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

71–76 of 76 posts

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

#71

Post by jbmorgado »

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.

I would be hard pressed to find any democratic government that passed retro-active laws.

It's a pillar of modern democracies that the effects of some law, can only be applied to future events not to past ones.

What ETH did, was create new laws and then proceed to apply them to previous actions. Very untrustworthy indeed.

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

#72

Post by drcode »

jbmorgado wrote: post #71
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.

I would be hard pressed to find any democratic government that passed retro-active laws. It's a pillar of modern democracies that the effects of some law, can only be applied to future events not to past ones. What ETH did, was create new laws and then proceed to apply them to previous actions. Very untrustworthy indeed.

Democracies do this all the time, like for slave emancipation, eminent domain, redistricting, etc.

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

#73

Post by jbmorgado »

drcode wrote: post #72
jbmorgado wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be hard pressed to find any democratic government that passed retro-active laws. It's a pillar of modern democracies that the effects of some law, can only be applied to future events not to past ones. What ETH did, was create new laws and then proceed to apply them to previous actions. Very untrustworthy indeed.

Democracies do this all the time, like for slave emancipation, eminent domain, redistricting, etc.

No, that's not like that at all. In the examples you made, you are giving people MORE rights from THAT point onwards.

In the ETH case, you are creating a law to REVERT a previous deal. Democracies don't do that.

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

#74

Post by vkou »

drcode wrote: post #8

In related news, a company built on top of ethereum performed a crowdsale earlier today that ended after 2.5 minutes when their 2 million dollar funding goal was successfully reached. (There is some initial disagreement about how to measure the time appropriately, it may have been several minutes longer) https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5u6uhb/melonport_...

... And it's quite probably illegal in the US, given SEC rules with respect to privately held companies with large number of owners.

Relatedly, from the Reddit thread:

> ICOs have nothing to do with ethereum. They can raise by any cryptocurrency existing or that will exist in the future. So far, they've mostly been used for scams, although I'm sure some legitimate projects will also be funded.

Is there a meaningful response to this? This is a serious question - how can I tell the difference between an ICO scam, and one that isn't? Are there any examples of sustainable businesses arising from ICOs, or are all of them pump-and-dump schemes?

If I get defrauded by a company putting out an ICO, will anyone go to jail?

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

#75

Post by DennisP »

monodeldiablo wrote: post #69
DennisP wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

That's basically because we don't have a good solution for Sybil attacks, other than weighting votes by account balances. There are various people trying to fix that by adding real-world identities to the blockchain; the most prominent on Ethereum is uPort: https://www.uport.me/

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

#76

Post by woodandsteel »

mistermumble wrote: post #5

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum". The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company…

You're right, ethereum has not fallen, it has gotten stronger. However, the content of the article does not reflect the title. In fact, your comment just reinforces the point of the article.

This is that trust can never really be fully automated, it is ultimately a human phenomenon. And that is just what happened, the Ethereum community decided, on the basis of the sorts of reasons that human beings normally use, that the whole project and the people running it are trustworthy, and so has charged ahead.

Post reply on HN