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The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

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31–40 of 74 posts

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#31
post #7

>> "it seems that funds can still be reverse under certain circumstances" Maybe it's me, but ideas like being able to reverse funds do not belong in crypto currencies. If risk is presented, escrow the transfer, buy insurance, etc. Why are people so unwilling to take responsibility for themselves?

A) Because people have severely constrained resources and imperfect information with which to allocate them.

B) escrow, insurance, etc. are just poor attempts at implementing reversible transactions, so if can why not just have them instead of using a greenspuned tangle of partially overlapping partially conflicting tools with who knows what kind of jurisdiction issues

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#32
> Going from ‘The DAO is based on Unstoppable Code’ to ‘if we screw up badly enough, WE WILL FORK YOU’ is a big change that shouldn’t be taken lightly

This is what I find so galling. If code is code is code, then the outcome should be what the code says it is. But whoops, we decided we don't like the outcome so let's toss that out.

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#33

Bitcoin has reversed funds multiple times via hard forks. The only thing this article proves is that ethereum is young

Bitcoin reversed to fix protocol errors, this is not a protocol error.

An exploitable protocol weakness sounds like a type of protocol error to me.

(But maybe I have entirely the wrong idea of what the attack vector was here)

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#34

> Going from ‘The DAO is based on Unstoppable Code’ to ‘if we screw up badly enough, WE WILL FORK YOU’ is a big change that shouldn’t be taken lightly This is what I find so galling. If code is code is code, then the outcome should be what the code says it is. But whoops, we decided we don't like the outcome so let's toss that out.

[deleted]

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin reversed to fix protocol errors, this is not a protocol error.

An exploitable protocol weakness sounds like a type of protocol error to me. (But maybe I have entirely the wrong idea of what the attack vector was here)

The bug was in the DAO conrtact, not the Ethereum protocol.

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#36
post #7

>> "it seems that funds can still be reverse under certain circumstances" Maybe it's me, but ideas like being able to reverse funds do not belong in crypto currencies. If risk is presented, escrow the transfer, buy insurance, etc. Why are people so unwilling to take responsibility for themselves?

There are all kinds of completely legitimate (IMO) reasons to want the ability to reverse a transaction. See theft, fraud, PayPal scams, etc.

We certainly could insist the victim live with it, but that seems like a worse world for everyone.

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#37
post #7

>> "it seems that funds can still be reverse under certain circumstances" Maybe it's me, but ideas like being able to reverse funds do not belong in crypto currencies. If risk is presented, escrow the transfer, buy insurance, etc. Why are people so unwilling to take responsibility for themselves?

There are all kinds of completely legitimate (IMO) reasons to want the ability to reverse a transaction. See theft, fraud, PayPal scams, etc. We certainly could insist the victim live with it, but that seems like a worse world for everyone.

Wish I had the ability to downvote. What you are doing is there dictionary definition of trolling. I'm sorry for your loss, but please do not put the whole Ethereum project in danger.

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#38
The value of money is subjective. Governments drain the value of fiat currency by printing and spending. This causes people to subjectively value the currency less, which makes its market value go down (inflation.)

There are several reasons why this is not the case with Eth/DAO:

1) Every fraction of Ethereum is accounted for in the public record.

2) No additional Ethereum was created to compensate the losses of investors, only the original stolen Ethereum is being returned.

3) No politician's pockets are being padded, the only receivers of value are the rightful owners of DAO Tokens. (Only ETH was stolen, not tokens - everyone still has their tokens.)

4) If some government took this as precedent to force a bail-out in the future Ethereum Ecosystem, based on the standards of the Ethereum community, the value of Ethereum under an actual government-instituted bailout would plummet. It goes against everything we believe in, and the subjective valuation of Ethereum on a mass scale would plummet, effectively making any funds doled out worth only a fraction of their value by the time the receiver had any chance to use them.

I could go on giving more reasons, but is it really necessary? No one should be attempting to make analogies between fiat currency controls and an Ethereum fork unless they've considered both the philosophical and economic implications of their arguments, and it's obvious that most anti-forkers haven't bothered to give due diligence to the question of what's really at stake here.

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#39

Bitcoin has reversed funds multiple times via hard forks. The only thing this article proves is that ethereum is young

That is not true. Bitcoin has never reversed a transaction without a signature. The only time you are probably talking about is when someone made a block with a 9 billion bitcoin reward. Even then, they just convinced the miners to start a different chain. Thus, the chain with the 9 billion coins block just died. So yea, no reversal without a signature, ever!

oh without a signature, a completely irrelevant qualifier that I didn't even make as a prerequisite!

I'm also referring to the march 2013 hard fork

so congratulations you just helped me prove my "multiple times" for the lay man

Re: The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all kinds of completely legitimate (IMO) reasons to want the ability to reverse a transaction. See theft, fraud, PayPal scams, etc. We certainly could insist the victim live with it, but that seems like a worse world for everyone.

Wish I had the ability to downvote. What you are doing is there dictionary definition of trolling. I'm sorry for your loss, but please do not put the whole Ethereum project in danger.

Call me a troll if you like. I have nothing to do with Ethereum, I just don't believe in the sanctity of all transactions, and "it's your fault, you should have bought transaction insurance" sounds like victim blaming.
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