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Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority

149 points by onestone 10y ago

Lawtonfogle 10y ago
Any chance the one who ran this exploit can sue for the money they were due? If the code IS the contract, then by the contract they are owed this money, no? Or does this mean the code isn't the contract?
- EdHominem 10y ago
  It's worth a try. They have ~$60 million to promise to shareholders in the lawsuit. They paid to participate in a code-based Nomic and were denied their prize because they won too quickly.
  - zeven7 10y ago
    In order to start litigation, they would have to reveal their identity. Among other things, this could bring them their own legal troubles. I am surprised the attacker didn't try to bribe the miners, though.
- yarrel 10y ago
  They really can't. If the argument is that code is law, the fork was implemented in code, so it's law. If their argument is that the white hat hacks shouldn't have happened then they lay themselves open to the argument that their initial hack shouldn't have happened. And then there's how draconian unauthorised computer access laws tend to be...
empath75 10y ago
To me, I think this represents a failure of the currency. Either the code is the final word on the contract or not. This process seems to give a cartel of people the power to revoke transactions on a whim. Who would commit to building anything in an environment like that?
- TheRealPomax 10y ago
  That description fits current banking systems just as much.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    So if it's not an improvement, why bother?
    - matthewbauer 10y ago
      From what I understand, it's much worse than any human legal system. Theory and precedent have all been thrown out and everyone is at the mercy of whoever can convince 51% of stakeholders. There's no concept of "equal protection" like in a modern legal system.
      - zwischenzug 10y ago
        Exactly - what happens when the next freedom fighter/terrorist/Kanye uses Ethereum, and a hysterical majority freeze them out. Where is your open distributed cryptocurrency then? Worse - as far as I can tell - than a properly regulated banking system working under the rule of law.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Except, uh, no. Almost everywhere, there is a ton of legal (and other) recourse, as well as a theoretically neutral arbiter who will listen to you and make a decision. There is some due process. You can argue about the neutrality, the laws, whatever. There's something, and it's recourse for plenty of people/etc. Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they can steal your money, and you have no recourse.
    - matthewbauer 10y ago
      > Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they can steal your money, and you have no recourse And this was always possible even before the hard fork. The difference now is that there is an actual precedent for it and apparently at least 51% of Ethereum stakeholders are okay with doing that sort of thing. Anyone actually holding a significant amount of Ethereum should seriously question the original claims that the Ethereum team made on its value.
zekevermillion 10y ago
Whether you like this or not, goes to show that developers have to get their hands dirty with mining. If you remain in your ivory tower, you will not control the protocol after it gains any significant traction.
chejazi 10y ago
What's happening: the block number of the hard fork is much bigger than the block number of the non-fork. This means that most of the mining power is being devoted to the hard fork chain since it is longer. The non-fork can't keep up, so the fork is considered a success.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  Block height has nothing to do with it
  - chejazi 10y ago
    The longest chain always wins. Block height tells you which chain is longer. Am I missing something?
    - jude- 10y ago
      The chain with the most proof-of-work wins.
      - chejazi 10y ago
        Fair enough. For clarity: The proof of work threshold for a block (aka the difficulty) was the same when the fork started. The function that adjusts the difficulty (a function of time-between-blocks) is the same across both forks. It would take considerable time for the non-fork chain's difficulty to adjust to where it can make blocks at pace with the fork chain again. And even if it did, the fork would represent less work due to a lower difficulty.
    - petertodd 10y ago
      The chain with most work _thats valid_ wins. Post-bailout Ethereum is not the same currency as pre-bailout, and given that a non-trivial minority (~5%) of miners are mining pre-bailout Ethereum - and the difficulty of mining quickly adjusts - pre-bailout Ethereum will actually be a viable currency from a technical perspective, in the sense that it can be sent and received. From a social perspective, it's hard to be sure quite yet; we'll see in the coming days and weeks whether or not people decide that pre-bailout Ethereum has value or not (and equally, post-bailout Ethereum).
