11 ms·

If Ethereum is just another way that humans muddle through (and not the dispassionate justice of machines), is it still something different then the legal and p

If Ethereum is just another way that humans muddle through (and not the dispassionate justice of machines), is it still something different then the legal and political systems that came before it?

InclinedPlane 10y ago
Of course not. Ethereum failed, spectacularly. Ethereum made as clear-cut and direct a statement of purpose and of conditions for success and failure as possible, and they failed. Instead of accepting that fact and moving on zealots have refused to believe that they could be wrong or that their utopian ideals could be flawed in any way. Like most zealous utopians they'll be willing to accept a horrific amount of damage and destruction before seeing reality.
- j_s 10y ago
  Was it Ethereum or the DAO that failed?
  - hueving 10y ago
    Ethereum failed when it forked to try to mop up the DAO failure.
  - cjslep 10y ago
    As an outsider looking in on trying out my first cryptocurrency, Ethereum was definitely on my radar. Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my money in fiat where the regulations are well-defined and I know I have recourse through the law. I do not want to be subjected to the whims of an unregulated group operating under unknown rules with an unknown, possibly nonexistent, path of rectification if they chose something I did not like. I otherwise would have accepted the operational philosophy similar to how Bitcoin has been handled thus far and all of the responsibilities associated with a level, permanent playing field. I honestly am no longer interested and do not plan to keep up with Ethereum. I'm just N=1, but if the trend continues then I see it not growing beyond a hardcore self-interested group of people.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      >Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my money in fiat where the regulations are well-defined and I know I have recourse through the law. US fiat failed and was only rescued through ad hoc legislation. US fiat would not exist today if new rules (unknown at the time of failure) were not defined to essentially rollback prior transactions.
      - lunula 10y ago
        I do not know what you are referring to, but I point out that fiat means "by decree". So US fiat only exists through legislation. When is legislation not ad hoc?
        mablap 10y ago
        Well in absolute everything is ad hoc but think about it this way: You are pretty much guaranteed that, modulo some events, any US president from any party will honor their predecessors' decisions, pacts, treaties, etc. And you can be assured that the whole nation will follow them, because of of the Rule of Law! What you've just witnessed in Ethereum is a bunch of rich, moderately intelligent, technocratic and very technologically literate (but not necessarily well educated ("who would want a government when you have code bah!")) visionaries and mostly speculators crying to get their money back by abandoning the very characteristic (immutability) that distinguished them from traditional systems of governance! They had a modus operandi that "Code is Law", and they've now turned against it. "Code is Law unless X". Why have that when you can just have plain and simple "Law"?
      - NhanH 10y ago
        Yes, and if ETH is behaving the same as US dollars then there is no reason not to just stick to US dollars.
      - cjslep 10y ago
        Thank you for exactly making my point. There is a legislative process, no matter how ad hoc and pressing the issue is, that can attempt to rescue US fiat. There's no way to divine every rule which is needed for a fiat currency to keep succeeding. And rules change over time with the ebb and flow of balance of power between nations, their trade, their military might, etc. Legislation provides a well-defined process for changes to be made. Whether you trust that legislative process seems to be a key point in choosing a cryptocurrency. Now take Ethereum: suddenly changes to the transaction history needed to be made which violates the one law of cryptocurrency that's been shoved down my throat ever since Bitcoin hit mainstream media. So with no process set (because it should not have been needed in the first place), a sudden reversal of intent for one arbitrary contract, and no way to have the original intent stay binding, Ethereum made its choice. It didn't even have a legislative process, just an authoritative one guised as a democratic vote. The way that choice went down shatters all trust. If US Treasury suddenly decided it didn't need to follow any US legislation and redistributed wealth across the world, trust in USD would equally be shattered. I'm not a gambling man, but at this point in time my money stays in USD.
  - elaineo 10y ago
    DAO failed, but it controls about 15% of the total ether supply, so it was too big to fail, and the fork will save it.
    - MichaelGG 10y ago
      The DAO did exactly, exactly, what it was supposed to do. In no way can it be have said to fail, except in the "wasn't a great investment" sense. Maybe in failed in the "wow using terrible languages to write complicated code is a bad idea" way, too. Ethereum failed, as they decided smart contracts aren't a great idea, so they're now going to involve humans when they feel like it. The whole premise of Ethereum was the opposite of what they're doing.
      - elaineo 10y ago
