It is really interesting to me how different Bitcoin users' understanding of morality and the typical person's are. To almost any joe or Jane on the street, exploiting a weakness in someone else's security -- be it an unlocked door or an unchecked error code -- to acquire money from them without their intent, is Wrong. On the other hand, taking retaliatory action, such as providing what detail you can about that person in the service of returning the ill-gotten gains, is right.
Judging by the contents of this thread, the Bitcoin/hacker community feels just the opposite. How odd. I feel like this more than anything will impede the mass adoption of Bitcoin.
I'm not sure the difference is really there. The fact that this place is a casino matters a lot. My understanding of typical morality is that it's totally cool to exploit a weakness in a casino's games to shift the odds in your favor, and the casino's recourse is limited to trying to make this impossible, and banning people who do it (while still paying out whatever they won before they were banned).
However, it's not cool to break the casino's games from within. To make an analogy, if you discover that e.g. a casino's blackjack decks have twice as many 7s in them as they should, and you use that knowledge to make a ton of money playing blackjack at the casino, that's legitimate. However, if you break into the casino and replace all their normal blackjack decks with ones which have twice as many 7s, then use that knowledge to make a ton of money at blackjack, that's bad.
So the question is, which category does this particular attack fall into? Apparently they exploited a race condition, wherein outcomes became predictable if lots of games were played simultaneously. Is that exploiting the game within its rules, or is that breaking and entering?
To me, this feels legitimate. An analogy to physical games here might be finding a roulette table where the dealer under some circumstances lets you place a bet after it becomes apparent where the ball is going to land.
if you break into the casino and replace all their normal blackjack decks with ones which have twice as many 7s
I've always wondered about this from the other perspective. Why can't the casino remove a few cards?
E.g. in Blackjack in a six-deck shoe the house edge is perhaps 0.5% to 2.0% against a "pretty good player" (depending on exact rules). Remove a few face cards and you would probably hurt the player by another 1% or thereabouts.
But you've now moved the house edge from 1% to 2%. Double the profit!
When is the last time you've ever seen any player at a casino ask the dealer to reconstruct the six or eight starting decks that are in a shoe? I've never seen that.
But I still do enjoy taking the occasional trip to Vegas.
When is the last time you've ever seen any player at a casino ask the dealer to reconstruct the six or eight starting decks that are in a shoe? I've never seen that
You see the decks fanned out, each card visible, before they get shuffled and put in the shoe. It would require some sleight of hand from the dealer to cheat that way. If you're going to do that, it's much less risky to rig your slot machines or your craps dice or your Wheel of Fortune, where no one will ever notice any wrongdoing short of an audit by the gaming commission.
First, if people ever find out you're cheating, your reputation will take a huge hit and you'll lose a ton of clients. People know that the house always wins, but they still insist that the house must play fair within those bounds.
Second, I'm guessing there's some way for a player to take advantage of this change if he knows what's going on, so you're potentially losing money if anyone discovers it.
Compared against these downsides, what's the upside? Casinos practically print money. Why risk destroying that just so you might print a little more? Better to put your effort into convincing people to bet more, or getting less experienced players to play more.
All the people I asked about this seemed to think that using the bug was wrong, and that the dox in this context was not wrong. But it is obv a biased sample.
Few people see scamming a casino (a business designed around scamming people) as "wrong". They see it as "a taste of their own medicine".
Go to any Joe or Jane on the street and ask them if swindling (conning) $50 from a lifetime "professional" con artist is wrong. Out-conning the con artist is typically seen as a thing of approval.
Comments
It is really interesting to me how different Bitcoin users' understanding of morality and the typical person's are. To almost any joe or Jane on the street, exploiting a weakness in someone else's security -- be it an unlocked door or an unchecked error code -- to acquire money from them without their intent, is Wrong. On the other hand, taking retaliatory action, such as providing what detail you can about that person in the service of returning the ill-gotten gains, is right.
Judging by the contents of this thread, the Bitcoin/hacker community feels just the opposite. How odd. I feel like this more than anything will impede the mass adoption of Bitcoin.
I'm not sure the difference is really there. The fact that this place is a casino matters a lot. My understanding of typical morality is that it's totally cool to exploit a weakness in a casino's games to shift the odds in your favor, and the casino's recourse is limited to trying to make this impossible, and banning people who do it (while still paying out whatever they won before they were banned).
However, it's not cool to break the casino's games from within. To make an analogy, if you discover that e.g. a casino's blackjack decks have twice as many 7s in them as they should, and you use that knowledge to make a ton of money playing blackjack at the casino, that's legitimate. However, if you break into the casino and replace all their normal blackjack decks with ones which have twice as many 7s, then use that knowledge to make a ton of money at blackjack, that's bad.
So the question is, which category does this particular attack fall into? Apparently they exploited a race condition, wherein outcomes became predictable if lots of games were played simultaneously. Is that exploiting the game within its rules, or is that breaking and entering?
To me, this feels legitimate. An analogy to physical games here might be finding a roulette table where the dealer under some circumstances lets you place a bet after it becomes apparent where the ball is going to land.
if you break into the casino and replace all their normal blackjack decks with ones which have twice as many 7s
I've always wondered about this from the other perspective. Why can't the casino remove a few cards?
E.g. in Blackjack in a six-deck shoe the house edge is perhaps 0.5% to 2.0% against a "pretty good player" (depending on exact rules). Remove a few face cards and you would probably hurt the player by another 1% or thereabouts.
But you've now moved the house edge from 1% to 2%. Double the profit!
When is the last time you've ever seen any player at a casino ask the dealer to reconstruct the six or eight starting decks that are in a shoe? I've never seen that.
But I still do enjoy taking the occasional trip to Vegas.
You see the decks fanned out, each card visible, before they get shuffled and put in the shoe. It would require some sleight of hand from the dealer to cheat that way. If you're going to do that, it's much less risky to rig your slot machines or your craps dice or your Wheel of Fortune, where no one will ever notice any wrongdoing short of an audit by the gaming commission.
There are some potentially huge downsides.
First, if people ever find out you're cheating, your reputation will take a huge hit and you'll lose a ton of clients. People know that the house always wins, but they still insist that the house must play fair within those bounds.
Second, I'm guessing there's some way for a player to take advantage of this change if he knows what's going on, so you're potentially losing money if anyone discovers it.
Compared against these downsides, what's the upside? Casinos practically print money. Why risk destroying that just so you might print a little more? Better to put your effort into convincing people to bet more, or getting less experienced players to play more.
All the people I asked about this seemed to think that using the bug was wrong, and that the dox in this context was not wrong. But it is obv a biased sample.
Few people see scamming a casino (a business designed around scamming people) as "wrong". They see it as "a taste of their own medicine".
Go to any Joe or Jane on the street and ask them if swindling (conning) $50 from a lifetime "professional" con artist is wrong. Out-conning the con artist is typically seen as a thing of approval.
There's also a lot of moralizing around casinos, so when you combine the two, people can't really help themselves.
"They deserve it!"