JoachimSchipper 10y ago
Note that this says more about the defaults in software than about any Ethereum user's opinion. (The miners may or may not be more informed, but note that Ethereum is only valuable if users are willing to exchange things of value for Ethereum, i.e. a hard fork requires changes in wallet software.)
- onestone 10y ago
  Which are the users you are referring to? Because all kinds of _actual_ users have shown that a clear majority is in favor of the hard fork: - ETH holders voted on http://carbonvote.com/ http://carbonvote.com/ with 87% pro-fork. 5.5% of the total ETH supply participated in the vote. - ETH miners clearly voted pro-fork on the major pools, e.g. https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting. In nearly all cases > 80% of the hash power was pro-fork. - ETH markets reacted positively when there were good pro-fork news, and negatively when there were bad news (such as the DDoS vulnerability in the proposed soft fork). Therefore the market sees more value in the post-HF Ethereum. Yes, there is a vocal group opposing the fork, but it mostly consists of persons wishing to see Ethereum fail.
  - leshow 10y ago
    you consider 5.5% of the money supply a good participation rate? In the voting on the pools, 80% of people didn't even vote. Therefore it is simply the fact that the fork was the default choice (and is the default in all the wallets), that is the deciding factor of this 'vote' By the way, "> 80% of the hash power was pro-fork." is demonstrably false. only 15% of the hashing power was pro fork, 85% of miners didnt vote at all.
    - onestone 10y ago
      Yes, I consider it an _excellent_ participation rate. A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%). Passive users by definition agree to follow the active users' decision.
alexbock 10y ago
Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum, I really don't understand how the people behind it can justify using their privileged position as developers and community leaders to try to undo this. They spent a lot of time talking about how "the code is the contract"... until they stood to be negatively impacted on a personal level by allowing the literal meaning of the code to stand. I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that.
- echelon 10y ago
  Prior to this fork, I had interest in Ethereum. I don't want to touch it now, out of both mistrust and the feeling that the developers are lacking in ethics. It really feels like a pyramid scheme if they're not willing to let the technology stand on its own. It's really a shame. Maybe some other group will fork the Ethereum code into a new cryptocurrency that can't have the blockchain forked as easily.
  - tankenmate 10y ago
    Ethereum is a human construct; written by humans, directed by humans, and facilitated by humans (no skynet has come along to do mining). Ipso facto, it is fallible just like humans. You think it is a bad thing that this has happened; I think it is a good thing. Now everyone is aware that the 51% can take control of the chain; you can't pretend any more that the code is the final arbiter, because it isn't. Black and white is a myth; it's a human construct that is made from mathematics and many shades of grey. Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - factorialboy 10y ago
      Will ETH hard fork after every fraud / theft / robbery? If not, then the case will be made of conflict of interest. People behind ETH had a stake in TheDAO and they chose to protect their _dollars_ rather than the platform.
seibelj 10y ago
Someone probably has another exploit queued up, so they can immediately create the need for another fork. Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money.
- eggie 10y ago
  > Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money. This is true, but the fork suggests the only way to do this will be by shorting the currency rather than trading the ETH earned from exploits.
  - tromp 10y ago
    Another way is to be not as blatantly greedy. Like, steal half a million instead of 60 million. That would have made it so much harder to justify a hard fork...
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    Nobody's enough of a sucker to be the counterparty to an ETH short.
    - aianus 10y ago
      Go to any margin trading site (eg. bitfinex) and there is plenty of ETH available to short with.
- mikeash 10y ago
  If (huge if, I know) people learn from what just happened, there at least won't be another $100 million target to exploit. The NewDAO should see much less investment until it's actually proven. Of course, it may well not happen that way.
  - ohnomrbill 10y ago
    The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each time an individual gets their savings wiped out, or accept that there is risk of death by 1000 cuts when investing in ETH. Others may see things differently of course.