        Yes, that is a more accurate description. The Ethereum community was very quick to call the guy a thief, without due process.
        nas 10y ago
        So what happens when new bugs are found in contracts controlling a lot of money? Fork again or let the buggy code run?
      - PeterisP 10y ago
        I believe that Ethereum+DAO was a sucessful experiment (with negative results) - they had a vision/hypothesis that smart contracts without human/legal overrides are a good idea, despite the experience of the whole financial and legal world over the last couple of millenia telling them that this vision is naively utopic. The whole point of Ethereum was implementing and testing this vision in practice, which they did. In practice they found out (and showed the public) the kind of consequences everyone was expecting; and so we have a successful experiment giving some evidence on whether smart contracts w/o overrides are a good idea - apparently, it's not; and now based on this we can build better systems that properly account for the risks that DAO had.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Both. Etherium's smart contract system turned out to be too hard to program correctly, and the DAO botched their program. Etherium needs to go back into the shop for a redesign. Maybe a full virtual machine is the wrong model for contracts. The problem with programs as contracts is that the goal of contracts is predictability. Something more declarative might be more predictable.
- bllguo 10y ago
  Zealot is a great way to describe them. The absurd justifications they have over at r/ethereum blow my mind.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  Do you think that the vision is bad or just the implementation?
  - nas 10y ago
    Writing bug free software is extremely difficult, as anyone who knows a little about software can tell you. When software bugs can cost people millions and your system is built on the idea of people writing lots of software contracts, there is a problem. I think the vision is bad. The idea of software enforced contracts is a neat idea and someday we will have it. Ethereum is not going to be it, IMHO. Their developers want to handwave the hard problems aside and brag about how innovative they are. E.g. call for research on tools to check for bugs in contracts, meanwhile their programming platform is absolutely dreadful for writing bug free code. A better vision would be to use all the software correctness research that been done over the last 20 years. Probably use a function language that makes reasoning easier. Maybe something like Lamports TLA+ to specify behavior. I would think you want a small set of contract templates that people can use. They would be as simple as possible and heavily reviewed. I have read the DAO is on the order of 1,000 lines of code. I'd be willing to bet money there are more bugs remaining to be found. More forks in the future?
    - mannykannot 10y ago
      The state of software verification is not yet there; if it were, there would be a lot of use - and corresponding job demand - in aerospace, finance and wherever security matters. Almost everyone who is enthusing about software-enforced contracts is implicitly assuming that someone else is going to do the verification, because they could not do it themselves even if they wanted to.
  - InclinedPlane 10y ago
    Both. The whole idea is stunningly naive in multiple different ways. First, because the idea of "the law" as some sort of operating system for society or even the concept of the law as a program is extremely dangerous and fraught with difficulties. And most legal systems in the world have built in systems to ensure that there are elements of flexibility through humans bringing subjective judgment to bear connecting the inflexible "programmatic" elements of the law, so that errors, bugs, incompleteness, paradoxes, etc. in the law do not have undue negative consequences on society. The idea of a completely programmatic system of law, even in contract law, should be monstrously frightening. This is the stuff of kafkaesque nightmares, of unfeeling and inflexible bureaucracy which has in it no room for humans or human life. To the extent that there are programmatic aspects of law that could be good, these must have a "safety valve" that allows them to be overriden and human judgment applied. Consider how often everyone has experienced a moment of frustration when trying to get some sort of customer service while hearing a clerk or service person say "sorry, the system just doesn't allow that". And indeed we've seen precisely what happens when you lock yourself into a contract system with zero human oversight, Ethereum proved that it did need oversight, and bolting it on after the fact is much more costly (if perhaps impossible) than building it in from the start. Second, there is a stunning naivety about logic and computing involved. One common misconception of developers with an immature understanding of computing is the idea that software is deterministic. In theory software can be deterministic, but largely in a way that is completely irrelevant quite often. It's deterministic the way dice are deterministic or fluid dynamics or computation of the mandlebrot set are. In practice it's not possible for humans to understand and reason about systems that might exhibit a stunning degree of complexity despite being very simply designed. Additionally, it ignores several well known fundamental problems in computer science, such as the halting problem and the problem of decidability. As well as several thorny