This is not crypto, this is Enron, Theranos and Madoff. In DeFi, you check the code once, and that's what gonna run (exception being proxy contracts, but those are a red flag in itself).
Unfortunately what happened here is a fraudster latched on to a movement that decried centralized trust and said that he is trustworthy and, when asked, pointed to some code that no one could inspect or understand. Simpletons believed him because they believed in the 'trust the code' hype, and believed his money was real. They were wrong.
But at the end of the day, expecting code to replace the core human emotion of trust, the source of money, is ridiculous.
No, the point is for code to replace the institutions/people that people trust (ie. trusting the bitcoin network's consensus code, rather than a central bank), not "replace the core human emotion of trust".
Knowing how computing hardware and software works, I wouldn't put more trust in code either - in fact it would be less.
If you don't understand currency basics, I advise to stay away from crypto
By the same token, money is debt from the past.
The origins of debt are ultimately material. Alice has a bushel of apples today, but Bob won't have a bushel of oranges until next month. The function of money is to decouple the general function of debt from its material details. In other words, you can have debt without money, but you cannot have money without an underlying debt.
This type of synchronization requires a negative price signal on money though.
This is really sad. Especially the guy who 'advised' to stay away from crypto. I don't need advice to know it's for idiots
You are never borrowing from the future. In a 100% reserve system you borrow from other people in the present. If you fail to repay you don't disappoint your future self, you disappoint another person in the present.
In a fractional reserve system loans create both debt and new money and the debt is always an obligation to pay back present money on a fixed schedule.
I don't think the movement cares about centralized trust? Instead it's a movement of get rich quick schemes
There's some separate movement that cares about decentralization, but they're only tangentially affected because they didn't use FTX, and they don't value their crypto in terms of stuff it can buy, but how it makes them feel
Even expert programmers aren't able to check smart contracts for all possible issues.
It's actually sane when your contract is written in a non-turing-complete language with strong typing and the smart contract system has deterministic execution (i.e. you know the result when you submit the Tx and if the result would be different, the tx fails, preferably without charging you).
I'm convinced that one of the main issues with most smart contracts is that they have such weak guarantees and the guarantees they do have are brittle and hidden behind complex, opaque proofs & constraint systems.
What was the language and why did running it in a stack based VM lead to this? I'm curious about the intersection of the language and the type of VM it ran in.
They didn't. They made a hard fork and the community followed. The "hacked" chain still exists, go use it if you want.