'me' than i can exert on 'Them'.

The problem with crypto is the 'keys' are what crypto is. No nationstate can come and take that away from me. They can kill/imprison/fine me, but then neither of us will have it. You would have to hack/fork the chain for that to happen (Which has happened) or find some social way around it (If i have it on a centralized exchange, if i have a hackable hard drive, found my keys on AWS, etc etc.) Additionally, with things like Monero, and tornado swap good luck trying to find them.

But it's not as simple as a robbery, like they forced their way in, or gained access to a key that its owner attempted to keep private.

If you offer a sheep for 100 lb of apples, and someone accepts and gives you the 100 lb of apples, you owe them a sheep, even if you later think that deal was a bad use of that sheep.

If you say "currency is to move and out of my bank/warehouse according to these rules, conducted by this robot", and someone finds a profitable way to transact with that robot according to those rules, you have arguably signed away those profits to that someone, and they are then entitled to keep what the rule-implementing robot gave them.

This doesn't mean "code is law" actually works as a defense in court -- there are are all kinds of reason why that promise might be unenforceable -- but you can't casually asset that this is a robbery without examining the specifics of how the transfer happened.

Even if you can prove ‘robbery’ in the courts, the courts have no ability to follow up on their threats like they would in the normal financial system. That’s my point.

Pray tell how your threat model would handle this: https://xkcd.com/538/

He said he will die for his internet money.

Willing to die and willing to endure torture are different things. Everybody breaks given enough pain.

Hahahaha. That meme is hilarious. And very true.

But again, it ignores my last point completely. Good luck trying to find the person behind the wallet.

It will be interesting to see if they can prosecute people. They are called smart contracts and talked about being the actual contract.

People have been prosecuted for this sort of stuff over the past few years.

'Code is law' is just a reddit meme at this point, that has no basis in reality. 'Smart contracts' are just regular contracts, but with more opportunities for theft.

I'm pretty sure smart contracts aren't contracts. They're pieces of computer code.

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