problems in software engineering. Even if you work only within the space of "provably correct" software systems, that still doesn't save you because one of the most common kinds of software engineering errors is an omission at the design stage. Software that provably does exactly what you've specified, but when you've specified the wrong thing is unhelpful. The whole idea relies on behavior of both humans and software that are not only unrealistic but provably impossible. It requires that everyone write 100% perfect bug free code for every contract and to be able to read code and determine conclusively with minimal effort exactly what it does and also verify that it is 100% bug free. If any of that were possible the direct applications of being able to do such magical things in software development would vastly outstrip the use in contracts or cryptocurrency, by orders of magnitude. If we had the formula to make bug free software with minimal effort the world would be an utterly different place.
jarsin 10y ago
I also have been questioning why at this point you would ever build on ethereum because if its not truly decentralized then whats the point? If a contract can be updated then its not decentralized so now you are trusting some dev or some group of people. If a contract can't be updated then it will have bugs and you can't trust it....and so on...
- lukeschlather 10y ago
  It's truly decentralized. Really, I don't think decentralization is a good thing, and this is demonstrating why. If you've got a truly decentralized system, pretty much anybody can tear the whole thing down while no one is paying attention. In a centralized system, there's a small group of trusted people who are responsible for keeping it safe.
  - mablap 10y ago
    And this is why I'll be pouring my money into a serious government backed digital currency. It's a shame Canada isn't going all in on this, they were pioneers with their digital money project last decade. I'm reassured by Bank of England's latest (95 page) note on the matter.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kakarot 10y ago
    Perhaps the problem boils down to putting all of your eggs in one basket?
    - mannykannot 10y ago
      A basket with a bunch of holes in it.
matt4077 10y ago
Sure: it's ruled by money or social/technical standing rather than votes. It's run by a bunch of Ayn Rand-ian social darwinists who believe morality can be defined in absolute, 'dispassionate' truths. Oh, and they're now playing the game they hate so much and know so little about.
- pron 10y ago
  Believing a group of people can interact without politics is like believing bodies with large masses can interact without gravity; you can believe it, but if you do you really have no idea what gravity -- or politics -- is. As a result, the difference between those who do politics and those who don't, is that those who don't are just destined to do it badly.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aminok 10y ago
  That is an extremely rude/ungenerous blanket characterization of proponents of cryptocurrency. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given your support for authoritarianism.
- f3llowtraveler 10y ago
  If aggression is normally used by murderers, robbers, and tyrants, and that is normally "not okay" -- do you believe there are cases where it IS okay, as long as we voted on it first?
kartickv 10y ago
The machines are controlled by humans, and will be, unless and until AI takes over the world. So how can you possibly have a system where humans can't decide things? I would still view it as less corrupt than traditional finance, where a few powerful companies / people / government have disproportionate control.
- runeks 10y ago
  > The machines are controlled by humans, and will be, > unless and until AI takes over the world. So how can > you possibly have a system where humans can't decide things? It's not about humans not deciding things. It's about: 1. Creating a protocol (Ethereum) 2. Making claims about what this protocol can do; attract investments 3. When the protocol is shown the be flawed: discard it The very value proposition of Ethereum is that it's a protocol. When the authors suddenly "change the protocol", it amounts to the reference implementation of the protocol changing to be incompatible with all other alternative implementations of the protocol. This has no value in the real world. The value proposition (the protocol) is now gone. Investors invested $150 million in a protocol, not an computer program distributed by the "official developers", which everyone must use in order to access the system.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    It's also the reason for the change. Changing the protocol to fix clear bugs is one thing; changing the protocol because whales lost a bundle is another.
    - runeks 10y ago
      On the surface we can "fix the protocol", yes. But when the value proposition was a protocol that has now been shown to be flawed, what is there to fix? Create a new protocol, which does not exhibit the exploited bug, and hope people choose to believe that this was the only bug that is there? In-production protocols can't really be changed. You can only create a new protocol, and hope people switch to that. And if you, the inventor of the protocol, have the power to just "move over" users to the new protocol, it was never really a protocol to begin with, but more like a backend interface (the difference being that the latter can change without changing the client protocol).

