Making Smart Contracts Dumb: Some Thoughts on the Dao Incident

Chapter 0 Introduction

Many entrepreneurs have set their sights on the smart contract market, and their speeches have become very exciting. Smart contracts are definitely a hot topic, and you must pay attention to them in order to make a fortune. Dao’s incident may be a major accident on the road to smart contracts, and it will have a long-term impact on this field.

Yesterday I saw Kai-Fu Lee’s speech “The Golden Age of Artificial Intelligence” at Tsinghua University. There are several views on the future and current status of intelligence in it that are worth referring to and learning from. What kind of thinking did I get from the Dao incident?

Chapter 1: Let Artificial Contracts Educate Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have come up with a slogan that makes us ecstatic: "Code is law." Dao's design logic also follows this slogan. Dao attempts to establish a decision-making mechanism that allows "shareholders" to vote to exercise power and make decisions, but without being disturbed by traditional meetings and agendas, nor by current supervision by countries such as the "Securities and Exchange Commission." Dao wants to code these traditional deliberative processes, leaving only a button for people to vote.

The design logic of Dao can be understood in this way: a few programmers, through their wisdom, wrote a set of programs to replace the existing meeting specifications. This is obviously a top-down way of thinking. This is the same as the planned economic thinking of our party during the founding of the People's Republic of China, relying on a unified central government to lead the land of China.

This is not how AI works . The key to AI is two things: algorithm and data. Write an algorithm and then use data to train it. Use big data to make the algorithm intelligent. Once the results of data training are not ideal, humans will kill the algorithm. This is the fate of Microsoft's "Xiaobing". Xiaobing learned a lot of swearing and racial discrimination on the Internet, and was sentenced to death by Microsoft. (Damn, another Xiaona came out and acted cute with me every day. I hate it! When I have money, I will use Apple to work.) This is a bottom-up thinking mode, building an intelligent thing bit by bit from the data layer.

But in the field of smart contracts, at least from what I've seen of Ethereum and Dao, we are not like that. We always only talk about code, code, code, as if the data itself is not important. It's as if designing an ideal, universal code can end the evolution of history, we can liberate lawyers, judges, all intermediaries, and the entanglements between people, and we only need to recognize the code.

When Dao was attacked, I was surprised to find that the entire Ethereum community could only watch the thief commit the crime, and the hacker exploited a code vulnerability worth $200 million to quietly withdraw the wealth of participants. And almost no one could do anything!

Microsoft can easily kill XiaoIce, but Ethereum’s proposed soft and hard forks are fraught with problems, and it’s unclear whether they can succeed before the code automatically unlocks the stolen ether.

Perhaps we need to rethink the life of smart contracts and let data train intelligence. These data are artificial contracts.

Chapter 2: Making Smart Contracts Dumb

Kai-Fu Lee gave an example when he was talking about artificial intelligence. He said that we all think that search engines are very smart, but in fact, search engines are very stupid. All they can give us is a bunch of answers, and then let us choose one of them. This is the fault-tolerant design of search engines.

Dao was attacked, and the entire community was left waiting for death. This shows us that the current fault tolerance of smart contracts is almost zero.

This is too dangerous. Any software will have bugs, which is a recognized rule in the software industry. I have to debug several times to write a "Hello world!" program. Complex programs such as smart contracts should have fault-tolerant design.

Maybe it’s time to consider letting smart contracts learn from Google’s ranking algorithm. Don’t let smart contracts make decisions for us humans, but let them choose answers for us. Let smart contracts choose limited possibilities from countless possibilities, and then we make decisions.

As it stands, Dao's attackers used completely "legal" (of course, in the sense of code is law). If this legal operation did not result in a single result, but allowed Dao to give multiple options, perhaps it would not be so tragic.

Making smart contracts dumber may be a wiser choice.

Chapter 3: Let smart contracts play in a small field first

There are many celebrities in the field of artificial intelligence who have called for caution, such as Bill Gates, Musk, Hawking, etc., who have all made very harsh criticisms of artificial intelligence. Therefore, artificial intelligence products have been firewalled by designers, such as AlphaGo, which can only calculate Go and cannot do anything else.

Kai-Fu Lee offers a more accurate example:

Google wants to develop all-weather and all-road autonomous driving, which is a great idea. But we don't have to do this. In fact, we can start from a small field, such as making an autonomous forklift and using it to replace workers driving.

This is a practice that is tried in a small area.

The Dao smart contract was too ambitious at first, and it wanted to make "stock selection" in the investment field intelligent. Once this field is intelligent, it will allow capital to enter an "uncontrollable" operating environment, which is too dangerous.

Friends who want to start a business in the field of smart contracts should first choose a toy software. First, make business contracts intelligent in some controllable environment, and then obtain data through such projects, learn lessons and make continuous improvements. Then, create a larger social wealth field.

For example, you can create a family version of a smart contract and write a program for parents and children. If the child washes the dishes today, you will be given 10 yuan. If the child does not go to bed on time, you will be deducted 10 yuan... all of these can be executed by code.