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The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum

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

#61

Post by matt4077 »

triadicmonad wrote: post #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 inves…

Except that inflation is at an all-time low (more would actually be better). And politicians aren't "lining their pockets" – none of them make what they could get in the private sector. That sort of conspiracy theory is why most people stay far away from cryptocurrency (and really enjoyed this DAO thing).

Oh, and the government doesn't print money. Well it does in the strict interpretation of fixing color on some substrate. But government spending does not increase the amount of money in circulation.

The analogy between the DAO fiasco and real currencies is almost brutally obvious: a fake currency, powered by the conspiracy theories of a population shocked by the financial crisis suddenly needs market intervention because an institution that's 'too big to fail' is threatened.

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

#62

Post by drcode »

gst wrote: post #57
aakilfernandes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree with that. I'm a big fan of Ethereum, just very unhappy about this fork. I think that until Vitalik pulls a Satoshi, Etheruem will never be as decentralized. This has pros and cons, especially with sharding/PoS around the corner.

PoS will be much harder without a fork. I don't care about the DAO holders (disclaimer: I have around 5% of my total Ether holdings locked in the DAO), but due to the issues with PoS I think that a fork would be the best option at this point.

This is mainly an issue because Vitalik endorsed DAO forks- If he had said "This does not justify a fork" I would be 100% anti fork, for the same reasons you describe: Vitalik needs credibility to pull the POS transition through.

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

#63

Post by drcode »

codys wrote: post #60

My impression from all of this is simply that the tools (and perhaps the etherium op codes themselves) for writing smart contracts still need work. When programming for hardware began, it was very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with languages of the time, but over time new languages which made it harder (or eliminated certain foot-guns entirely) appeared. For Etherium, I'd look at whether the ISA (set of opcodes)…

There have been many other languages before solidity (LLL, Serpent, others) Solidity is actually pretty well engineered, it is problematic mainly because it put beginner-friendliness before security as a design goal.

I think the future the ethereum smart contract options will consist of (1) Solidity with many static analysis tests added to generate warnings about dangerous code use and (2) an ML-style language that is less novice-friendly but allows for deep type-level constraints to mitigate potential attack scenarios.

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

#64

Post by aakilfernandes »

gst wrote: post #57
aakilfernandes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree with that. I'm a big fan of Ethereum, just very unhappy about this fork. I think that until Vitalik pulls a Satoshi, Etheruem will never be as decentralized. This has pros and cons, especially with sharding/PoS around the corner.

PoS will be much harder without a fork. I don't care about the DAO holders (disclaimer: I have around 5% of my total Ether holdings locked in the DAO), but due to the issues with PoS I think that a fork would be the best option at this point.

Heads up that Vlad (the guy leading PoS) does not share this assessment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rohdy/vlad_zamfi...

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

#65

Post by drcode »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #64
gst wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoS will be much harder without a fork. I don't care about the DAO holders (disclaimer: I have around 5% of my total Ether holdings locked in the DAO), but due to the issues with PoS I think that a fork would be the best option at this point.

Heads up that Vlad (the guy leading PoS) does not share this assessment. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rohdy/vlad_zamfi...

I think the problem is less that an attacker can use an economic attack on PoS, and more that Vitalik won't be able to force through an PoS fork to begin with if the community rejects his (possibly misguided) recommendation for a DAO fork.

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

#66

Post by aakilfernandes »

drcode wrote: post #65
aakilfernandes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up that Vlad (the guy leading PoS) does not share this assessment. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rohdy/vlad_zamfi...

I think the problem is less that an attacker can use an economic attack on PoS, and more that Vitalik won't be able to force through an PoS fork to begin with if the community rejects his (possibly misguided) recommendation for a DAO fork.

Well, they did include a difficulty bomb specifically for that reason.

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

#67

Post by swalsh »

nkuttler wrote: post #9

Smart contracts that can be modified post-hoc, through consensus or (after a precedent was made that it is possible) legislation or a judge are not smart.

A loophole in a contract is a bug in a smart contract. The difference is if you try to egregiously exploit a loophole there's a system of checks and balances... it's imperfect, but at least it tries to be fair.

Smart contracts are one-sided. The exploiter always wins if the contract writer made a stupid mistake.

WHY would you want that system?

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

#68

Post by jjnoakes »

swalsh wrote: post #67
nkuttler wrote: post #9

Smart contracts that can be modified post-hoc, through consensus or (after a precedent was made that it is possible) legislation or a judge are not smart.

A loophole in a contract is a bug in a smart contract. The difference is if you try to egregiously exploit a loophole there's a system of checks and balances... it's imperfect, but at least it tries to be fair. Smart contracts are one-sided. The exploiter always wins if the contract writer made a stupid mistake. WHY would you want that system?

That's kind of the point. If you don't want a smart contract, use the existing systems.

Why would you need Ethereum if the contracts you want to enforce shouldn't be "smart"?

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

#69

Post by Shorel »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #2

Such a fork would be more difficult in Bitcoin due to their political/financial (not necessarily technical) decentralization. This fork, if it happens, will be proof that Ethereum is far behind bitcoin in terms of decentralization.

It depends.

If by centralization you mean control of the mining power by a small group of people, then Bitcoin is a lot more centralized than Ethereum.

It's just that the response to the DAO problem was one of consensus, instead of the response to the block size issue in Bitcoin, where they behave like playing a zero sum game and every proposed fork is rejected by someone.

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

#70

Post by Shorel »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #22
swalsh wrote: post #6

Perhaps the next big of development the Ethereum guys need to build is a decentralized court system.

Or perhaps if you want mutable contracts based on intent, you could use one of the 253 legal systems that already provide you with that.

Well, I for one welcome our programmable judges.
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