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Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

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Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#51

Post by nas »

onestone wrote: post #45
deegles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking to add features and expand capabilities is great. I'm not arguing against that. I disagree with forking to undo the effects of a hack on a contract.

You speak as if this was an individual's decision. It was not. Vitalik may be influential, but it was not his decision to fork. The community decided so, by a significant majority.

Didn't the majority of the people deciding to fork stand to profit? I.e. they would restore their DAO funds? That's my understanding and makes me not want to touch Ethereum with a 10ft pole. Seems very much like mob rule vs a system of rules and contracts.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#52

Post by seagreen »

mistermumble wrote: post #48
seagreen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they're still using Solidity. http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html : > "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." Solidity docs are here: http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/solidity-in-depth.... No referential transparency, no purity, no algebraic data types . . . it's scary stuff for writing contract…

Solidity is the most widely adopted language, but there are other choices including Serpent (Python-like)and LLL (lisp-like). A few developers I know use Serpent because it is simple and stable (meaning it has not been changed or updated for a while, unlike Solidity which they say is continually being tweaked in a manner that can be aggravating). Interestingly, Vitalik's preferred language (say for prototyping Casper…

Python is a nightmare for static analysis. Basing anything contract-related on it is the opposite of reassuring.

I think there are some really cool ideas in Etherium. Proof-of-stake is great. Provably terminating functions are great! These ideas deserve to be paired with a higher level language worthy of them.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#53

Post by onestone »

nas wrote: post #51
onestone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You speak as if this was an individual's decision. It was not. Vitalik may be influential, but it was not his decision to fork. The community decided so, by a significant majority.

Didn't the majority of the people deciding to fork stand to profit? I.e. they would restore their DAO funds? That's my understanding and makes me not want to touch Ethereum with a 10ft pole. Seems very much like mob rule vs a system of rules and contracts.

No, the people deciding to fork were the ETH holders. A lot of them owned DAO tokens, but not a majority, probably about 10%. There was a coin vote before the fork which showed about 85% support, and the result was confirmed by the market after the fork (ETH is about 10x more expensive than ETC).

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#54

Post by Klinky »

drcode wrote: post #26
Animats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like there's about $10 million unclaimed in DAO tokens.[1] Soon it will no longer be possible to redeem them, because the infrastructure is disappearing. Getting them back is really complicated. [1] https://medium.com/curator-multisig-phf-official-channel/dao...

I definitely agree that's unfortunate, but no specific entity is holding those funds, they are locked into the contract.

Post "contracts don't matter" fork, suddenly contracts matter again. Interesting how that works.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#55

Post by Klinky »

drcode wrote: post #32
Klinky wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pandering to big stakeholders. That's the problem with all cryptocurrencies, they don't solve big players having huge influence over the underlying currency. It is still very much a "who you know" and "how much profit is at stake" kind of game, which is one of the main reasons people hate state-run currencies. The little guys lose thier shirt and get a "too bad,so sad" response. A big player losses thier shirt…

I agree with what you're saying 100%, actually. Egalitarianism in the blockchain world remains an elusive goal, just as it does in other fields.

You agree with what I stated, but what you wrote that I responded to suggested the community was in agreement on the fork. It was powerful members of the community who stood to lose a lot of money who pushed for the fork, and everyone had to follow unless they also wanted to lose a lot of money. This doesn't look good on Ethereum and saying "the community changed the law" isn't the actual truth, nor really how Ethereum was advertised.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#56

Post by onestone »

wyager wrote: post #43
drcode wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The code is the law", they said. And the law can change if the community deems it wise.

> And the law can change if the community deems it wise. In other words, the code isn't the law, which is exactly what I said.

In otherer words, the constitution is above the law. And the constitution allows laws to be changed, in this case by the will of the majority. The same is true for all public blockchains btw.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#57

Post by Animats »

heliumcraft wrote: post #12
Animats wrote: post #9

The only reason there was a hard fork was because it was Buterin's company that got ripped off. If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money. As for "The DAO", the biggest question on their forum is "How do I get out?"[1] Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money. [1] https://forum.daohub.org/

First of all the DAO was a decentralized organisation, it didn't belong to Buterin, it isn't "Buterin's company"... The hard fork had a lot more to do with the fact the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor. There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen…

The DAO existed mostly to funnel cash to an IOT startup, Slock. They were going to sell network-connected door locks, with some AirBNB like service to manage them for rentals. The COO of Slock was from Etherium.

This was a lot less decentralized than the PR indicated.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#58

Post by drcode »

Klinky wrote: post #55
drcode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying 100%, actually. Egalitarianism in the blockchain world remains an elusive goal, just as it does in other fields.

You agree with what I stated, but what you wrote that I responded to suggested the community was in agreement on the fork. It was powerful members of the community who stood to lose a lot of money who pushed for the fork, and everyone had to follow unless they also wanted to lose a lot of money. This doesn't look good on Ethereum and saying "the community changed the law" isn't the actual truth, nor really how Ethere…

I think any time you get people together to hammer out a plan it's going to be messy and imperfect. However (1) Vitalik didn't have final say on anything (2) Various vote attempts and the message boards seemed to indicate preference for a fork, and this was also the case in my social network. This to me indicates the right decision was made, even if there was probably unfair favoratism on some levels.

> nor really how Ethereum was advertised

This meme is kind of silly to me: Would it be false advertising for BMW to say "Pushing the gas pedal makes the car go forward" after a single BMW had to be taken to the shop because of a broken gas pedal?

(I'm talking about advertising for ethereum in general, not for the DAO itself. I agree the DAO advertising was totally inexcusable for many reasons. I wish I had had the guts to say so more publicly at the time.)

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#59

Post by wyager »

onestone wrote: post #56
wyager wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the law can change if the community deems it wise. In other words, the code isn't the law, which is exactly what I said.

In otherer words, the constitution is above the law. And the constitution allows laws to be changed, in this case by the will of the majority. The same is true for all public blockchains btw.

So you're saying ethereum definitely doesn't have any fundamental advantages over the traditional legal contract system? I agree.

Re: Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum

#60

Post by onestone »

wyager wrote: post #59
onestone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In otherer words, the constitution is above the law. And the constitution allows laws to be changed, in this case by the will of the majority. The same is true for all public blockchains btw.

So you're saying ethereum definitely doesn't have any fundamental advantages over the traditional legal contract system? I agree.

I'm saying that the main rule for all blockchains (not only Ethereum) is that consensus is decided by the majority. This is their "constitution". The majority of the stakeholders in a blockchain can decide to change the consensus rules. In a traditional legal system majority is not required, laws can be changed by relativly few people.
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