[peterth3]

The other night I watched the Crypto Startup School video series by a16z on YouTube [0]. It includes presentations from smart people saying that blockchain/ethereum is the computing platform of the future.

One issue with ETH/smart-contracts that is not addressed in the series is how to ship patches to a smart contract. Let’s say there’s a vulnerability in my contract that accidentally leaks ETH.

How do I ship a patch to fix the contract? Could my buggy contract be taken advantage of indefinitely? Maybe I could move all my ETH to a new wallet and leave the bad contract? How is this problem handled today?

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK9Lwn4_TfLS3I9huJjd-k_Fe...

[wait_a_minute]

There are upgradeable smart contracts.

https://docs.openzeppelin.com/upgrades-plugins/1.x/writing-u...

There is also the concept of a standard upgradeable proxy contract.

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1822#motivation

This is an area in which someone could build useful tools and libraries to facilitate this need even more.

[ShamelessC]

If it is upgradeable and only one party has to agree to it, could be ripe for abuse.