We live in an increasingly automated economy where it seems there's no task that an app can't take care of. Over the past year, an international community of researchers, tech geeks and bankers has embarked on a series of projects to achieve what was once thought impossible: developing decentralised platforms where unstoppable, self-fulfilling programmable financial contracts called "smart contracts" can live.
A smart contract is like any other contract, whether it's for a mortgage, a loan, a job or an investment. The main difference is that the clauses are not written in English, secured by courts or executed by book-keepers. Instead, smart contracts are written in computer code, secured by cryptography and executed by an open network of computers that update a public ledger. The beauty of smart contracts is that the clauses execute themselves because they are computer code that runs on a public network, and so it's impossible to break their terms. No court system is needed.
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This is made possible by the blockchain, the ledger technology behind Bitcoin. Global banks such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Barclays are investing heavily, out of fear of getting left behind and being outpaced by lean startups. The technology opens the door for new breeds of financial products that are more efficient, democratic and secure than traditional finance. Smart contracts are doing to traditional contracts what smartphones did to dumb phones by unleashing a new world of life-changing permissionless innovation.
As with any big technological achievement, the success hasn't been without major setbacks and failures. In May 2016, a new, employeeless, stateless investment fund that solely operates using smart contracts called the DAO (short for the Decentralized Autonomous Organization) received more than $100m (£75m) in crowdfunded investment. DAO investors received voting rights proportional to their share to vote on investment proposals. The stated mission of the DAO is to "blaze a new path in business organisation for the betterment of its members, existing simultaneously nowhere and everywhere and operating solely with the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code".
However, the "unstoppable code" aspect of the DAO led to its downfall. On June 17, 2016, an anonymous attacker exploited an overlooked programming mistake in the code of the smart contract to which investors signed up, which allowed the attacker to freely withdraw $50m from the decentralised organisation's funds. This is similar to how a loophole in the law or a contract could allow someone to go against the intended spirit of it.
What ensued after the attack was a fierce philosophical debate within the community about how to proceed. Because of the intentional unstoppable design of Ethereum, the smart-contract platform on which the DAO runs on, there was nothing that anyone could do to reverse the attack. The platform operates on a global public network of computers that anyone can join. In order to break the rules of the system and return the stolen funds, you must convince a vast majority of users who run the computers in the network. This process is called a "hard fork", because it creates a split in the network to perform a fundamental change in the constitutional software rules running on computers maintaining the blockchain public ledger.
The line between politics and technology is blurring. Those pushing for a hard fork argued that social consensus trumps computer code because code exists to serve humans, and the interpretation of a contract should be its intended spirit rather than a loophole. In UK law this is what is referred to as reasonable terms in the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.
On the other hand, those pushing against a hard fork argued that it would be against the purpose of Ethereum, which is to be a "decentralised platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference". A hard fork means third-party interference to stop an individual who fairly played by the rules of a contract that everyone signed up to.
After weeks of debate, a vote was put forward to the network that resulted in a majority of 87 per cent saying "Yes" to the hard fork. Incredibly, a $50 million theft democratically resolved itself without any interference by the state. It seems that for now the investors of the DAO have been protected from the attack, but at the cost of damaging investor confidence, causing a rift in the community and potentially slowing down the pace of further innovation.
Perhaps this setback is what was needed to slow the rapid pace of change, so that essential safety features can be introduced to the system. One thing is for sure: as smart contracts become more commonplace, institutions are going to want to make sure they do as they're intended. And that means hiring white-hat hackers to write and review them.
Mustafa Al-Bassam is a former black-hat hacker who co-founded LulzSec. He now works as a security adviser at Secure Trading.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
