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"We are working with law enforcement officials..."

If the promise of ETH contracts is that code is law and to eliminate needing trust, then how and why would law enforcement get involved?

Did the attackers break down the door and steal the money? Or did the provide a widget that met the contract and which just happened to have the unfortunate side-effect of siphoning off tokens, a bug which will be fixed in the next revision of the contract...

I 100% agree this behavior is immoral, but as web3 coders become essentially lawyers, is it illegal? The further we go from fiat currency, are we burdening a specific countries tax-funded investigation and enforcement?

Fascinating stuff!



Under the code is law philosophy, if the there was a bug in the contract someone exploited that should be fair play.

However hacking into your systems and stealing your keys is still theft. Same as using a $5 wrench to get your private key.


I recently stumbled on this and it illustrates the situation perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrbDWq64BNg


People pay a lot of taxes for their crypto trades.


It's in the article. Keys were stolen.


Thank you, I missed that detail. I do think the larger question of DAOs replacing trust with code/law is worth further discussion.


After following the DeFi space for over a year now I've come to the conclusiong that "code is law" is a fallacy. If you come to the possession of funds that were not intended to be in your possession by exployting bugs or vulnerabilities, and other parties are significantly harmed in this process, then you will be in a position to face criminal charges... Well that is unless one can maintain anonymity indefinitely. Once anonymity is lost law enforcement may come for you.

The best thing you can do (and the moral thing to do) is to submit for a bug bounty in case you find a crictical bug in a blockchain/protocol.


Funny that it's kind of the same paradox as robbing a bank the old fashioned away. Congrats, you have millions of dollars of cash, good luck spending it without anyone asking "hey where'd you get all this money" / bragging to a friend


the odd are not good for recovering the $. of all the dozens of hacks, there has been no arrests (except a kid in Canada) and no $ recovered.




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