It's simply not immutable and decentralized anymore. Just another distributed computatiom technology (and rather slow for that)
Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#122Looking 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…
> Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum This basically answers your question. A few pointers: * you cannot do a hard fork alone, if no one follows you it own't work. You need the majority (to become the majority fork) * hard forking, soft forking, are always possibilities that can happen at any moment (same for bitcoin) * There was no reason not to fork at this point. Ethereum is at…
No reason not to fork? This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#123Earlier 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…
This was a political and cultural question: is the contract the code? The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be." If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a fork _always_ possible in a decentralized blockchain? And if so, wasn't the "the contract is whatever 50%+1 of the network decides it is" always part of the contract?
Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here.
Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#124To 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?
On the contrary, this represents a success for the currency - it represents a failure of the concept "the code is the final word on the contract", which the Ethereum community judged as incompatible with a good future of their currency and threw out this concept. Apparently when considering "Who would commit to building anything in an environment like that?" in practice, then an environment where the code is the fina…
But that approach was what made Ethereum unique. If it is abandoned, then why should anyone use it, rather than the more popular and better established alternatives?
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#125All this forking made me wonder about the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies.
Suppose we have guys D and C, and D owes C some amount in X-coin - complete with a written contract.
Now, if X-coin is forked, and one of the forks has a blockchain recording a transaction from D to C in that amount, but the other one does not, which one is considered authoritative? If C sues D, because they are on the other fork, and that fork doesn't have the debt settled, how would it go in court?
This gets especially interesting if the forks are roughly equal in size...
I guess it would all depend on the interpretation of the meaning of the term "X-coin" in the contract, but that's just a different way of asking the same question.
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#126Looking 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…
The code is still the contract. The code says that the majority of mining determines the state of the blockchain. That hasn't changed. The logic of "the code is the contract" is that whatever happens is in and of itself legal. You cannot break the law, you can only mold the law to conform to your current reality.
Disclaimer: non-expert.
I think that's mixing two things: the code that the miners run, and the code that is the digital contract. I think the idea behind digital contracts is that, once the parties commit to it, it should be set in stone (set in code), un-changeable, even by a majority of miners, irrespective of the fact that the algorithm used for distributed mining is majority based. In other words if a small set of parties do a digital contract (eg. the DAO people), then the whole point of the blockchain is that, once it's in the blockchain, it can't be undone---even if some people don't like it, change their minds, whatever. It assumes the miners just supply the mining power, but don't go in and conspire to remove specific blocks. This situation shows that in the case of Ethereum, a small set of people are able to influence a lot of mining nodes, and hence get a majority, and have no problem going in an changing specific things in the blockchain (by changing the source code of the mining software).
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum This basically answers your question. A few pointers: * you cannot do a hard fork alone, if no one follows you it own't work. You need the majority (to become the majority fork) * hard forking, soft forking, are always possibilities that can happen at any moment (same for bitcoin) * There was no reason not to fork at this point. Ethereum is at…
No reason not to fork? This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
> This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
That statement came out of nowhere :D care to expand?
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#128Here's an interesting thought: should everyone involved be charged with conspiracy to commit grand larceny?
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#129Earlier 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.
Every single Ethereum dev I know - and pretty nearly everyone else in the community - owns far more ETH than they do DAO, if they own any DAO at all. So this 'explanation', which I see over and over again, just doesn't scan: The financially rational thing for anyone in that position to do is to maximise the value of the ether they have, not to try and rescue a proportionally small amount held in DAO tokens.
Disclaimer: I recently joined the Ethereum-go team. I have 30 ether worth of DAO tokens (and about 500 ether not invested in anything).
Re: Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
No reason not to fork? This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
> This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about That statement came out of nowhere :D care to expand?
Not sure why I nee to expand.Crypto is about immutability and decentralization. If you see no reason for that I see no reason to explain. the hard fork was for getting money back.