Interesting, but did you really have to be condescending? On top of this, not everyone here is a hacker and not every hacker is a computer security expert.
What do you mean by 'anything significant'? Paper money is not backed by anything material. Rather, it is backed by institutions (central banks, governments, banks) and individuals using them. To me, that's pretty much the same as cryptocurrencies.
I think that was the point he was trying to make. Without major support of such institutions / individuals, bitcoin won't catch on as a "real" currency.
They were indeed very naive. In the history of law, there has always been a divide between those who believe that the letter of law should be applied no matter what, and those who believe that social justice should be ensured.
Whatever the terms of theDAO, there WILL be judges to find that what just happened to it is theft. That is why instead of damaging trust in Ether by forking it, the ethereum/DAO management should turn to the law to get its money back.
Smart contracts are a very good thing, but they won't become perfectly safe any time soon (if ever), so the community should recognize that civil and criminal law are a safety net, likely to help smart contract get wider use, because of they create increased trust.
> Whatever the terms of theDAO, there WILL be judges to find that what just happened to it is theft.
I am not completely sure if it went to court and it was litigated fully it would be found that the theDAO smart contracts that were buggy could be rolled back to what was "intended" as there was language that specifically denied that form of reasoning. theDAO clearly fucked up but that doesn't invalidate a contract. The intent in the contract was actually clearly declared, the smart contract was binding in its form. The smart contract's intent was its code. It's code was buggy. Thus one will have to litigate in court whether intent can inferred from buggy code and whether a software bug can be rules as outside of intent. Rolling back transactions like that are really exceptional.
I think it is quite interesting. A lot of people in the stock market have lost money because of software bugs, although everyone didn't agree beforehand that that software was the intent. I think it could go either way with theDAO's software contract if it was litigated.
That said you could possibly sue the implementers of the smart contract for negligence to try to recover the loss, or those that advertized theDAO as a viable investment vehicle for false advertizing or misleading one about safety, both of those are much more straight forward legal avenues.
The purpose of a hack (or any crime) is not to extract the maximum possible value, but to extract the maximum value and get away with it. Cashing out quickly and disappearing is part of the escape strategy. They probably won't care if it destroys the currency.
They can easily switch bikes pretending that they have a flat tire, or any other issue. IIRC suspects of using batteries have also been seen to switch bikes at suspicious moments.
Then by implication this task does not require intelligence ;)
Computers are faster serial processors but brains do more in parallel.
Parallel pipelines only really hit Neural Nets with GPU's and the Imagenet convnet solvers like Alexnet were among the 1st parallel implementations - this gave 30 - 300 speedup but still relatively tiny compared with squishy wetware.
