Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority? We already have contracts that require highly paid humans to judge whether they've been broken or not. To me at least Etherium was dead the moment they chose to fork because they felt a contract was "hacked".
Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law".
That's OK for now as the _real_ money being put into crypto-currency is understood to be a speculative thrill-ride. People who put actual _real_ money into this stuff know it could vaporize at any time for completely insane reasons. Its basically a bunch of people playing with funny money and having loud arguments about absurdly complex rules.
If, somehow, this stuff is to make it into the real world and start interacting with money, institutions, courts and the livelihoods of regular people, it will have to be VERY different from what it is now. That means you can't have smug, over-confident programmers writing clever shit-code and proclaiming it to be "law" and the "final authority".
> If, somehow, this stuff is to make it into the real world [...] it will have to be VERY different from what it is now.
Either that, or the nature of expectations in the real world will have to change, kind of like they did in the 90s when, after a few technological iterations, real people decided that shopping online was not so batshit crazy after all; or like people did in the late aughts when they decided that sharing every damn thing they were doing, and taking pictures of their tacos, was how one conducted oneself socially.
A lot of people are talking like the hacking risk applies equally to all forms of cryptocurrency, but I really don't think that's the case. Smart contracts in Ethereum have a much larger attack surface than, say, a simple Bitcoin purchase to cold storage.
> Because "code as law" also requires you to accept "bug as law" or even worse "exploit as law".
You're not answering adrianN's question. You're saying why one wouldn't want the contract to be the final authority. But adrianN pointed out that we already have contracts which aren't the final authority. They're asking why the code-based ones are better, given that you still don't want them to be the final authority. (I'm with adrianN; I don't see the point.)
> Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority?
I think this is a common misunderstanding of Ethereum and blockchains in general. The current Ethereum blockchain is authoritative only as long as a majority of it users consider it to be authoritative. The same applies to Bitcoin. No single person decided to fork Ethereum after the DAO was hacked, it was decided by a quorum of Ethereum users. The original fork still exists as Ethereum Classic and if you believe that the "contract is king" then you are still free to continue using that fork along with everyone else who shares that view.
You say "To me at least Ethereum was dead the moment they chose to fork" and that is probably the view of many Ethereum users. I'm certain many Ethereum holders chose to divest their positions and move their assets elsewhere. That is a big loss for the currency but obviously enough people still believe it to be worth something and so it survives.
Because of their distributed nature, cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users. They don't need to be perfect to survive, only to be slightly fitter than their competitors.
You are making the argument that if, say, you've made a bunch of ethereum through means that the majority of miners don't like, they can just fork the currency and take your coins from you, and that's totally fine.
I don't know enough about Ethereum to know whether or not that is technically possible, but I believe it's technically possible with Bitcoin. I think the common misconception of these technologies is that trust is eliminated. It's not, it's simply distributed - you have to trust that the majority miners will find it in their own interests not to steal money from your wallet. I am not saying one way or another whether this state of affairs is 'fine', just pointing out the reality.
The code had implications that the writers didn't intend. Those implications involved attackers being able to take/steal a large amount of ETH under its terms. But those writers got the entire network to fork and give them back their money in direct contravention of the terms of the code/contract.
Other than the 'totally fine' part that accurately describes the situation with basically all cryptocurrentcies. How many coins you have is stored in a distributed ledger which can be arbitrarily modified with a majority of computing power.
I'm not sure it was a "common understanding" that the network would make special exceptions for "the code is the contract, and nothing else" only when the most influential people wrote bad code.
> cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users
Mm, I like this image. It completes something for me...
The world is filling up with these autonomous information organisms, who eat computing power. They also need other care, to go for walks, etc. If we humans want to survive in the information age, we will need to take shelter in one, draw a salary from the care of it.