ikken 10y ago
I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it can. I have no confidence that Bitcoin or any other currency doesn't fork in the future, because it is possible at any moment. The fact that the fork has happened or not changes nothing - it always stays as a possibility. In other words the chance of Ethereum or Bitcoin hard-forking in the future wouldn't change if the hard-fork didn't happen right now.
- matthewbauer 10y ago
  > I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it can. Well, it's setting a precedent that will make the case easier in the future. Bitcoin's hard forks have all seemed to be good faith attempts to fix issues in the protocol. I don't think anyway on the Ethereum team is arguing this is anything other than an extremely arbitrary fork. The fact that 51% of stakeholders agreed to set this precedent should scare anyone from owning Ethereum in the future.
markkat 10y ago
I am surprised how so many seem to think this is a bad thing. Ethereum is very nascent, and this was how the community wanted to fix this issue. It was not just about returning DTH, it was about the implications of the allocation of the DTH in the hands of one individual when Ethereum moves to PoS. Obviously the HF isn't ideal, but not forking was potentially much worse. This settles the issue, and allows people to get back to work. Hard forks will become less viable as a solution the larger the network gets, and as more interests are involved. However, blockchains are consensus mechanisms. Anyone can propose a hard fork update at any time. Here is something to consider: as more than 80% of Bitcoin's hash power is in the hands of a few Chinese companies, the CCP could very realistically enforce a Bitcoin hard fork.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  "Anyone can proposed a hard fork update at any time." So there is no difference between me and the core developers?
  - sidereal1 10y ago
    In the ability to propose a hard fork, no difference. However, you need to be able to convince the majority of miners to vote for your fork and that's where being a core dev has a lot of influence.
  - markkat 10y ago
    Of course there is. However, as Bitcoin Classic may illustrate, it is possible to leave the core developers working on a defunct chain. Core developers represent a double-edged sword. They are critical for getting the network adopted, and for adapting the network to new demands, but they can also be a risk due to their influence. By all accounts, the Ethereum core developers have been open and responsive. Not all Ethereum devs wanted this fork. I do think they could be faulted for not strongly advising Slock.it to cap The DAO. That may be one reason why they were amenable to a refund solution. You definitely should consider the core devs when investing time and money in a blockchain. They have an inertia that influences the system.
  - 10y ago
ianpurton 10y ago
No no no no no. It's too early to measure success. OK, there was a fork. Technical success if you like. But, at the moment most exchanges are closed to Ethereum trading on either the old or new software. When they open we will then have a better idea how this will play out.
mrfusion 10y ago
Would anyone be willing to explain the background on this? I'll admit I haven't been following it.
- ecopoesis 10y ago
  Ethereum is a post-Bitcoin blockchain. One of the major differences with Bitcoin is that Ethereum is designed to be Turing complete: the blockchain can be used to run any arbitrary code. The ability to run arbitrary code was built to allow for the creation of smart contracts. The basic idea with a smart contract is that the contract's code (running on the blockchain) enforces all the rules of the contract itself. No need for courts or external parties to handle disputes: the code just does the right thing. A company called Slock.it created a smart contract called the DAO (distributed autonomous organization). The DAO was a venture capital smart contract. Anyone could submit proposals, owners of the DAO would vote on them, and if successful, fund them, taking some ownership of the proposed venture in hope of a payoff. The DAO got people excited, and $160 million worth of Ethereum was invested in it. However, the DAO had bugs, and someone exploited one of those bugs to move a large portion of the DAO's Ethereum into another contract that the DAO owners couldn't control. This crashed the ETH exchange rate. The "hack" split the Ethereum community: some felt that nothing should be done, the DAO contract ran correctly, just not in a way that was anticipated. Others felt that the DAO funds should be recovered and returned, and suggested a soft-fork followed by a hard-fork to make this happen. Both the Ethereum Foundation and Slock.it supported the fork option. Eventually the soft-fork was released. The soft-fork stayed