If Ethereum is just another way that humans muddle through (and not the dispassionate justice of machines), is it still something different then the legal and political systems that came before it?

InclinedPlane 10y ago

Of course not. Ethereum failed, spectacularly. Ethereum made as clear-cut and direct a statement of purpose and of conditions for success and failure as possible, and they failed. Instead of accepting that fact and moving on zealots have refused to believe that they could be wrong or that their utopian ideals could be flawed in any way. Like most zealous utopians they'll be willing to accept a horrific amount of damage and destruction before seeing reality.

j_s 10y ago
Was it Ethereum or the DAO that failed?
- hueving 10y ago
  Ethereum failed when it forked to try to mop up the DAO failure.
- cjslep 10y ago
  As an outsider looking in on trying out my first cryptocurrency, Ethereum was definitely on my radar. Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my money in fiat where the regulations are well-defined and I know I have recourse through the law. I do not want to be subjected to the whims of an unregulated group operating under unknown rules with an unknown, possibly nonexistent, path of rectification if they chose something I did not like. I otherwise would have accepted the operational philosophy similar to how Bitcoin has been handled thus far and all of the responsibilities associated with a level, permanent playing field. I honestly am no longer interested and do not plan to keep up with Ethereum. I'm just N=1, but if the trend continues then I see it not growing beyond a hardcore self-interested group of people.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    >Now that the founders have shown they are capable and will undo the way the system has executed if they do not like it, I feel much more comfortable keeping my money in fiat where the regulations are well-defined and I know I have recourse through the law. US fiat failed and was only rescued through ad hoc legislation. US fiat would not exist today if new rules (unknown at the time of failure) were not defined to essentially rollback prior transactions.
    - lunula 10y ago
      I do not know what you are referring to, but I point out that fiat means "by decree". So US fiat only exists through legislation. When is legislation not ad hoc?
      - mablap 10y ago
        Well in absolute everything is ad hoc but think about it this way: You are pretty much guaranteed that, modulo some events, any US president from any party will honor their predecessors' decisions, pacts, treaties, etc. And you can be assured that the whole nation will follow them, because of of the Rule of Law! What you've just witnessed in Ethereum is a bunch of rich, moderately intelligent, technocratic and very technologically literate (but not necessarily well educated ("who would want a government when you have code bah!")) visionaries and mostly speculators crying to get their money back by abandoning the very characteristic (immutability) that distinguished them from traditional systems of governance! They had a modus operandi that "Code is Law", and they've now turned against it. "Code is Law unless X". Why have that when you can just have plain and simple "Law"?
    - NhanH 10y ago
      Yes, and if ETH is behaving the same as US dollars then there is no reason not to just stick to US dollars.
    - cjslep 10y ago
      Thank you for exactly making my point. There is a legislative process, no matter how ad hoc and pressing the issue is, that can attempt to rescue US fiat. There's no way to divine every rule which is needed for a fiat currency to keep succeeding. And rules change over time with the ebb and flow of balance of power between nations, their trade, their military might, etc. Legislation provides a well-defined process for changes to be made. Whether you trust that legislative process seems to be a key point in choosing a cryptocurrency. Now take Ethereum: suddenly changes to the transaction history needed to be made which violates the one law of cryptocurrency that's been shoved down my throat ever since Bitcoin hit mainstream media. So with no process set (because it should not have been needed in the first place), a sudden reversal of intent for one arbitrary contract, and no way to have the original intent stay binding, Ethereum made its choice. It didn't even have a legislative process, just an authoritative one guised as a democratic vote. The way that choice went down shatters all trust. If US Treasury suddenly decided it didn't need to follow any US legislation and redistributed wealth across the world, trust in USD would equally be shattered. I'm not a gambling man, but at this point in time my money stays in USD.
- elaineo 10y ago
  DAO failed, but it controls about 15% of the total ether supply, so it was too big to fail, and the fork will save it.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    The DAO did exactly, exactly, what it was supposed to do. In no way can it be have said to fail, except in the "wasn't a great investment" sense. Maybe in failed in the "wow using terrible languages to write complicated code is a bad idea" way, too. Ethereum failed, as they decided smart contracts aren't a great idea, so they're now going to involve humans when they feel like it. The whole premise of Ethereum was the opposite of what they're doing.
    - elaineo 10y ago
      Yes, that is a more accurate description. The Ethereum community was very quick to call the guy a thief, without due process.
      - nas 10y ago
        So what happens when new bugs are found in contracts controlling a lot of money? Fork again or let the buggy code run?
