6 ms·
Except that it isn't powerful people calling the shots. It's powerful people making suggestions, and then the shots being called by the network participants. Th
by darawk 10y ago
Except that it isn't powerful people calling the shots. It's powerful people making suggestions, and then the shots being called by the network participants. There is nothing happening here that is contrary to the ethos of smart contracts or decentralized governance. If any sort of fork is accepted it will be because a majority of miners thought it was a good idea, not because Vitalik said so.
- mikeash 10y agoThat just means that a majority of miners can be swayed into breaking the whole thing by a few people at the top. That's what power looks like. A few people decide and many people willingly make it happen.
- darawk 10y agoI disagree. The miners are the network. It has always been the case that the ability to influence the miners is equivalent to the ability to manipulate the network however you please. This isn't a new property of the system. The miners choosing to do this or not to do this changes nothing about the fundamental security assumptions of Ethereum. Even if they choose not to fork, that doesn't mean that they couldn't choose to do so in the future for some other case. So i'm not really sure what it is that's being lost if they choose to do so now.
- mikeash 10y agoThere's an assumption with these systems that the miners value the integrity of the system, whether out of idealism or just because they're invested in it, so you'll never have most of them try to subvert it. If they roll this back, that will show that this assumption is wrong. They are not sufficiently invested or sufficiently idealistic to preserve the system. At least half of them value expediency instead. Technologically it changes nothing, but it totally alters the human element.
- xyzzy123 10y agoIdealists will get wiped if they don't agree with majority consensus. It was always a human system and "the code is the network" is just ideology.
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoIt is ultimately a human system, but human systems can include an element of rule based order. Humans can decide to have one process for making the rules and different one for enforcing/honoring the rules. So the best way to proceed, in my view, is to honor the current version of the contract (which equals the current version of the code including the "exploit") and then change the rules/code so that the same thing cannot happen again in the future.
- xyzzy123 10y agoThe miners are not the network; the expectation of market reaction is the network and the miners make their choice just like everyone else. Miners don't want to be on the wrong chain.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10y agoThat may be even worse. This would basically be a "majority robs minority" attack. Not necessarily a great thing...
- verroq 10y agoThat's every cryptocurrency ever though.
- kalleboo 10y agoWhat does the mining situation look like for Eth? Is it like Bitcoin where it's less than a dozen guys in China? Or is it more spread out.
- pstrateman 10y agoIt's much worse.
- jcoffland 10y agoWhere did you get the idea that Bitcoin is mined by less than a dozen guys in China. This is absolutely false. There are major miners in the US, Georgia and elsewhere.
- kalleboo 10y agoAround 70% of the hashrate is controlled by 5 Chinese-controlled mining pools.
- cloudjacker 10y agothe hashrate chart.... ? the recently mined blocks perhaps? what they wrote was only BARELY hyperbole, barely.
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y agoThree pools (dwarfpool, ethpool/ethermine, and f2pool) control around 64 % of the hashrate currently.[1] I don’t know how many people are behind these organizations, but their vote, if coordinated, would be decisive in whether any kind of fork takes place. [1] https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners
- pYQAJ6Zm 10y agoCorrection: ethermine, much to my delight, has enabled individual voting. (I don’t know about the others.)