Re: Ethereum - Doomsday machine or not?

On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 6:57 PM, Michael Brunnbauer <brunni@netestate.de>
wrote:

>
> hi all,
>

Hi Michael,

Nice to meet you and greetings from sunny Hong Kong!


>
> Ethereum - Doomsday machine or not?
>

Interesting binary title.


>
> Well... if it gets really bad we should be able to coerce the miners. But
> what can we do short of that?
>
> Can we stop malicious autonomous contracts if we really want? I think we
> can - by banning anything that delivers true anonymity.
>

You might note that there are some in the wider community who do value the
concept of online anonymity, nevertheless it's good IMHO to explore edge
cases to sharpen the thinking of all 'stakeholders' and their sharp pointy
stakes. :)


>
> Let the mafia contract be a contract that threatens a random
> person/organization with a DDOS attack. If the recipient does not pay the
> small protection fee, the contract will use a part of its balance to
> attack.
> Any profits only serve to make further threats more intimidating. The
> contract
> cannot be controlled or changed by anyone.
>

Interesting idea and business model.


>
> Ethereum seems to be designed so that there is no way to stop a contract
> from
> doing things in the blockchain. Contracts can create other contracts and
> code
> can be obfuscated so that detecting or tracking malicious contracts - even
> those that are known - becomes very difficult. Code in the blockchain can
> even
> have secrets:
>
>
> https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/08/cryptographic-code-obfuscation-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-are-about-to-take-a-huge-leap-forward/
>
> I think we can stop the mafia contract at the gateway to the real world by
> blacklisting it, everything it creates and any known "proxy" service in the
> blockchain it could use to hide. The contract now does have to rely on
> humans
> creating arbitrary contracts to bypass the blacklist. Requests to create
> arbitrary contracts would look quite suspicious so those humans would know
> that they are probably breaking the law. How are they going to spend any
> profits they got from helping the mafia contract? By banning mixing
> services
> or any funds coming out of them, the incentive to help the mafia contract
> could be reduced to a minimum.
>
> Does this sound feasible?
>

Powerful ideas and constructs here and I guess a great way to start the
discussion.

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but I guess the issue that I
see is when, say, there are no 'truly anonymous and autonomous malicious'
contracts leaving only the 'attributed and autonomous malicious' contracts

e.g. perhaps in the case when the 'then mafia' use identity theft to
initiate the doomsday contract.

-- what then? :)

Tks.

p.



>
> So my expectation for the future of blockchain technology is that it will
> never be allowed to deliver true anonymity.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael Brunnbauer
>
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