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Comment by dafelst | Hacker News Reader

But guys, what you don't understand is that the code IS the contract!!! That means you don't even NEED regulation!!

Yeah, people who genuinely believe that don't have any problem with smart contracts getting exploited. Of course there are people who _say_ that because it's financially expedient at the time, then change their tune. But both groups exist and this is not really a gotcha.

I dont mind smart contracts getting battle tested.

I also dont mind the whole chain coming together to vote to reverse the transaction.

I also dont mind a bunch of people being unhappy with that and forking.

That's fine. I just see it as heuristics at different levels. In the wider context, generally, markets work well, so people should be 'allowed' to do all of this. After all, you can choose not to use ETH if you think the foundation sucks. Whether ETH or the foundation sucks is a technical question given your goals, I suppose, rather than a moral one.

In a western legal framework you might argue promissory estoppel if the foundation made certain statements about it, but if you take the libertarian code-is-law stance and you want to be consistent then you probably should have researched exactly what was possible at that level before investing.

So all-in-all, seems fine to me.

The contract code said, "if you have a valid (off-chain) private key, you can mint tokens." The hacker gained access to their AWS account and ultimately their keys.

While I am happy to celebrate dumb crypto stuff, this isn't a situation where someone's code was "exploited." Their code was stupid, relying only on an off-chain private key to allow the minting of tokens. Their security was just also bad.

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