The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence

How is splitting into ETC earning anyone money?

Well, okay. But this isn't an answer to the fundamental dilemma of the DAO hack: either Ethereum should have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren't really a good idea, or it shouldn't have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren't really a good idea. This manifesto just argues that the second option is right, but that doesn't change the conclusion.

Specifically, I have seen a lot of buggy software. I don't think I've ever seen any truly bug-free software. I expect, therefore, that if I put money into a smart contract, that contract is going to have a bug in it somewhere. What happens when the bug is discovered and exploited? If you say "Some humans will decide that's not what was meant," that's wonderful--but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's very well-supported. If you say "No, the contract is the contract" (as these people do), fantastic: you have a compellingly different product, not just a bunch of complicated math on top of a system that's as squishy as my current financial system. But why at all should I believe that it's different for the better? Now I have an expectation that a bug will exist, and be exploited, and it will be correct for the bug to be exploited. If the goal is correctness, that's great. But if the goal is getting me to use the system, why would I want that?

Or, as Matt Levine put it in his writeup of the DAO hack (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...):

"Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong."

One amusing consequence of the "fork" is that it demonstrates that there are few Etherium contracts outstanding that matter. Otherwise, the people on opposite sides of the contract would be having big disputes over where their contract ended up. Did anybody other than the DAO crowd actually use that feature for anything big enough or long term enough to matter?

ETC is a pump and dump scam.

> but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's very well-supported.

Totally independent of Ethereum, this style of argument is kinda weak. We really should be trying to build something better, either by improving the existing system or building a parallel system that will slowly replace what's there. Good enough is the enemy of great.

Unfortunately, building better stuff winds up requiring building a bunch of stupid stuff that doesn't work out.

It's smart to avoid being an early adopter, unless you have some unique interest in whatever the topic might be, photography, self driving cars, or Ethereum.

Back to Ethereum, yeah, i agree smart contracts aren't a good idea. They may be a good idea in the future, but today they're a mess. I think, in general, some sort of blockchain transaction history is a great idea; it should be adopted somehow. I can't say exactly what that might look like though.