5 ms·

Ethereum Wallet and Mist Beta with Hard Fork choice

66 points by Ursium 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
HappyFunGuy 10y ago
It's a good thing that smart contracts have allowed us freedom from human error and bias.... I guess we can just call them "contracts." now.
- theli0nheart 10y ago
  Human error and bias are pretty much impossible to eliminate in any system that involves humans making choices.
- aakilfernandes 10y ago
  Intersting idea. Perhaps we should have a system of governance of the "contracts" whereby we elect "representatives" who appoint "judges".
  - HappyFunGuy 10y ago
    Dude, we could even name it something cute, like when you're trying to get a girl to marry you... Courting, yes, we could call it a Court!
  - goodplay 10y ago
    Poe's law in full effect. If you're serious: Why not make use of existing infrastructure (current courts, laws, etc) rather than reimplementing all that again on top of ethereum? Also, what prevents this new layer from becoming as corrupt and bureaucratic as the one we currently have in place?
    - aakilfernandes 10y ago
      I was being facetious :)
  - mst 10y ago
    I think that's kinda where http://urbit.org/ http://urbit.org/ is going with its constitution.
  - whazor 10y ago
    Without irony, it would be awesome to have a court system on the internet.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  smart "contracts" = essentially a severless service running on a decentralized platform smart "contracts" != legal contracts
  - HappyFunGuy 10y ago
    How decentralized is a platform that hardforks via human intervention? What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%? If your blockchain changes the rules, because someone followed the rules of the code, but following those rules led to the "wrong" people losing money. Then your blockchain is more harmful than useful.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      > What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%? What happens when the 51% desires to violate the rights of the 49% in general? (Or, more commonly in the real world, 10% desires to violate the rights of 0.5% and 85% don't care.) Direct democracy refuses to solve that issue in any way other than assuming that the minority will be successful at returning violence against the majority, or that everyone will just get along. In practice, though, nobody's actually stealing your money here... you can still use the old chain if you want, it'll just be devalued to the point of uselessness.
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      "your blockchain"?.. This is not a football team or a clan, there is no "my"/"your"... Decentralized systems work by consensus and by choice, for the DAO the consensus of the community is to stop the theft. Some might disagree and move to their own fork. In the scenario of the "51%" you described, the "49%" would simply move to their own forked chain if they so choose.
CydeWeys 10y ago
This looks really bad from the perspective of trusting the currency to actually retain its value. What if you end up on the wrong fork, and that thousands of dollars in Ethereum you accepted to send out physical goods ends up being worthless? What's the point in saving the DAO if it kills the whole purpose behind the currency?
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  Won't you own Ether, and everything else, on both branches in the event of a fork?
  - mcherm 10y ago
    Ether that you own (not related to the DAO) before the fork happens would be unaffected by the fork. But after the fork, suppose you accept payment for something. You can accept payment in cash, Bitcoin, Ether-on-left-side-of-fork, or Ether-on-right-side-of-fork. I suppose you could also insist on getting paid in BOTH "Ether-on-left-side-of-fork" and ALSO in "Ether-on-right-side-of-fork", but that starts to get really complicated.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      In practice I think I'd sooner switch back to a non-forked cryptocurrency than try to deal with running multiple forks and ensuring that I'm getting paid on all of them. That sounds like a right huge mess to deal with, as you point out.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Not if the transactions happen after the fork, and on the "wrong" one. If you're purely using Ethereum as a store of value, and already have all your funds put into it, then this won't affect you, sure. But if you're actually trying to use it as a currency like intended, then you're screwed. Money isn't very useful if you can't transact it at all for fear that new transactions won't be any good.
  - api 10y ago
Gargoyle 10y ago
I was a hardcore Ethereum fanboy, but this fork completely turned me off.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Too many of the Ethereum devs had way too much of their currency tied up in the DAO. It's a classic conflict of interest. Don't forget that Ethereum had a significant premine as well (which is very shady in its own right), so the early devs and adopters have a lot of ETH to throw around.
