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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

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.
    - jarsin 10y ago
      Gatecoin got robbed of over 185k ETH and they asked if they could get those back when Vitalik first mentioned they were going to hardfork in the hours after the attack. They were obviously denied. It's my understanding they know what account holds most of there coins too. There have been numerous other small hacks on eth users as well. Unfortunately, this hardfork did nothing for those people.
      - npongratz 10y ago
        It would be fun to know how many Ethereum developers lost their ETH in the Gatecoin robbery versus how many stood to lose in the DAO exploit.
        drostie 10y ago
        I mean, from what I understood it was more complicated than just pure profit-seeking. (Disclaimer: I'm not a user of Ethereum.) My understanding was that the DAO (and organizations like it) was the whole point of people signing up to use Ethereum, and the hard fork basically says "The DAO never existed, you're all getting your ether back" with an understanding of "now that you know all of the attendant risks of hacking, start your own autonomous organizations with a bit more prudence." It is not very realistic to expect further forks as every fork produces a new cryptocurrency; furthermore it is not very realistic to expect a mere 51% majority to sway the blockchain (as I understand it the change is code-level). If each decision only gets 80% approval then after 3 such decisions you have your community split across 4 cryptocurrencies: {20%, 16%, 13%, 10%, 41%} and you've lost over half of your users; furthermore if the power of a currency is proportional to the square of the users (as it likely to first-order has to do with how many ways they can interact with each other, which goes with the number of handshakes they can make), you've cut down your value proposition to only ~16% of what it was. It sounds like this might have gotten 90-99% adoption by the community in terms of hashpower, but some of this is doubtless amplified by miners who will go wherever the wind takes them. It reminds me of my environmental science teacher in high school. Between counting the bugs we caught at local streams, one day he taught my class about the Tragedy of the Commons. He said, "tomorrow, if you want to play a game to illustrate this, bring a quarter and we'll play it for real cash." Most of us brought quarters. "Okay, if you still want to play this game after I explain the rules, put your quarter in this jar and I'll give you a card. You're going to write on that card your name, and then either 'use' or 'leave': for whether you're going to use the common resource or leave it alone for a while. You have to keep your decision secret, if anyone else sees what you wrote then you're getting your quarter back and it's like you were not in the game at all. You can SAY anything you want to people, but nobody's allowed to see what you're DOING. After 5-10 minutes I'll call time, and you'll give the folded cards back to me. If everyone says Leave then I'll give everyone who participated two quarters. If one person says Use and everyone else says Leave then I'll give them the jar of quarters: and, no being mean to them, they won the jackpot fair and square. Or if two or more people say Use, then I win all of the quarters. Who still wants to play?" A lot of us put our quarters in, and I being a petulant teenager wrote Use (with the intention to give everyone back their quarters afterwards! I wasn't greedy, just a smartass) ... but while almost everyone else wrote Leave, this did not include one kid who didn't understand English so well and meant to write Leave but instead wrote Use (or else that was just what he told everyone afterwards). The teacher won all our quarters, but he returned them like a good sport and offered to let us play again, this time FOR REALS. This time I voted Leave, but multiple people voted Use just to somehow "punish" me, which was even more what the teacher was trying to teach: "if you can't guarantee that everyone else is going to leave it alone, hey, you might as well try to get in on this sweet sweet resource while it still exists, right? So that's why the tragedy of the commons happens and we're all pretty much doomed. I'm gonna win your quarters every time." He gave back the quarters anyway, of course, after making a big show of "No, the second time was FOR REALS, you all knew it, didn't you? Would you have paid ME back?!" It's probably just the feeling of a bunch of kids being like "that wasn't fair, give us back our money and let us try again!" from the first time we played the game, and the more sober discourse of the second match where we understood better that our money was on the line and we had to find a way together to steal our teacher's money.
  - themgt 10y ago
    No, the problem is you've replaced code-is-contract with an insider-run Politburo who decides to put referenda up to a vote with their preferred choice set as default and propagandized to the community from the top-down. I have long thought anarchist digital currency is bound to fail because of the need for a political superstructure able to make some decisions. The problem is now you've thrown out 3000 years of political thought and replaced it with ... whatever the hell the process behind these decisions is now. What you would actually need to do this right is put real thought and effort into how to have an effective, impartial and ethical governing body managing a digital currency. Giving the primary stakeholders carte blanche to make these decisions is basically recreating a virtual version of "company scrip".
    - tankenmate 10y ago
      I think you might be misunderstanding authority. Authority doesn't come from lording it over people, or making the best decisions. Authority comes from submission; as long as someone submits to you you have authority over them, likewise anything you submit to has authority over you. The submissive person in the relationship has all the power; they are the one who gets to say "stop". In this case the various arguments were put forward by various people; this included rants, well researched documents, but most importantly code. In the end most people submitted to the code that was put out there by the main group. But still this submission is a choice. The main group survives by this submission, but it isn't their choice; this is government by consent. You may not consent to it, but plenty others have. So if you don't like it I suggest you follow Alan Kay's advice; "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." If you want to influence the situation go write better code; of course you need good ideas for that code, but you still need to ship code! Otherwise the cost of submission is too high for most people and they won't follow you.
      - drdeca 10y ago
        > Authority comes from submission; I don't think I quite agree with this, but I agree with something similar I suppose : Power comes from submission. (sorta) I believe that one can be under an authority which one does not choose to submit to. (relating more to how people should act than how they do act, compared to power) But, perhaps this is just using words differently without necessarily much disagreement about the actual things. By your comment I am reminded of a dialogue "How to quit smoking" on self-control, which argues that self-control is more due to obedience than it is to "willpower". This dialogue seems to make sense to me. (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13) Regarding your last paragraph: I don't know that I know how that last bit is applicable. In order to not have the fork happen, the difference would be people not running the fork code, or alternatively running some slightly different code that handles the fact that some people are running the fork but is otherwise basically unchanged. This code already exists. As such, I'm not sure what you are really saying by this paragraph, other than, basically "suck it up"?