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      I believe that Ethereum+DAO was a sucessful experiment (with negative results) - they had a vision/hypothesis that smart contracts without human/legal overrides are a good idea, despite the experience of the whole financial and legal world over the last couple of millenia telling them that this vision is naively utopic. The whole point of Ethereum was implementing and testing this vision in practice, which they did. In practice they found out (and showed the public) the kind of consequences everyone was expecting; and so we have a successful experiment giving some evidence on whether smart contracts w/o overrides are a good idea - apparently, it's not; and now based on this we can build better systems that properly account for the risks that DAO had.
- Animats 10y ago
  Both. Etherium's smart contract system turned out to be too hard to program correctly, and the DAO botched their program. Etherium needs to go back into the shop for a redesign. Maybe a full virtual machine is the wrong model for contracts. The problem with programs as contracts is that the goal of contracts is predictability. Something more declarative might be more predictable.
bllguo 10y ago
Zealot is a great way to describe them. The absurd justifications they have over at r/ethereum blow my mind.
tdaltonc 10y ago
Do you think that the vision is bad or just the implementation?
- nas 10y ago
  Writing bug free software is extremely difficult, as anyone who knows a little about software can tell you. When software bugs can cost people millions and your system is built on the idea of people writing lots of software contracts, there is a problem. I think the vision is bad. The idea of software enforced contracts is a neat idea and someday we will have it. Ethereum is not going to be it, IMHO. Their developers want to handwave the hard problems aside and brag about how innovative they are. E.g. call for research on tools to check for bugs in contracts, meanwhile their programming platform is absolutely dreadful for writing bug free code. A better vision would be to use all the software correctness research that been done over the last 20 years. Probably use a function language that makes reasoning easier. Maybe something like Lamports TLA+ to specify behavior. I would think you want a small set of contract templates that people can use. They would be as simple as possible and heavily reviewed. I have read the DAO is on the order of 1,000 lines of code. I'd be willing to bet money there are more bugs remaining to be found. More forks in the future?
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    The state of software verification is not yet there; if it were, there would be a lot of use - and corresponding job demand - in aerospace, finance and wherever security matters. Almost everyone who is enthusing about software-enforced contracts is implicitly assuming that someone else is going to do the verification, because they could not do it themselves even if they wanted to.
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  Both. The whole idea is stunningly naive in multiple different ways. First, because the idea of "the law" as some sort of operating system for society or even the concept of the law as a program is extremely dangerous and fraught with difficulties. And most legal systems in the world have built in systems to ensure that there are elements of flexibility through humans bringing subjective judgment to bear connecting the inflexible "programmatic" elements of the law, so that errors, bugs, incompleteness, paradoxes, etc. in the law do not have undue negative consequences on society. The idea of a completely programmatic system of law, even in contract law, should be monstrously frightening. This is the stuff of kafkaesque nightmares, of unfeeling and inflexible bureaucracy which has in it no room for humans or human life. To the extent that there are programmatic aspects of law that could be good, these must have a "safety valve" that allows them to be overriden and human judgment applied. Consider how often everyone has experienced a moment of frustration when trying to get some sort of customer service while hearing a clerk or service person say "sorry, the system just doesn't allow that". And indeed we've seen precisely what happens when you lock yourself into a contract system with zero human oversight, Ethereum proved that it did need oversight, and bolting it on after the fact is much more costly (if perhaps impossible) than building it in from the start. Second, there is a stunning naivety about logic and computing involved. One common misconception of developers with an immature understanding of computing is the idea that software is deterministic. In theory software can be deterministic, but largely in a way that is completely irrelevant quite often. It's deterministic the way dice are deterministic or fluid dynamics or computation of the mandlebrot set are. In practice it's not possible for humans to understand and reason about systems that might exhibit a stunning degree of complexity despite being very simply designed. Additionally, it ignores several well known fundamental problems in computer science, such as the halting problem and the problem of decidability. As well as several thorny problems in software engineering. Even if you work only within the space of "provably correct" software systems, that still doesn't save you because one of the most common kinds of software engineering errors is an omission at the design stage. Software that provably does exactly what you've specified, but when you've specified the wrong thing is unhelpful. The whole idea relies on behavior of both humans and software that are not only unrealistic but provably impossible. It requires that everyone write 100% perfect bug free code for every contract and to be able to read code and determine conclusively with minimal effort exactly what it does and also verify that it is 100% bug free. If any of that were possible the direct applications of being able to do such magical things in software development would vastly outstrip the use in contracts or cryptocurrency, by orders of magnitude. If we had the formula to make bug free software with minimal effort the world would be an utterly different place.