  - eco 10y ago
    > Too many of the Ethereum devs had way too much of their currency tied up in the DAO. Do you have any evidence of that? I know about the address that was found in both the Foundation wallet and as a DAO holder but I haven't seen any other developer shown to be DAO holders. Stephan Taul would obviously be a big DAO holder as one of the people behind it but he's not with the Ethereum Foundation anymore (having left to work on Slock.it and The DAO). Even if they have a conflict of interest they seem to be going out of their way to let the community decide what to do.
    - bergeoisie 10y ago
      I'd expect that Gavin Wood has substantial DAO holdings. He might not be a foundation member, but the way that ethcore is acting here doesn't make me think it's operating in an unbiased fashion.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  "The creatures outside looked from smart contracts to regular contracts, and from regular contracts to smart contracts, and from smart contracts to regular contracts again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
  - microtherion 10y ago
    Fiat currency bad, cryptocurrency good!
HappyFunGuy 10y ago
I think this is what they call throwing the baby out with the bath water? We didn't need immutability right?
rhodey_orbits 10y ago
Ethereum brushed off my bug bounty submission and then began this hard fork junk so I documented and packaged my exploit publicly. It hasn't gotten much exposure yet, please have fun with it. "Walking Past Same-origin Policy, NAT, and Firewall for Ethereum Wallet Control" - https://medium.com/@rhodey/walking-past-same-origin-policy-nat-and-firewall-for-ethereum-wallet-control-30c29b73a057 https://medium.com/@rhodey/walking-past-same-origin-policy-n...
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  Nice post. It looks like a potential issue for someone specifically running geth with that config, but ok for an end-user using Mist or Metamask.
  - rhodey_orbits 10y ago
    thanks! I didn't take the time to setup Mist but my understanding is that Mist is especially vulnerable because it's bundled with a wallet and used for browsing DAPPS which always require the JSON API to be enabled.
    - heliumcraft 10y ago
      It's not since Mist (and Metamask) injects the web3 object into the page, no jSON-API is used. It also displays a confirmation dialog each time a transaction is generated. If setting up Mist too much trouble to try this, you can always try Metamask https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/
- curiousgal 10y ago
  It's been posted to r/ethereum. Check there. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ta6go/walking_past_sameorigin_policy_nat_and_firewall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ta6go/walking_pa...
- choffman 10y ago
  From the Medium blog: > The cypherpunk, anarchist future wasn’t supposed to be about stronger banking guarantees and wealth redistribution among Reddit users. I think your interests may fall more closely in line with what the Monero folks are doing. I'm not aware of any other cryptocurrency project with better privacy features. And they're working directly with the I2P developers to get better privacy at the network level(Kovri).
yakcyll 10y ago
So, uh, in layman's terms, where's the money now?
- mlvljr 10y ago
  It's in ether, man! ha ha
- Artlav 10y ago
  On both sides of the fork. The bet is that one side would die out, and most of the exchanges agreed that they would stop operations until a clear winning fork is determined.
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    THey'll only halt deposits/withdrawals. Trading will be uninterrupted.
HappyFunGuy 10y ago
You know what's funny about a hard fork "choice?" If you don't own majority shares, or have social influence with the majority, you get to choose to go along with the mass, or screw yourself. Great choice!
themgt 10y ago
It's just kind of crazy to me the amount of DAO-specific lines of code that have been put into apparently Mist and Geth, e.g. just search "DAO" on these links [1], [2] How many many man hours have been spent on introducing a single DAO-fork feature into the code? They didn't even build it as a generic "community referendum fork" feature just something specific to this situation? They can say "the community decides" but the community didn't decide to dedicate that amount of dev resources to putting a band-aid on a single community member's fuckup. What a mess. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/1b2941cd56d69744e6121b7a590285d0faecbded https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/1b2941cd56d69... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/mist/commits/0.8.1 https://github.com/ethereum/mist/commits/0.8.1