  - nzoschke 10y ago
    Agreed that this is a good thing. Strict dogma is bad and unsustainable. The core team has backed off from "the code is the construct" philosophy, both implicitly by executing this fork, and explicitly in other publications. It's a black mark on the trust record for Ethereum, but hard lessons learned are the best ways to grow. Folks that look at this as a black and white "Ethereum can no longer be trusted" are ironically applying strict dogma in the other direction. I am not making any calls about the value of Ethereum. Just that evolving philosophy and software systems is a very good and necessary thing.
  - dandare 10y ago
    Democracy doesn't sucks less - it only sucks for less people.
  - moefogs 10y ago
    This was a political and cultural question: is the contract the code? The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be." If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly indelible manner. "nope, they lost tens of millions and they ate it because the contract is the code, so we won't help you either." Instead, what the nerds did was say "hey, you know the one interesting part of Ethereum? yeah, forget it... because we decided that we value our short-term wealth over the creation of that system." And that's fine. It's fine that they decided they don't give a shit about contracts as code. It's fine that they took their ball and went home. But Ethereum is now dead. Not today mind you, but in the long run. Only a complete and total lunatic will ever trust Ethereum again, because there will be more forks in the future. The precedent is set. They won't all remain "clear cut". So the interesting question is: who's next? It's not ethereum anymore. But it's still an interesting problem space. And maybe there's a team that is actually interested in it.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a fork _always_ possible in a decentralized blockchain? And if so, wasn't the "the contract is whatever 50%+1 of the network decides it is" always part of the contract? Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here. Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.
  - lajarre 10y ago
    > the 51% can take control of the chain This argument seems fallacious and off-the-point in this context. Isn't the goal of a contract to precisely bypass the 51% control thing (a distributed consensus rule, needed for mining), by defining its own explicit rules? > Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else More profoundly, isn't the essence of such systems to go beyond democracy, and allow for new governance paradigms?
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  >developers are lacking in ethics From their point of view however, it was perhaps most ethical to try their best to save money of all other people who trusted in their system that failed.
ohnomrbill 10y ago
Yep - I don't see the draw for new investors now. We know they will rollback contracts that are financially damaging enough, except with ETH there is no legal recourse in the case of disputed transactions. From the outside looking in, it just seems like a generally worse traditional currency.
- zanny 10y ago
  It requires consensus in the chain to make such a fork. While you can argue against raw direct democracy of hash power like that, anyone who believes the state does not represent the will of the people should be strongly interested in something like Eth where the will of the majority is absolute.
  - ohnomrbill 10y ago
    Agreed on the consensus; the nice thing about making decisions with a currency is that people can vote with their money. But I can buy other state-backed currencies today, some of which I trust to represent my interests. They have the benefit of an established legal system too, which Ethereum does not.
- natrius 10y ago
  Stop investing in cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is a platform that gives developers incredible power to facilitate social and economic coordination. It's not about providing a better currency.
cloudjacker 10y ago
The dao exploiter really should have followed through with the plan to pay miners $1,000,000 to mine their transactions toward exchanges. The legal argument was solid enough to also be purchaseable , so no anonimity required
- ComodoHacker 10y ago
  Maybe he really would if it were just 3-4 persons to negotiate with and 3-4 wallets to pay to.
api 10y ago
What's funny is that the message in Bitcoin's genesis block is about this. The idea of doing something better than current financial systems gained traction after the US Fed hard forked the dollar to fix the housing bubble crash. (The degree of manipulation in 2008 to reflate the banking system resembles a hard fork.) Money is a signaling mechanism. It carries information. If you invalidate mistakes, you keep the economic system from learning.
- zanny 10y ago
  Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again. The fact that didn't happen meant most people didn't want it to happen. If people did want a reset to compensate for the insecurity in the DAO it would have happened.
  - rsync 10y ago
    "Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again." Aren't you confusing Etherium with The Dao ? Yes, the dao needed to be abandoned due to its insecurity, but my understanding is that the Etherium base itself was not at fault.
    - jude- 10y ago
      Sure, the EVM may be fine, but the biggest flaws lie in the design of Solidity. Solidity makes it very easy to introduce reentrancy bugs like the one that led the DAO to be exploited. As long as Solidity remains the de facto smart contract programming language, I don't expect overall security of smart contracts to improve much.
    - zanny 10y ago
      My point is that if 60 million dollars were stolen in Eth without no recourse that would permanently tarnish the name Ether. Nobody would care that the DAO did not represent the whole project, the fact a huge portion of the economy was pushed and then destroyed would ruin the brand entirely.
skybrian 10y ago
One way to justify it might be to consider this a beta period. It is still early days for this new currency and perhaps when the system is more robust, they will be able to walk away. But the question is whether that day will ever come, or the currency will always need emergency overrides.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  "beta" isn't really an excuse for a clustercuddle involving $150 million.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    Maybe it's not an excuse, but it seems like a reasonable explanation. The system clearly isn't ready to handle $150 million but some folks did it anyway.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Upvoted for the term clustercuddle. A couple of points: 1) It's probably not unusual to have $150 million in value tied up on the success or failure of a beta. 2) Calling this "beta" was a stretch. I'm of the opinion that the first "beta" should almost always still be called an "alpha" until in-the-wild bug fixes. However, it would be difficult to get $150 million invested on alpha software. It may have been beta for etherium, but it was definitely alpha of DAO.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Once you start handling money, you lose the "beta" cop-out. If they had succeeded in redefining what a business is and proving out the success of smart contracts, would they say, "but we're just in beta" or would they be trumpeting it as a success and a revolution?
