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Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

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Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#81
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, from what I understood it was more complicated than just pure profit-seeking. (Disclaimer: I'm not a user of Ethereum.)

My understanding was that the DAO (and organizations like it) was the whole point of people signing up to use Ethereum, and the hard fork basically says "The DAO never existed, you're all getting your ether back" with an understanding of "now that you know all of the attendant risks of hacking, start your own autonomous organizations with a bit more prudence." It is not very realistic to expect further forks as every fork produces a new cryptocurrency; furthermore it is not very realistic to expect a mere 51% majority to sway the blockchain (as I understand it the change is code-level). If each decision only gets 80% approval then after 3 such decisions you have your community split across 4 cryptocurrencies: {20%, 16%, 13%, 10%, 41%} and you've lost over half of your users; furthermore if the power of a currency is proportional to the square of the users (as it likely to first-order has to do with how many ways they can interact with each other, which goes with the number of handshakes they can make), you've cut down your value proposition to only ~16% of what it was. It sounds like this might have gotten 90-99% adoption by the community in terms of hashpower, but some of this is doubtless amplified by miners who will go wherever the wind takes them.

It reminds me of my environmental science teacher in high school. Between counting the bugs we caught at local streams, one day he taught my class about the Tragedy of the Commons. He said, "tomorrow, if you want to play a game to illustrate this, bring a quarter and we'll play it for real cash." Most of us brought quarters. "Okay, if you still want to play this game after I explain the rules, put your quarter in this jar and I'll give you a card. You're going to write on that card your name, and then either 'use' or 'leave': for whether you're going to use the common resource or leave it alone for a while. You have to keep your decision secret, if anyone else sees what you wrote then you're getting your quarter back and it's like you were not in the game at all. You can SAY anything you want to people, but nobody's allowed to see what you're DOING. After 5-10 minutes I'll call time, and you'll give the folded cards back to me. If everyone says Leave then I'll give everyone who participated two quarters. If one person says Use and everyone else says Leave then I'll give them the jar of quarters: and, no being mean to them, they won the jackpot fair and square. Or if two or more people say Use, then I win all of the quarters. Who still wants to play?"

A lot of us put our quarters in, and I being a petulant teenager wrote Use (with the intention to give everyone back their quarters afterwards! I wasn't greedy, just a smartass) ... but while almost everyone else wrote Leave, this did not include one kid who didn't understand English so well and meant to write Leave but instead wrote Use (or else that was just what he told everyone afterwards). The teacher won all our quarters, but he returned them like a good sport and offered to let us play again, this time FOR REALS. This time I voted Leave, but multiple people voted Use just to somehow "punish" me, which was even more what the teacher was trying to teach: "if you can't guarantee that everyone else is going to leave it alone, hey, you might as well try to get in on this sweet sweet resource while it still exists, right? So that's why the tragedy of the commons happens and we're all pretty much doomed. I'm gonna win your quarters every time." He gave back the quarters anyway, of course, after making a big show of "No, the second time was FOR REALS, you all knew it, didn't you? Would you have paid ME back?!"

It's probably just the feeling of a bunch of kids being like "that wasn't fair, give us back our money and let us try again!" from the first time we played the game, and the more sober discourse of the second match where we understood better that our money was on the line and we had to find a way together to steal our teacher's money.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#82
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to this fork, I had interest in Ethereum. I don't want to touch it now, out of both mistrust and the feeling that the developers are lacking in ethics. It really feels like a pyramid scheme if they're not willing to let the technology stand on its own. It's really a shame. Maybe some other group will fork the Ethereum code into a new cryptocurrency that can't have the blockchain forked as easily.

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…

Agreed that this is a good thing. Strict dogma is bad and unsustainable.

The core team has backed off from "the code is the construct" philosophy, both implicitly by executing this fork, and explicitly in other publications.

It's a black mark on the trust record for Ethereum, but hard lessons learned are the best ways to grow.

Folks that look at this as a black and white "Ethereum can no longer be trusted" are ironically applying strict dogma in the other direction.

I am not making any calls about the value of Ethereum. Just that evolving philosophy and software systems is a very good and necessary thing.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#83
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…

Disclaimer: I don't really have much of a stake in ethereum, although I made some money off of it during the craziness last month (I cashed out when early warnings about the DAO hit hn, and bough back in when it was at the bottom, and cashed out again) > I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that. I think the situation is the opposite. After the DAO there were broad calls criticising…

    > After the DAO there were broad calls criticising the lack of leadership,
    > criticism about decentralized/consensus decisionmaking, and comparisons 
    > with the broader economy and how the Fed can orchestrate a bailout (and 
    > why that's better - in the eyes of the critics).
This explanation would be acceptable if the motivating factor behind the hardfork were enabling bail-outs, rather than the loss of $60 million.

(Angry customer calls up used car salesman)

Customer: The car alarm you promised would work doesn't work. I'm afraid someone will steal my car.

Car salesman: I'm awfully sorry about that.

Customer: Also, the engine broke. I can't start the car anymore!

Car salesman: Great! So I assume the missing car alarm isn't a problem anymore then?

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like "passive users" would agree with the status quo? They don't care enough to vote for the fork, so they should have counted as voting against the forks.

By that logic there should be no Brexit, as less than 50% of the eligible voters voted for it.

Exactly right. But the same logic would apply to the Bentrance in the first place, etc.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it's not an improvement, why bother?

From what I understand, it's much worse than any human legal system. Theory and precedent have all been thrown out and everyone is at the mercy of whoever can convince 51% of stakeholders. There's no concept of "equal protection" like in a modern legal system.

Exactly - what happens when the next freedom fighter/terrorist/Kanye uses Ethereum, and a hysterical majority freeze them out. Where is your open distributed cryptocurrency then? Worse - as far as I can tell - than a properly regulated banking system working under the rule of law.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#88

Any chance the one who ran this exploit can sue for the money they were due? If the code IS the contract, then by the contract they are owed this money, no? Or does this mean the code isn't the contract?

It's worth a try. They have ~$60 million to promise to shareholders in the lawsuit.

They paid to participate in a code-based Nomic and were denied their prize because they won too quickly.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#89
post #77

And just like that, the entire point of Ethereum vanished into the ether. Contracts which contain an implicit item 'we can renegotiate this any time a majority of miners wish' are contrary to what Ethereum was meant to be.

What was it "meant to be"? I'm completely ignorant of the politics but my assumption was that every cryptocoin post-bitcoin was a way for the creators/developrs/owners to make money.

Did the creators make money? Success.

Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like "passive users" would agree with the status quo? They don't care enough to vote for the fork, so they should have counted as voting against the forks.

No vote means they don't care enough to say either way. Why would anyone who feels strongly against the fork say "I will now let everyone know how much I'm against the fork by not voting"? That's not how it works.

Furthermore, it's been well known for the past 2 weeks that the fork was likely to happen. That means the fork was the status quo. It's what was going to happen assuming nothing derailed it.

I'm an ETH holder and I didn't vote. I was undecided and was happy enough with the decision to fork.

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