on the same blockchain (hence the soft) as previous versions, it just blocked transactions related to the "hacked" contract so the former-DAO funds couldn't be moved. However, once again bugs were found, making folks running the soft-fork vulnerable to DOS attacks. I don't know if it ever reached consensus. A short while later, the hard-fork version of Ethereum was released. As the name implies, this version splits the blockchain into two, one continuing the existing blockchain and another that moves the DAOs ETH into a new contract that's going to be distributed to the former DAO owners. The forked blockchain also put ~$5 million in the hands of a curator to distribute as they see fit. The hard-fork went live today, and it looks like the majority of miners have switched to it, which means the hard-fork has become the new Ethereum blockchain.
zeveb 10y ago
And just like that, the entire point of Ethereum vanished into the ether. Contracts which contain an implicit item 'we can renegotiate this any time a majority of miners wish' are contrary to what Ethereum was meant to be.
- watty 10y ago
  What was it "meant to be"? I'm completely ignorant of the politics but my assumption was that every cryptocoin post-bitcoin was a way for the creators/developrs/owners to make money. Did the creators make money? Success.
  - jude- 10y ago
    Straight from ethereum.org: "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." Emphasis mine.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  The point of Ethereum to me is that I can write a service, fund it, and then have it run in perpetuity without any intervention from me. How is that vanished? There is some small probability that the Ethereum community might from consensus around interfering with my service. But I'm no more worried about that than I am about Heroku or anyone else deciding I'm not allowed on the platform. If anything this episode has shown just how high that bar is on Ethereum as compared to centralized offerings. People act like just because there is one tiny corner case where the full letter of the promise is unfulfilled that means the entire offering is void. But what offering doesn't have at least a few caveats?
deleted 10y ago
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desireco42 10y ago
Title should read: "Millions saved by Ethereum hard fork..." :)
onetwotree 10y ago
There's an interesting parallel between the arguments being made here and the argument that Schnier made against government controlled backdoors. Even if we suppose that only reasonable warrants would be granted for the use of such a backdoor, the backdoor is software, and does exactly what it's programmed to do - as anyone whose written software knows, this is sometimes not the same as what it's supposed to do. This means that bad guys can readily exploit any backdoor. A human would reject such accesses as obviously unwarranted, but a computer doing exactly what it's programmed to do won't. Similarly, in Ethereum, a contract does exactly what it's programmed to do, not what it's meant to do. When malicious actors exploit this for personal gain, our reaction is that we should to "fix" the currency to be in line with our human judgement about what it ought or ought not be used for. In both cases, you can't have your cake and eat it. With backdoors, you can either have a simple, automatic means of investigating suspects, or you can have human judgement as to whether or not such searches have value that exceeds the value of an individual's right to privacy. In Ethereum, you can either have autonomous and decentralized contracts, or you can have contracts that are subject to human judgement and values. I'm still very much in "Micheal Jackson eats popcorn" mode with respect to Ethereum, but at this point it seems like it's trying to accomplish two things that are fundamentally incompatible.
arisAlexis 10y ago
It's simply not immutable and decentralized anymore. Just another distributed computatiom technology (and rather slow for that)
int_19h 10y ago
All this forking made me wonder about the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies. Suppose we have guys D and C, and D owes C some amount in X-coin - complete with a written contract. Now, if X-coin is forked, and one of the forks has a blockchain recording a transaction from D to C in that amount, but the other one does not, which one is considered authoritative? If C sues D, because they are on the other fork, and that fork doesn't have the debt settled, how would it go in court? This gets especially interesting if the forks are roughly equal in size... I guess it would all depend on the interpretation of the meaning of the term "X-coin" in the contract, but that's just a different way of asking the same question.
dariusgodre 10y ago
Here's an interesting thought: should everyone involved be charged with conspiracy to commit grand larceny?
cannonball 10y ago
This is history revisionism as code.