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  That would be fine if they advertised it as such. There's no mention of "beta" or "pre-release" or anything like that on any of Ethereum's marketing materials, AFAICT.
dnautics 10y ago
Disclaimer: I don't really have much of a stake in ethereum, although I made some money off of it during the craziness last month (I cashed out when early warnings about the DAO hit hn, and bough back in when it was at the bottom, and cashed out again) > I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that. I think the situation is the opposite. After the DAO there were broad calls criticising the lack of leadership, criticism about decentralized/consensus decisionmaking, and comparisons with the broader economy and how the Fed can orchestrate a bailout (and why that's better - in the eyes of the critics). In a way, through consensus with this hard fork the Ethereum stakeholders squared the circle - orchestrating a bailout with majority assent (and if anyone didn't like it they were free to leave). I'm not going to pass judgement on whether or not that is a good precedent to set (or whether a turing complete blockchain - or the EVM implementation in particular - is a good idea in the long-term), but if anything the decisiveness of action should give more confidence in the short-term.
- zenogais 10y ago
  So the interesting thing here is the "majority assent" phrase. All the polls I saw included < 15% of Ethereum stakeholders / hashing power. Some included < 5%, but were taking by many (who already had a chosen outcome in mind) as definitive proof of community preference. Really this shows that a small group of people plus a core team already leaning in one direction are probably enough to fork the network.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    that's fine. Those figures just say that many people are ok with whatever. Ultimately: If you don't like it, then you can leave. And if you aren't paying attention, then, well, you obviously don't care enough about that asset.
    - zenogais 10y ago
      There we go, just wanted you to backpeddle on this "majority" thing.
DennisP 10y ago
The Foundation took no official position. Some of the lead developers supported the fork, some opposed it. The decision was made by the miners, by the exchanges (which decided to follow the miners), and indirectly by a public vote of ether holders. Vitalik expressed only a mild preference for the fork, and was careful to say that the opposition had good points and there would be no censorship of anyone. The fork code was implemented in all the major clients, some of which are independent of the Foundation. From what I've seen, none of the devs or community leaders had especially large DAO holdings, compared to their likely ETH stashes. Their economic incentive is heavily weighted towards keeping Ethereum healthy and supporting the price of ETH.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  supporting the fork in the official client is very much taking an official position.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Not implementing the fork would be an official no-fork position, enforced on everyone running the client. Implementing the fork gives users the ability to choose. The default was set pro-fork, but that was clearly the most popular option before the software was released. The real decision was made by the miners, and I think it'd be hard to argue that the miners weren't aware of the issue, or didn't have the technical chops to set the option however they liked.
twilightfog 10y ago
Exactly... and if you reverse the roles, the hypocrisy just becomes more clear, to quote Emin Gün Sirer: "Had the attacker lost money by mistake, I am sure the devs would have had no difficulty appropriating his funds and saying "this is what happens in the brave new world of programmatic money flows." http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao-hack/#what-s-a-hack-when-you-don-t-have-a-spec http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao...
- Jd 10y ago
  Emin supports some variant of a hard fork regardless.
patmcguire 10y ago
The code is still the contract. The code says that the majority of mining determines the state of the blockchain. That hasn't changed. The logic of "the code is the contract" is that whatever happens is in and of itself legal. You cannot break the law, you can only mold the law to conform to your current reality.
- Maro 10y ago
  Disclaimer: non-expert. I think that's mixing two things: the code that the miners run, and the code that is the digital contract. I think the idea behind digital contracts is that, once the parties commit to it, it should be set in stone (set in code), un-changeable, even by a majority of miners, irrespective of the fact that the algorithm used for distributed mining is majority based. In other words if a small set of parties do a digital contract (eg. the DAO people), then the whole point of the blockchain is that, once it's in the blockchain, it can't be undone---even if some people don't like it, change their minds, whatever. It assumes the miners just supply the mining power, but don't go in and conspire to remove specific blocks. This situation shows that in the case of Ethereum, a small set of people are able to influence a lot of mining nodes, and hence get a majority, and have no problem going in an changing specific things in the blockchain (by changing the source code of the mining software).
baby 10y ago
> Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum This basically answers your question. A few pointers: * you cannot do a hard fork alone, if no one follows you it own't work. You need the majority (to become the majority fork) * hard forking, soft forking, are always possibilities that can happen at any moment (same for bitcoin) * There was no reason not to fork at this point. Ethereum is at an early stage. Bitcoin had the same thing happened to it during its birth stage. * If you cannot have confidence in this system because you were planning to "steal", then wait until the system gets bigger so that not enough people get affected by your theft * If you cannot have confidence in this system because you were planning to truly write smart contracts or use them in a legit way. Then wait until the system gets bigger as well.
- arisAlexis 10y ago
  No reason not to fork? This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
  - baby 10y ago
    > This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about That statement came out of nowhere :D care to expand?
    - arisAlexis 10y ago
      Not sure why I nee to expand.Crypto is about immutability and decentralization. If you see no reason for that I see no reason to explain. the hard fork was for getting money back.
      - baby 10y ago
        > Crypto is about immutability and decentralization if crypto was about immutability, then we wouldn't have things like homomorphic encryption would we :)? Decentralization? A hard fork is something that only happens because of decentralization. If your system was centralized you would never have seen a hard fork.

