Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 76 posts

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

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

onestone wrote: post #60
wyager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only true with a restricted definition of stakeholders and majority (e.g., miners weighted by mining capacity in Bitcoin). It's not a majority of individuals in the community using the blockchain.

So I'm not sure that it's really all that distinct from legislative majorities in traditional legal system (and clearly less of a genuine majority than in legislative systems where the public retains, whether or not it chooses to frequently exercise them, powers of initiative and referendum.)

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

#62

Post by drcode »

Klinky wrote: post #54
drcode wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, we can't reimburse those funds since we don't know who the anonymous investors are, and if the ethereum foundation (or whatever) had put the coins into a custodian account then people like yourselves would have complained about that, too.

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

#63

Post by setr »

drcode wrote: post #18
deegles wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did hard forking after the DAO hack increase trust? Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract? Now it's established that there's a chance a contract can be "too big to fail". I think it would have built more trust if they had let the money go. To paraphrase a saying, they would have spent 15% of ETH on training everyone to build safe contracts, and to vet contr…

> Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract? If you hold this view you're going to be very unhappy with the many innovations we'll see in the blockchain space in the coming years: Almost every technology in the future is going to put the desires of the community ahead of any specific piece of code- Computer code is a tool, not the final decision maker.

>Computer code is a tool, not the final decision maker.

Yeah, especially in systems where the fundamental model is code is law

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

#64

Post by setr »

drcode wrote: post #19
wyager wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how anyone could trust it after they reversed a perfectly legitimate transaction. The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said. Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and…

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

Retroactively?

In this system, no transaction is actually final, because it can always be rollbacked because the reversal of a law can traverse time and space. The only gaurantee is once you've got it converted to cash (exited the network) because the network may simply enter a parallel universe where the law never existed (and unlike a hostile government invading another, with all the repurcussions of it, this is a manuever taken by the existing government, and likely it remains the government in the new universe).

This isn't a law then, its simply a communally accepted rule; if the ratchet turns, and community decides slavery is no longer acceptable, then it'll be applied retroactively and you'll be rendered an illegal actor for operating legally at the time of operation, despite operating legally now (no longer dealing in slaves).

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

#65

Post by heliumcraft »

Animats wrote: post #57
heliumcraft wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The COO of Slock was from Etherium.

That's incorrect, He was previously in the Ethereum Foundation but left (due to disagreements with Vitalik) long before the DAO was created.

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

#66

Post by heliumcraft »

Pent wrote: post #31

Ethereum lost all my trust when they hardforked over a contract mistake. They are never getting that back. I'd recommend rebranding the project to focus on the community-driven aspect. They are no better than our current legal framework.

smart contacts are just code, they are not 'legal documents', not everyone (most?) subscribes to the whole 'code is law' meme.

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

#67

Post by onestone »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
onestone wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only true with a restricted definition of stakeholders and majority (e.g., miners weighted by mining capacity in Bitcoin). It's not a majority of individuals in the community using the blockchain. So I'm not sure that it's really all that distinct from legislative majorities in traditional legal system (and clearly less of a genuine majority than in legislative systems where the public retains, whether or not…

I actually meant economic majority because that's what gives the token its value. A >50% hashrate majority in a PoW blockchain can censor transactions, but it's powerless if most users (or most precisely, the users who own most of the tokens) collectively decide to hardfork.

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

#68

Post by setr »

drcode wrote: post #58
Klinky wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

It's much more fundamental than that example though. BMW only guarantees that the gas pedal moves the car forwards in normal operation.

Ethereum even now advertises itself on its homepage as

>Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

But clearly, we had a program that very specifically ran exactly as programmed, and its operation was interfered by a third party (the community hard-fork). Ethereum offers a guarantee that is not held; this is false advertising.

If it is a guarantee that cannot be held, it is still false advertising.

But even more so, Ethereum imagines itself to have no established authority; to be decentralized. But obviously, it is not. The final say clearly remains with the Ethereum developers, even if the community has the option to secede. (You can renounce your citizenship from the US, everyone can wholesale, but this does not mean the US has no centralized authority.) Bitcoin, of course, offers the same situation; the difference being that bitcoin's authorities do not collude, and by community happenstance, it is unlikely that they will. Such a fork is unimaginable in that universe.

Ethereum (and its many users) imagines itself to be of Bitcoin's equivalence, a large enough and stable enough network that offers little ability and incentive for its authorities to collude. But, of course, this is false. It remains small enough that a hard-fork is viable; proven by the act of a hard-fork.

This is false advertising, in the sense that it misrepresents fundamental components of the system. It might support decentralization given a sufficiently large network, but it does not (yet) have sufficiently large network. But either it pretends its network is sufficiently large, or it pretends that requirement does not exist.

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

#69

Post by monodeldiablo »

DennisP wrote: post #30
wyager wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how anyone could trust it after they reversed a perfectly legitimate transaction. The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said. Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and…

The devs didn't reverse it by themselves. There were multiple independent client teams who all agreed to code the change, then they had to convince the community to run the altered software. Not all the official devs were even on board with the change, some stayed neutral, and some of the community refused the change so now we have both ETH and ETC. So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only…

> So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community

A large economic majority of the community, you mean. Which gets to the heart of my largest misgiving about these networks: They are so transparently libertarian in striving to embody the Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If a big actor makes a mistake that benefits 1,000 small actors, the little guys still get fucked.

If the US operated like this, Bill Gates would have ~500,000 more votes than the average American. You could argue that wealthy actors already exert outsize influence on our meatspace contract system, but I'd argue it's to a much lesser extent, and anyway, I don't see Ethereum offering much of an alternative. They don't even pretend to try to strike a balance between individual and community justice.

Economic majority is a copout, and it looks an awful lot like feudalism. As a little guy, I'm hesitant to hitch my wagon to that particular star.

Post reply on HN