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Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

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Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#61

Post by clarkmoody »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #55
tankenmate wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be misunderstanding authority. Authority doesn't come from lording it over people, or making the best decisions. Authority comes from submission; as long as someone submits to you you have authority over them, likewise anything you submit to has authority over you. The submissive person in the relationship has all the power; they are the one who gets to say "stop". In this case the various arguments…

> The submissive person in the relationship has all the power; they are the one who gets to say "stop". Maybe when you're into BDSM. You're right that authority comes from submission, but people submit to power . A gun, a hostage, a 51% voting majority.

> A gun, a hostage

Those are direct use of force, not authority or power.

> 51% voting majority

Can still be undermined by civil disobedience, if we're talking about society. Only a small minority in society (the police) use force to get you to submit. The rest submits to the authority of the law. A very small group can undermine the majority through civil disobedience, since they can outnumber the police very quickly.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#62

Post by ohnomrbill »

mikeash wrote: post #20
seibelj wrote: post #8

Someone probably has another exploit queued up, so they can immediately create the need for another fork. Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money.

If (huge if, I know) people learn from what just happened, there at least won't be another $100 million target to exploit. The NewDAO should see much less investment until it's actually proven. Of course, it may well not happen that way.

The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each time an individual gets their savings wiped out, or accept that there is risk of death by 1000 cuts when investing in ETH. Others may see things differently of course.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#63

Post by jarsin »

factorialboy wrote: post #34
tankenmate wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum is a human construct; written by humans, directed by humans, and facilitated by humans (no skynet has come along to do mining). Ipso facto, it is fallible just like humans. You think it is a bad thing that this has happened; I think it is a good thing. Now everyone is aware that the 51% can take control of the chain; you can't pretend any more that the code is the final arbiter, because it isn't. Black and w…

Will ETH hard fork after every fraud / theft / robbery? If not, then the case will be made of conflict of interest. People behind ETH had a stake in TheDAO and they chose to protect their _dollars_ rather than the platform.

Gatecoin got robbed of over 185k ETH and they asked if they could get those back when Vitalik first mentioned they were going to hardfork in the hours after the attack.

They were obviously denied. It's my understanding they know what account holds most of there coins too.

There have been numerous other small hacks on eth users as well.

Unfortunately, this hardfork did nothing for those people.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#64

Post by natrius »

ohnomrbill wrote: post #10
alexbock wrote: post #6

Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum, I really don't understand how the people behind it can justify using their privileged position as developers and community leaders to try to undo this. They spent a lot of time talking about how "the code is the contract"... until they stood to be negatively impacted on a personal level by allowing the literal meaning of the code to stand. I'm…

Yep - I don't see the draw for new investors now. We know they will rollback contracts that are financially damaging enough, except with ETH there is no legal recourse in the case of disputed transactions. From the outside looking in, it just seems like a generally worse traditional currency.

Stop investing in cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is a platform that gives developers incredible power to facilitate social and economic coordination. It's not about providing a better currency.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#65

Post by mikeash »

ohnomrbill wrote: post #62
mikeash wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If (huge if, I know) people learn from what just happened, there at least won't be another $100 million target to exploit. The NewDAO should see much less investment until it's actually proven. Of course, it may well not happen that way.

The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each time an individual gets their savings wi…

It's all going to come down to risk/reward. How much work does it take to find a bug in a contract, and how much money do you get out of it? It's possible that any given contract is likely to have bugs, but that it takes so long to find them that it's not worth the effort. That assumes that different contracts have different bugs, which may not actually be the case. And of course it could be the other way around, where bugs are easy and plentiful and the whole thing collapses. It'll be interesting to see how it actually ends up.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#66

Post by aianus »

smitherfield wrote: post #57
eggie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money. This is true, but the fork suggests the only way to do this will be by shorting the currency rather than trading the ETH earned from exploits.

Nobody's enough of a sucker to be the counterparty to an ETH short.

Go to any margin trading site (eg. bitfinex) and there is plenty of ETH available to short with.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

onestone wrote: post #24
leshow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you consider 5.5% of the money supply a good participation rate? In the voting on the pools, 80% of people didn't even vote. Therefore it is simply the fact that the fork was the default choice (and is the default in all the wallets), that is the deciding factor of this 'vote' By the way, "> 80% of the hash power was pro-fork." is demonstrably false. only 15% of the hashing power was pro fork, 85% of miners didnt vot…

Yes, I consider it an _excellent_ participation rate. A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%). Passive users by definition agree to follow the active users' decision.

> A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%).

Sociological studies tend to actively seek limited size representative samples for cost reasons, and because the mathematics demonstrating the power of a limited size representative sample for making generalization about the universe from which the sample is drawn is well-known.

Comparing the size (relative to the represented universe) of a study sample actively selected to be representative with the relative size of a participant group for which there is little reason to expect it to be representative is not particularly meaningful.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#68

Post by DannyBee »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #18
empath75 wrote: post #2

To me, I think this represents a failure of the currency. Either the code is the final word on the contract or not. This process seems to give a cartel of people the power to revoke transactions on a whim. Who would commit to building anything in an environment like that?

That description fits current banking systems just as much.

Except, uh, no. Almost everywhere, there is a ton of legal (and other) recourse, as well as a theoretically neutral arbiter who will listen to you and make a decision. There is some due process. You can argue about the neutrality, the laws, whatever. There's something, and it's recourse for plenty of people/etc.

Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they can steal your money, and you have no recourse.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#69

Post by npongratz »

jarsin wrote: post #63
factorialboy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will ETH hard fork after every fraud / theft / robbery? If not, then the case will be made of conflict of interest. People behind ETH had a stake in TheDAO and they chose to protect their _dollars_ rather than the platform.

Gatecoin got robbed of over 185k ETH and they asked if they could get those back when Vitalik first mentioned they were going to hardfork in the hours after the attack. They were obviously denied. It's my understanding they know what account holds most of there coins too. There have been numerous other small hacks on eth users as well. Unfortunately, this hardfork did nothing for those people.

It would be fun to know how many Ethereum developers lost their ETH in the Gatecoin robbery versus how many stood to lose in the DAO exploit.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#70

Post by zanny »

rsync wrote: post #54
zanny wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again. The fact that didn't happen meant most people didn't want it to happen. If people did want a reset to compensate for the insecurity in the DAO it would have happened.

"Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again." Aren't you confusing Etherium with The Dao ? Yes, the dao needed to be abandoned due to its insecurity, but my understanding is that the Etherium base itself was not at fault.

My point is that if 60 million dollars were stolen in Eth without no recourse that would permanently tarnish the name Ether. Nobody would care that the DAO did not represent the whole project, the fact a huge portion of the economy was pushed and then destroyed would ruin the brand entirely.
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