66 points by Ursium 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

It's a good thing that smart contracts have allowed us freedom from human error and bias.... I guess we can just call them "contracts." now.

theli0nheart 10y ago
Human error and bias are pretty much impossible to eliminate in any system that involves humans making choices.
aakilfernandes 10y ago
Intersting idea. Perhaps we should have a system of governance of the "contracts" whereby we elect "representatives" who appoint "judges".
- HappyFunGuy 10y ago
  Dude, we could even name it something cute, like when you're trying to get a girl to marry you... Courting, yes, we could call it a Court!
- goodplay 10y ago
  Poe's law in full effect. If you're serious: Why not make use of existing infrastructure (current courts, laws, etc) rather than reimplementing all that again on top of ethereum? Also, what prevents this new layer from becoming as corrupt and bureaucratic as the one we currently have in place?
  - aakilfernandes 10y ago
    I was being facetious :)
- mst 10y ago
  I think that's kinda where http://urbit.org/ http://urbit.org/ is going with its constitution.
- whazor 10y ago
  Without irony, it would be awesome to have a court system on the internet.
heliumcraft 10y ago
smart "contracts" = essentially a severless service running on a decentralized platform smart "contracts" != legal contracts
- HappyFunGuy 10y ago
  How decentralized is a platform that hardforks via human intervention? What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%? If your blockchain changes the rules, because someone followed the rules of the code, but following those rules led to the "wrong" people losing money. Then your blockchain is more harmful than useful.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    > What happens when the 51% choose to take the money of the 49%? What happens when the 51% desires to violate the rights of the 49% in general? (Or, more commonly in the real world, 10% desires to violate the rights of 0.5% and 85% don't care.) Direct democracy refuses to solve that issue in any way other than assuming that the minority will be successful at returning violence against the majority, or that everyone will just get along. In practice, though, nobody's actually stealing your money here... you can still use the old chain if you want, it'll just be devalued to the point of uselessness.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    "your blockchain"?.. This is not a football team or a clan, there is no "my"/"your"... Decentralized systems work by consensus and by choice, for the DAO the consensus of the community is to stop the theft. Some might disagree and move to their own fork. In the scenario of the "51%" you described, the "49%" would simply move to their own forked chain if they so choose.

CydeWeys 10y ago

This looks really bad from the perspective of trusting the currency to actually retain its value. What if you end up on the wrong fork, and that thousands of dollars in Ethereum you accepted to send out physical goods ends up being worthless? What's the point in saving the DAO if it kills the whole purpose behind the currency?

Bromskloss 10y ago
Won't you own Ether, and everything else, on both branches in the event of a fork?
- mcherm 10y ago
  Ether that you own (not related to the DAO) before the fork happens would be unaffected by the fork. But after the fork, suppose you accept payment for something. You can accept payment in cash, Bitcoin, Ether-on-left-side-of-fork, or Ether-on-right-side-of-fork. I suppose you could also insist on getting paid in BOTH "Ether-on-left-side-of-fork" and ALSO in "Ether-on-right-side-of-fork", but that starts to get really complicated.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    In practice I think I'd sooner switch back to a non-forked cryptocurrency than try to deal with running multiple forks and ensuring that I'm getting paid on all of them. That sounds like a right huge mess to deal with, as you point out.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Not if the transactions happen after the fork, and on the "wrong" one. If you're purely using Ethereum as a store of value, and already have all your funds put into it, then this won't affect you, sure. But if you're actually trying to use it as a currency like intended, then you're screwed. Money isn't very useful if you can't transact it at all for fear that new transactions won't be any good.
- api 10y ago

Gargoyle 10y ago

I was a hardcore Ethereum fanboy, but this fork completely turned me off.