jarsin 10y ago

I also have been questioning why at this point you would ever build on ethereum because if its not truly decentralized then whats the point? If a contract can be updated then its not decentralized so now you are trusting some dev or some group of people. If a contract can't be updated then it will have bugs and you can't trust it....and so on...

lukeschlather 10y ago
It's truly decentralized. Really, I don't think decentralization is a good thing, and this is demonstrating why. If you've got a truly decentralized system, pretty much anybody can tear the whole thing down while no one is paying attention. In a centralized system, there's a small group of trusted people who are responsible for keeping it safe.
- mablap 10y ago
  And this is why I'll be pouring my money into a serious government backed digital currency. It's a shame Canada isn't going all in on this, they were pioneers with their digital money project last decade. I'm reassured by Bank of England's latest (95 page) note on the matter.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kakarot 10y ago
  Perhaps the problem boils down to putting all of your eggs in one basket?
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    A basket with a bunch of holes in it.

matt4077 10y ago

Sure: it's ruled by money or social/technical standing rather than votes. It's run by a bunch of Ayn Rand-ian social darwinists who believe morality can be defined in absolute, 'dispassionate' truths. Oh, and they're now playing the game they hate so much and know so little about.

pron 10y ago
Believing a group of people can interact without politics is like believing bodies with large masses can interact without gravity; you can believe it, but if you do you really have no idea what gravity -- or politics -- is. As a result, the difference between those who do politics and those who don't, is that those who don't are just destined to do it badly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aminok 10y ago
That is an extremely rude/ungenerous blanket characterization of proponents of cryptocurrency. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given your support for authoritarianism.
f3llowtraveler 10y ago
If aggression is normally used by murderers, robbers, and tyrants, and that is normally "not okay" -- do you believe there are cases where it IS okay, as long as we voted on it first?

kartickv 10y ago

The machines are controlled by humans, and will be, unless and until AI takes over the world. So how can you possibly have a system where humans can't decide things? I would still view it as less corrupt than traditional finance, where a few powerful companies / people / government have disproportionate control.

runeks 10y ago
> The machines are controlled by humans, and will be, > unless and until AI takes over the world. So how can > you possibly have a system where humans can't decide things? It's not about humans not deciding things. It's about: 1. Creating a protocol (Ethereum) 2. Making claims about what this protocol can do; attract investments 3. When the protocol is shown the be flawed: discard it The very value proposition of Ethereum is that it's a protocol. When the authors suddenly "change the protocol", it amounts to the reference implementation of the protocol changing to be incompatible with all other alternative implementations of the protocol. This has no value in the real world. The value proposition (the protocol) is now gone. Investors invested $150 million in a protocol, not an computer program distributed by the "official developers", which everyone must use in order to access the system.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  It's also the reason for the change. Changing the protocol to fix clear bugs is one thing; changing the protocol because whales lost a bundle is another.
  - runeks 10y ago
    On the surface we can "fix the protocol", yes. But when the value proposition was a protocol that has now been shown to be flawed, what is there to fix? Create a new protocol, which does not exhibit the exploited bug, and hope people choose to believe that this was the only bug that is there? In-production protocols can't really be changed. You can only create a new protocol, and hope people switch to that. And if you, the inventor of the protocol, have the power to just "move over" users to the new protocol, it was never really a protocol to begin with, but more like a backend interface (the difference being that the latter can change without changing the client protocol).