149 points by onestone 10y ago

Any chance the one who ran this exploit can sue for the money they were due? If the code IS the contract, then by the contract they are owed this money, no? Or does this mean the code isn't the contract?

EdHominem 10y ago
It's worth a try. They have ~$60 million to promise to shareholders in the lawsuit. They paid to participate in a code-based Nomic and were denied their prize because they won too quickly.
- zeven7 10y ago
  In order to start litigation, they would have to reveal their identity. Among other things, this could bring them their own legal troubles. I am surprised the attacker didn't try to bribe the miners, though.
yarrel 10y ago
They really can't. If the argument is that code is law, the fork was implemented in code, so it's law. If their argument is that the white hat hacks shouldn't have happened then they lay themselves open to the argument that their initial hack shouldn't have happened. And then there's how draconian unauthorised computer access laws tend to be...

empath75 10y ago

To me, I think this represents a failure of the currency. Either the code is the final word on the contract or not. This process seems to give a cartel of people the power to revoke transactions on a whim. Who would commit to building anything in an environment like that?

TheRealPomax 10y ago
That description fits current banking systems just as much.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  So if it's not an improvement, why bother?
  - matthewbauer 10y ago
    From what I understand, it's much worse than any human legal system. Theory and precedent have all been thrown out and everyone is at the mercy of whoever can convince 51% of stakeholders. There's no concept of "equal protection" like in a modern legal system.
    - zwischenzug 10y ago
      Exactly - what happens when the next freedom fighter/terrorist/Kanye uses Ethereum, and a hysterical majority freeze them out. Where is your open distributed cryptocurrency then? Worse - as far as I can tell - than a properly regulated banking system working under the rule of law.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  Except, uh, no. Almost everywhere, there is a ton of legal (and other) recourse, as well as a theoretically neutral arbiter who will listen to you and make a decision. There is some due process. You can argue about the neutrality, the laws, whatever. There's something, and it's recourse for plenty of people/etc. Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they can steal your money, and you have no recourse.
  - matthewbauer 10y ago
    > Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they can steal your money, and you have no recourse And this was always possible even before the hard fork. The difference now is that there is an actual precedent for it and apparently at least 51% of Ethereum stakeholders are okay with doing that sort of thing. Anyone actually holding a significant amount of Ethereum should seriously question the original claims that the Ethereum team made on its value.

zekevermillion 10y ago

Whether you like this or not, goes to show that developers have to get their hands dirty with mining. If you remain in your ivory tower, you will not control the protocol after it gains any significant traction.

chejazi 10y ago

What's happening: the block number of the hard fork is much bigger than the block number of the non-fork. This means that most of the mining power is being devoted to the hard fork chain since it is longer. The non-fork can't keep up, so the fork is considered a success.

cloudjacker 10y ago
Block height has nothing to do with it
- chejazi 10y ago
  The longest chain always wins. Block height tells you which chain is longer. Am I missing something?
  - jude- 10y ago
    The chain with the most proof-of-work wins.
    - chejazi 10y ago
      Fair enough. For clarity: The proof of work threshold for a block (aka the difficulty) was the same when the fork started. The function that adjusts the difficulty (a function of time-between-blocks) is the same across both forks. It would take considerable time for the non-fork chain's difficulty to adjust to where it can make blocks at pace with the fork chain again. And even if it did, the fork would represent less work due to a lower difficulty.
  - petertodd 10y ago
    The chain with most work _thats valid_ wins. Post-bailout Ethereum is not the same currency as pre-bailout, and given that a non-trivial minority (~5%) of miners are mining pre-bailout Ethereum - and the difficulty of mining quickly adjusts - pre-bailout Ethereum will actually be a viable currency from a technical perspective, in the sense that it can be sent and received. From a social perspective, it's hard to be sure quite yet; we'll see in the coming days and weeks whether or not people decide that pre-bailout Ethereum has value or not (and equally, post-bailout Ethereum).