CydeWeys 10y ago
Too many of the Ethereum devs had way too much of their currency tied up in the DAO. It's a classic conflict of interest. Don't forget that Ethereum had a significant premine as well (which is very shady in its own right), so the early devs and adopters have a lot of ETH to throw around.
- eco 10y ago
  > Too many of the Ethereum devs had way too much of their currency tied up in the DAO. Do you have any evidence of that? I know about the address that was found in both the Foundation wallet and as a DAO holder but I haven't seen any other developer shown to be DAO holders. Stephan Taul would obviously be a big DAO holder as one of the people behind it but he's not with the Ethereum Foundation anymore (having left to work on Slock.it and The DAO). Even if they have a conflict of interest they seem to be going out of their way to let the community decide what to do.
  - bergeoisie 10y ago
    I'd expect that Gavin Wood has substantial DAO holdings. He might not be a foundation member, but the way that ethcore is acting here doesn't make me think it's operating in an unbiased fashion.
JorgeGT 10y ago
"The creatures outside looked from smart contracts to regular contracts, and from regular contracts to smart contracts, and from smart contracts to regular contracts again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
- microtherion 10y ago
  Fiat currency bad, cryptocurrency good!

HappyFunGuy 10y ago

I think this is what they call throwing the baby out with the bath water? We didn't need immutability right?

rhodey_orbits 10y ago

Ethereum brushed off my bug bounty submission and then began this hard fork junk so I documented and packaged my exploit publicly. It hasn't gotten much exposure yet, please have fun with it. "Walking Past Same-origin Policy, NAT, and Firewall for Ethereum Wallet Control" - https://medium.com/@rhodey/walking-past-same-origin-policy-nat-and-firewall-for-ethereum-wallet-control-30c29b73a057 https://medium.com/@rhodey/walking-past-same-origin-policy-n...

heliumcraft 10y ago
Nice post. It looks like a potential issue for someone specifically running geth with that config, but ok for an end-user using Mist or Metamask.
- rhodey_orbits 10y ago
  thanks! I didn't take the time to setup Mist but my understanding is that Mist is especially vulnerable because it's bundled with a wallet and used for browsing DAPPS which always require the JSON API to be enabled.
  - heliumcraft 10y ago
    It's not since Mist (and Metamask) injects the web3 object into the page, no jSON-API is used. It also displays a confirmation dialog each time a transaction is generated. If setting up Mist too much trouble to try this, you can always try Metamask https://metamask.io/ https://metamask.io/
curiousgal 10y ago
It's been posted to r/ethereum. Check there. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ta6go/walking_past_sameorigin_policy_nat_and_firewall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ta6go/walking_pa...
choffman 10y ago
From the Medium blog: > The cypherpunk, anarchist future wasn’t supposed to be about stronger banking guarantees and wealth redistribution among Reddit users. I think your interests may fall more closely in line with what the Monero folks are doing. I'm not aware of any other cryptocurrency project with better privacy features. And they're working directly with the I2P developers to get better privacy at the network level(Kovri).

yakcyll 10y ago

So, uh, in layman's terms, where's the money now?

mlvljr 10y ago
It's in ether, man! ha ha
Artlav 10y ago
On both sides of the fork. The bet is that one side would die out, and most of the exchanges agreed that they would stop operations until a clear winning fork is determined.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  THey'll only halt deposits/withdrawals. Trading will be uninterrupted.

HappyFunGuy 10y ago

You know what's funny about a hard fork "choice?" If you don't own majority shares, or have social influence with the majority, you get to choose to go along with the mass, or screw yourself. Great choice!

themgt 10y ago

It's just kind of crazy to me the amount of DAO-specific lines of code that have been put into apparently Mist and Geth, e.g. just search "DAO" on these links [1], [2] How many many man hours have been spent on introducing a single DAO-fork feature into the code? They didn't even build it as a generic "community referendum fork" feature just something specific to this situation? They can say "the community decides" but the community didn't decide to dedicate that amount of dev resources to putting a band-aid on a single community member's fuckup. What a mess. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/1b2941cd56d69744e6121b7a590285d0faecbded https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/commit/1b2941cd56d69... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/mist/commits/0.8.1 https://github.com/ethereum/mist/commits/0.8.1