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.
  - jarsin 10y ago
    Gatecoin got robbed of over 185k ETH and they asked if they could get those back when Vitalik first mentioned they were going to hardfork in the hours after the attack. They were obviously denied. It's my understanding they know what account holds most of there coins too. There have been numerous other small hacks on eth users as well. Unfortunately, this hardfork did nothing for those people.
    - npongratz 10y ago
      It would be fun to know how many Ethereum developers lost their ETH in the Gatecoin robbery versus how many stood to lose in the DAO exploit.
      - drostie 10y ago
        I mean, from what I understood it was more complicated than just pure profit-seeking. (Disclaimer: I'm not a user of Ethereum.) My understanding was that the DAO (and organizations like it) was the whole point of people signing up to use Ethereum, and the hard fork basically says "The DAO never existed, you're all getting your ether back" with an understanding of "now that you know all of the attendant risks of hacking, start your own autonomous organizations with a bit more prudence." It is not very realistic to expect further forks as every fork produces a new cryptocurrency; furthermore it is not very realistic to expect a mere 51% majority to sway the blockchain (as I understand it the change is code-level). If each decision only gets 80% approval then after 3 such decisions you have your community split across 4 cryptocurrencies: {20%, 16%, 13%, 10%, 41%} and you've lost over half of your users; furthermore if the power of a currency is proportional to the square of the users (as it likely to first-order has to do with how many ways they can interact with each other, which goes with the number of handshakes they can make), you've cut down your value proposition to only ~16% of what it was. It sounds like this might have gotten 90-99% adoption by the community in terms of hashpower, but some of this is doubtless amplified by miners who will go wherever the wind takes them. It reminds me of my environmental science teacher in high school. Between counting the bugs we caught at local streams, one day he taught my class about the Tragedy of the Commons. He said, "tomorrow, if you want to play a game to illustrate this, bring a quarter and we'll play it for real cash." Most of us brought quarters. "Okay, if you still want to play this game after I explain the rules, put your quarter in this jar and I'll give you a card. You're going to write on that card your name, and then either 'use' or 'leave': for whether you're going to use the common resource or leave it alone for a while. You have to keep your decision secret, if anyone else sees what you wrote then you're getting your quarter back and it's like you were not in the game at all. You can SAY anything you want to people, but nobody's allowed to see what you're DOING. After 5-10 minutes I'll call time, and you'll give the folded cards back to me. If everyone says Leave then I'll give everyone who participated two quarters. If one person says Use and everyone else says Leave then I'll give them the jar of quarters: and, no being mean to them, they won the jackpot fair and square. Or if two or more people say Use, then I win all of the quarters. Who still wants to play?" A lot of us put our quarters in, and I being a petulant teenager wrote Use (with the intention to give everyone back their quarters afterwards! I wasn't greedy, just a smartass) ... but while almost everyone else wrote Leave, this did not include one kid who didn't understand English so well and meant to write Leave but instead wrote Use (or else that was just what he told everyone afterwards). The teacher won all our quarters, but he returned them like a good sport and offered to let us play again, this time FOR REALS. This time I voted Leave, but multiple people voted Use just to somehow "punish" me, which was even more what the teacher was trying to teach: "if you can't guarantee that everyone else is going to leave it alone, hey, you might as well try to get in on this sweet sweet resource while it still exists, right? So that's why the tragedy of the commons happens and we're all pretty much doomed. I'm gonna win your quarters every time." He gave back the quarters anyway, of course, after making a big show of "No, the second time was FOR REALS, you all knew it, didn't you? Would you have paid ME back?!" It's probably just the feeling of a bunch of kids being like "that wasn't fair, give us back our money and let us try again!" from the first time we played the game, and the more sober discourse of the second match where we understood better that our money was on the line and we had to find a way together to steal our teacher's money.
- themgt 10y ago
  No, the problem is you've replaced code-is-contract with an insider-run Politburo who decides to put referenda up to a vote with their preferred choice set as default and propagandized to the community from the top-down. I have long thought anarchist digital currency is bound to fail because of the need for a political superstructure able to make some decisions. The problem is now you've thrown out 3000 years of political thought and replaced it with ... whatever the hell the process behind these decisions is now. What you would actually need to do this right is put real thought and effort into how to have an effective, impartial and ethical governing body managing a digital currency. Giving the primary stakeholders carte blanche to make these decisions is basically recreating a virtual version of "company scrip".
