Don’t let prejudice fool you

Published by Jorge on

Millionaire Solidity bug

34 million dollars have been lost forever in an Ethereum NFT smart contract. What a waste.

Because of software defects, the contract has reached a state where the money has been locked inside the smart contract and cannot be retrieved, not even by the responsibles.

No one can revert this. Not even Vitalik Buterim, the Ethereum founder.

People are arguing that a technology where a bug could make their users millions of dollar is bad.

I reject this thought. Technology is neutral. Code immutability is a feature, not a problem.

Code immutability provides a way to create kinds of trustless applications that were not possible before. Having a new technology unlocking new kinds of applications is a net positive thing.

  • You could argue that today applications are not useful or not relevant (many won’t agree with you).
  • You could argue that right now there’s a gold rush mode where people are trying to make quick gains in the industry doing bad practices and even plainly cheating. For sure.
  • You could argue that the industry is immature and there should be a stronger verification process. I think that too.
  • You could argue that there are not enough regulation.
  • You could argue that deployers have no liability. That’s right, but since the code is public, should they?

But there have never been a technology that we could not take advantage of, and this one hopefully won’t be the first one.

Don’t let prejudice fool you.


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    Categories: Crypto