JoachimSchipper 10y ago

Note that this says more about the defaults in software than about any Ethereum user's opinion. (The miners may or may not be more informed, but note that Ethereum is only valuable if users are willing to exchange things of value for Ethereum, i.e. a hard fork requires changes in wallet software.)

onestone 10y ago
Which are the users you are referring to? Because all kinds of _actual_ users have shown that a clear majority is in favor of the hard fork: - ETH holders voted on http://carbonvote.com/ http://carbonvote.com/ with 87% pro-fork. 5.5% of the total ETH supply participated in the vote. - ETH miners clearly voted pro-fork on the major pools, e.g. https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting. In nearly all cases > 80% of the hash power was pro-fork. - ETH markets reacted positively when there were good pro-fork news, and negatively when there were bad news (such as the DDoS vulnerability in the proposed soft fork). Therefore the market sees more value in the post-HF Ethereum. Yes, there is a vocal group opposing the fork, but it mostly consists of persons wishing to see Ethereum fail.
- leshow 10y ago
  you consider 5.5% of the money supply a good participation rate? In the voting on the pools, 80% of people didn't even vote. Therefore it is simply the fact that the fork was the default choice (and is the default in all the wallets), that is the deciding factor of this 'vote' By the way, "> 80% of the hash power was pro-fork." is demonstrably false. only 15% of the hashing power was pro fork, 85% of miners didnt vote at all.
  - onestone 10y ago
    Yes, I consider it an _excellent_ participation rate. A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%). Passive users by definition agree to follow the active users' decision.

alexbock 10y ago

Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum, I really don't understand how the people behind it can justify using their privileged position as developers and community leaders to try to undo this. They spent a lot of time talking about how "the code is the contract"... until they stood to be negatively impacted on a personal level by allowing the literal meaning of the code to stand. I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that.

echelon 10y ago
Prior to this fork, I had interest in Ethereum. I don't want to touch it now, out of both mistrust and the feeling that the developers are lacking in ethics. It really feels like a pyramid scheme if they're not willing to let the technology stand on its own. It's really a shame. Maybe some other group will fork the Ethereum code into a new cryptocurrency that can't have the blockchain forked as easily.
- tankenmate 10y ago
  Ethereum is a human construct; written by humans, directed by humans, and facilitated by humans (no skynet has come along to do mining). Ipso facto, it is fallible just like humans. You think it is a bad thing that this has happened; I think it is a good thing. Now everyone is aware that the 51% can take control of the chain; you can't pretend any more that the code is the final arbiter, because it isn't. Black and white is a myth; it's a human construct that is made from mathematics and many shades of grey. Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - factorialboy 10y ago
    Will ETH hard fork after every fraud / theft / robbery? If not, then the case will be made of conflict of interest. People behind ETH had a stake in TheDAO and they chose to protect their _dollars_ rather than the platform.

seibelj 10y ago

Someone probably has another exploit queued up, so they can immediately create the need for another fork. Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money.

eggie 10y ago
> Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for security researchers who want to earn money. This is true, but the fork suggests the only way to do this will be by shorting the currency rather than trading the ETH earned from exploits.
- tromp 10y ago
  Another way is to be not as blatantly greedy. Like, steal half a million instead of 60 million. That would have made it so much harder to justify a hard fork...
- smitherfield 10y ago
  Nobody's enough of a sucker to be the counterparty to an ETH short.
  - aianus 10y ago
    Go to any margin trading site (eg. bitfinex) and there is plenty of ETH available to short with.
mikeash 10y ago
If (huge if, I know) people learn from what just happened, there at least won't be another $100 million target to exploit. The NewDAO should see much less investment until it's actually proven. Of course, it may well not happen that way.
- ohnomrbill 10y ago
  The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each time an individual gets their savings wiped out, or accept that there is risk of death by 1000 cuts when investing in ETH. Others may see things differently of course.

