The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
> But in our email exchanges, he argued that he'd executed a perfectly legal series of trades.<p>In real finance, there is an understanding that technical loopholes can exist, since not every outcome can be foreseen when writing laws, but the legal system can frequently prosecute against a series of actions which are, individually, legal, but which together are taken in order to achieve something illegal.<p>That is, modern finance and the law also attempt to deal with intent.<p>But in the Ethereum smart contracts world isn't the whole <i>premise</i> that the code is the law? That we don't need any of these pesky courts or banks or auditors or anything: the code is the law, and the decentralized blockchain will enforce it.<p>With this worldview, if the attacker simply exploited poorly-written code to find a loophole, how do the owners of Index have a leg to stand on?