  - tankenmate 10y ago
    I think you might be misunderstanding authority. Authority doesn't come from lording it over people, or making the best decisions. Authority comes from submission; as long as someone submits to you you have authority over them, likewise anything you submit to has authority over you. The submissive person in the relationship has all the power; they are the one who gets to say "stop". In this case the various arguments were put forward by various people; this included rants, well researched documents, but most importantly code. In the end most people submitted to the code that was put out there by the main group. But still this submission is a choice. The main group survives by this submission, but it isn't their choice; this is government by consent. You may not consent to it, but plenty others have. So if you don't like it I suggest you follow Alan Kay's advice; "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." If you want to influence the situation go write better code; of course you need good ideas for that code, but you still need to ship code! Otherwise the cost of submission is too high for most people and they won't follow you.
    - drdeca 10y ago
      > Authority comes from submission; I don't think I quite agree with this, but I agree with something similar I suppose : Power comes from submission. (sorta) I believe that one can be under an authority which one does not choose to submit to. (relating more to how people should act than how they do act, compared to power) But, perhaps this is just using words differently without necessarily much disagreement about the actual things. By your comment I am reminded of a dialogue "How to quit smoking" on self-control, which argues that self-control is more due to obedience than it is to "willpower". This dialogue seems to make sense to me. (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13) Regarding your last paragraph: I don't know that I know how that last bit is applicable. In order to not have the fork happen, the difference would be people not running the fork code, or alternatively running some slightly different code that handles the fact that some people are running the fork but is otherwise basically unchanged. This code already exists. As such, I'm not sure what you are really saying by this paragraph, other than, basically "suck it up"?
- nzoschke 10y ago
  Agreed that this is a good thing. Strict dogma is bad and unsustainable. The core team has backed off from "the code is the construct" philosophy, both implicitly by executing this fork, and explicitly in other publications. It's a black mark on the trust record for Ethereum, but hard lessons learned are the best ways to grow. Folks that look at this as a black and white "Ethereum can no longer be trusted" are ironically applying strict dogma in the other direction. I am not making any calls about the value of Ethereum. Just that evolving philosophy and software systems is a very good and necessary thing.
- dandare 10y ago
  Democracy doesn't sucks less - it only sucks for less people.
- moefogs 10y ago
  This was a political and cultural question: is the contract the code? The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be." If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly indelible manner. "nope, they lost tens of millions and they ate it because the contract is the code, so we won't help you either." Instead, what the nerds did was say "hey, you know the one interesting part of Ethereum? yeah, forget it... because we decided that we value our short-term wealth over the creation of that system." And that's fine. It's fine that they decided they don't give a shit about contracts as code. It's fine that they took their ball and went home. But Ethereum is now dead. Not today mind you, but in the long run. Only a complete and total lunatic will ever trust Ethereum again, because there will be more forks in the future. The precedent is set. They won't all remain "clear cut". So the interesting question is: who's next? It's not ethereum anymore. But it's still an interesting problem space. And maybe there's a team that is actually interested in it.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a fork _always_ possible in a decentralized blockchain? And if so, wasn't the "the contract is whatever 50%+1 of the network decides it is" always part of the contract? Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here. Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.
- lajarre 10y ago
  > the 51% can take control of the chain This argument seems fallacious and off-the-point in this context. Isn't the goal of a contract to precisely bypass the 51% control thing (a distributed consensus rule, needed for mining), by defining its own explicit rules? > Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else More profoundly, isn't the essence of such systems to go beyond democracy, and allow for new governance paradigms?
ComodoHacker 10y ago
>developers are lacking in ethics From their point of view however, it was perhaps most ethical to try their best to save money of all other people who trusted in their system that failed.