ikken 10y ago

I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it can. I have no confidence that Bitcoin or any other currency doesn't fork in the future, because it is possible at any moment. The fact that the fork has happened or not changes nothing - it always stays as a possibility. In other words the chance of Ethereum or Bitcoin hard-forking in the future wouldn't change if the hard-fork didn't happen right now.

matthewbauer 10y ago
> I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it can. Well, it's setting a precedent that will make the case easier in the future. Bitcoin's hard forks have all seemed to be good faith attempts to fix issues in the protocol. I don't think anyway on the Ethereum team is arguing this is anything other than an extremely arbitrary fork. The fact that 51% of stakeholders agreed to set this precedent should scare anyone from owning Ethereum in the future.

markkat 10y ago

I am surprised how so many seem to think this is a bad thing. Ethereum is very nascent, and this was how the community wanted to fix this issue. It was not just about returning DTH, it was about the implications of the allocation of the DTH in the hands of one individual when Ethereum moves to PoS. Obviously the HF isn't ideal, but not forking was potentially much worse. This settles the issue, and allows people to get back to work. Hard forks will become less viable as a solution the larger the network gets, and as more interests are involved. However, blockchains are consensus mechanisms. Anyone can propose a hard fork update at any time. Here is something to consider: as more than 80% of Bitcoin's hash power is in the hands of a few Chinese companies, the CCP could very realistically enforce a Bitcoin hard fork.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
"Anyone can proposed a hard fork update at any time." So there is no difference between me and the core developers?
- sidereal1 10y ago
  In the ability to propose a hard fork, no difference. However, you need to be able to convince the majority of miners to vote for your fork and that's where being a core dev has a lot of influence.
- markkat 10y ago
  Of course there is. However, as Bitcoin Classic may illustrate, it is possible to leave the core developers working on a defunct chain. Core developers represent a double-edged sword. They are critical for getting the network adopted, and for adapting the network to new demands, but they can also be a risk due to their influence. By all accounts, the Ethereum core developers have been open and responsive. Not all Ethereum devs wanted this fork. I do think they could be faulted for not strongly advising Slock.it to cap The DAO. That may be one reason why they were amenable to a refund solution. You definitely should consider the core devs when investing time and money in a blockchain. They have an inertia that influences the system.
- 10y ago

ianpurton 10y ago

No no no no no. It's too early to measure success. OK, there was a fork. Technical success if you like. But, at the moment most exchanges are closed to Ethereum trading on either the old or new software. When they open we will then have a better idea how this will play out.

mrfusion 10y ago

Would anyone be willing to explain the background on this? I'll admit I haven't been following it.

ecopoesis 10y ago
Ethereum is a post-Bitcoin blockchain. One of the major differences with Bitcoin is that Ethereum is designed to be Turing complete: the blockchain can be used to run any arbitrary code. The ability to run arbitrary code was built to allow for the creation of smart contracts. The basic idea with a smart contract is that the contract's code (running on the blockchain) enforces all the rules of the contract itself. No need for courts or external parties to handle disputes: the code just does the right thing. A company called Slock.it created a smart contract called the DAO (distributed autonomous organization). The DAO was a venture capital smart contract. Anyone could submit proposals, owners of the DAO would vote on them, and if successful, fund them, taking some ownership of the proposed venture in hope of a payoff. The DAO got people excited, and $160 million worth of Ethereum was invested in it. However, the DAO had bugs, and someone exploited one of those bugs to move a large portion of the DAO's Ethereum into another contract that the DAO owners couldn't control. This crashed the ETH exchange rate. The "hack" split the Ethereum community: some felt that nothing should be done, the DAO contract ran correctly, just not in a way that was anticipated. Others felt that the DAO funds should be recovered and returned, and suggested a soft-fork followed by a hard-fork to make this happen. Both the Ethereum Foundation and Slock.it supported the fork option. Eventually the soft-fork was released. The soft-fork stayed on the same blockchain (hence the soft) as previous versions, it just blocked transactions related to the "hacked" contract so the former-DAO funds couldn't be moved. However, once again bugs were found, making folks running the soft-fork vulnerable to DOS attacks. I don't know if it ever reached consensus. A short while later, the hard-fork version of Ethereum was released. As the name implies, this version splits the blockchain into two, one continuing the existing blockchain and another that moves the DAOs ETH into a new contract that's going to be distributed to the former DAO owners. The forked blockchain also put ~$5 million in the hands of a curator to distribute as they see fit. The hard-fork went live today, and it looks like the majority of miners have switched to it, which means the hard-fork has become the new Ethereum blockchain.

