[saurik]

Yeah... and as the person in question who found and exploited this particular bug ;P, I can definitely state that I would not feel comfortable betting the rest of my life on my ability to safely launder a giant pile of crypto back through to fiat (and then, further, keep that secret for the rest of my life, which shouldn't be downplayed).

I am much happier being able to get a bunch of clean money and then be able to give talks on the subject at conferences and get a lot of "street cred" in the tech community for my effort than spending the rest of my life wondering if there's someone from a real-world mob out there trying to hunt me down to recover the $100M I "owe them".

[jacquesm]

The whole assumption that your ethics have a pricetag attached is faulty, it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'.

[saurik]

Yeah: I definitely agree with this, and I think it is an endemic problem to discussion of ethics in technology: we tend to focus on "but I could"--which sometimes ignores the law but even when it doesn't tends to then get bogged down arguing the exact boundaries of the law--without instead trying to judge people on whether they "should" (maybe based on the ramifications it has on other people) or "would".

I just think it is also worth noting that, even if we do accept the false dichotomy, I would not be an effective criminal... which seems to continually disappoint some people ;P. (I'm sorry to be such a let down! lol)

[jacquesm]

Indeed, not everything that is permitted is ethical.

[sillysaurusx]

Everyone’s ethics have a price tag. It’s better not to pretend otherwise, since it clarifies a lot of human behavior.

[jacquesm]

I strongly disagree with that. You really can't claim to speak for everybody.

[sillysaurusx]

If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river. The price tag is just different.

Yours would likely be family or close relatives.

I think you’d take money to do something untoward if that was the alternative. Almost everybody would. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that.

[dahart]

> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river. The price tag is just different.

Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?

[jacquesm]

My 'goalposts moved' detector just twitched.

[sillysaurusx]

If you say so. It’s the same thing, even if it’s more comfortable to believe it’s not.

It helps to frame it this way, because once you accept that you’d do that, you’re more likely to accept you would do something unethical for a billion dollars if it had no consequences to you. And from there, it’s a binary search to determine exactly what your price is.

Would you be able to say you wouldn’t lie to your wife if it meant you’d walk away with a billion dollars? Certainly this is contrived, but all examples in this territory are contrived.

[snowwrestler]

Positive and negative consequences are not the same thing in ethics.

Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.

[sillysaurusx]

On the contrary — the decisions you have to make to avoid negative consequences are often the best test of your ethics. Consider how many people would’ve been punished for speaking out against what plantation owners were doing in the 1800’s, for example.

The illusion that they feel different is extremely powerful. It’s worth resisting. It helps uncover all kinds of ways that we contribute to unethical behavior, if only through inaction.

The concept of having a price attached to your ethics is essential. Without it, people fool themselves into believing they’re above temptation. In my experience those same people tend to be the most vulnerable to it.

[jancsika]

> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river.

OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."

Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)

tldr; goto considered harmful on HN

[Consultant32452]

People choose the river regularly.

[aaaaaaaaata]

Many people's ethics have a price tag.

Don't bleed all over us!, or let others bleed on us.