Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Bad Code Has Lost $500M of Cryptocurrency in Under a Year
by
nullius
on 14/02/2018, 20:45:00 UTC
[...discussion of Bitgrail bugs...]

Those bugs don't happen by accident.
Such bugs appear when the coder has zero (really: ZERO) knowledge.

Sorry, I can’t resist—that sounds funny to me, much time as I’ve spent thinking about a different type of zero-knowledge.

I presume that if the Bitgrail devs manufactured a vacuum cleaner, it wouldn’t suck.


This is why I am drooling over the concept of Simplicity (PDF) for Bitcoin.  A powerful smart-contracts DSL with formally verified properties, which is designed to support writing of formally verifiable contracts, is exactly what we need.

Oh yes. Solutions such as Simplicity are exactly why I give Bitcoin a better chance of survival than most of the alts. The academic work being done around Bitcoin is amazing. It might not be as flashy as the snakeoil that some of the alts are selling, but at least it has substance.

“Snakeoil” is a good word for many most the numeric vast majority of the alts.  As for “flashy”, I’d say that plenty of the current and potential future features in Bitcoin (and Lightning!) are exactly that.  However, unlike snakeoil, they take longer to develop than the fifteen-minute attention span of the average social media reader; also, they’re not being hyped promoted by armies of social media sockpuppet shills and, in this forum, signature-spammers.

Developing good ideas takes time.  Developing them into reliable implementations takes more time.  Patience is a forgotten virtue, and was never known at all to the peculiar brand of technical incompetents who enjoy tossing about Other People’s Money.