zeveb 10y ago

And just like that, the entire point of Ethereum vanished into the ether. Contracts which contain an implicit item 'we can renegotiate this any time a majority of miners wish' are contrary to what Ethereum was meant to be.

watty 10y ago
What was it "meant to be"? I'm completely ignorant of the politics but my assumption was that every cryptocoin post-bitcoin was a way for the creators/developrs/owners to make money. Did the creators make money? Success.
- jude- 10y ago
  Straight from ethereum.org: "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." Emphasis mine.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
The point of Ethereum to me is that I can write a service, fund it, and then have it run in perpetuity without any intervention from me. How is that vanished? There is some small probability that the Ethereum community might from consensus around interfering with my service. But I'm no more worried about that than I am about Heroku or anyone else deciding I'm not allowed on the platform. If anything this episode has shown just how high that bar is on Ethereum as compared to centralized offerings. People act like just because there is one tiny corner case where the full letter of the promise is unfulfilled that means the entire offering is void. But what offering doesn't have at least a few caveats?

deleted 10y ago

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desireco42 10y ago

Title should read: "Millions saved by Ethereum hard fork..." :)

onetwotree 10y ago

There's an interesting parallel between the arguments being made here and the argument that Schnier made against government controlled backdoors. Even if we suppose that only reasonable warrants would be granted for the use of such a backdoor, the backdoor is software, and does exactly what it's programmed to do - as anyone whose written software knows, this is sometimes not the same as what it's supposed to do. This means that bad guys can readily exploit any backdoor. A human would reject such accesses as obviously unwarranted, but a computer doing exactly what it's programmed to do won't. Similarly, in Ethereum, a contract does exactly what it's programmed to do, not what it's meant to do. When malicious actors exploit this for personal gain, our reaction is that we should to "fix" the currency to be in line with our human judgement about what it ought or ought not be used for. In both cases, you can't have your cake and eat it. With backdoors, you can either have a simple, automatic means of investigating suspects, or you can have human judgement as to whether or not such searches have value that exceeds the value of an individual's right to privacy. In Ethereum, you can either have autonomous and decentralized contracts, or you can have contracts that are subject to human judgement and values. I'm still very much in "Micheal Jackson eats popcorn" mode with respect to Ethereum, but at this point it seems like it's trying to accomplish two things that are fundamentally incompatible.

arisAlexis 10y ago

It's simply not immutable and decentralized anymore. Just another distributed computatiom technology (and rather slow for that)

int_19h 10y ago

All this forking made me wonder about the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies. Suppose we have guys D and C, and D owes C some amount in X-coin - complete with a written contract. Now, if X-coin is forked, and one of the forks has a blockchain recording a transaction from D to C in that amount, but the other one does not, which one is considered authoritative? If C sues D, because they are on the other fork, and that fork doesn't have the debt settled, how would it go in court? This gets especially interesting if the forks are roughly equal in size... I guess it would all depend on the interpretation of the meaning of the term "X-coin" in the contract, but that's just a different way of asking the same question.

dariusgodre 10y ago

Here's an interesting thought: should everyone involved be charged with conspiracy to commit grand larceny?

cannonball 10y ago

This is history revisionism as code.