ohnomrbill 10y ago

Yep - I don't see the draw for new investors now. We know they will rollback contracts that are financially damaging enough, except with ETH there is no legal recourse in the case of disputed transactions. From the outside looking in, it just seems like a generally worse traditional currency.

zanny 10y ago
It requires consensus in the chain to make such a fork. While you can argue against raw direct democracy of hash power like that, anyone who believes the state does not represent the will of the people should be strongly interested in something like Eth where the will of the majority is absolute.
- ohnomrbill 10y ago
  Agreed on the consensus; the nice thing about making decisions with a currency is that people can vote with their money. But I can buy other state-backed currencies today, some of which I trust to represent my interests. They have the benefit of an established legal system too, which Ethereum does not.
natrius 10y ago
Stop investing in cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is a platform that gives developers incredible power to facilitate social and economic coordination. It's not about providing a better currency.

cloudjacker 10y ago

The dao exploiter really should have followed through with the plan to pay miners $1,000,000 to mine their transactions toward exchanges. The legal argument was solid enough to also be purchaseable , so no anonimity required

ComodoHacker 10y ago
Maybe he really would if it were just 3-4 persons to negotiate with and 3-4 wallets to pay to.

api 10y ago

What's funny is that the message in Bitcoin's genesis block is about this. The idea of doing something better than current financial systems gained traction after the US Fed hard forked the dollar to fix the housing bubble crash. (The degree of manipulation in 2008 to reflate the banking system resembles a hard fork.) Money is a signaling mechanism. It carries information. If you invalidate mistakes, you keep the economic system from learning.

zanny 10y ago
Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again. The fact that didn't happen meant most people didn't want it to happen. If people did want a reset to compensate for the insecurity in the DAO it would have happened.
- rsync 10y ago
  "Except "learning" in Etherium's case would have been to abandon the currency due to its insecurity, probably fork the code, and just start over from block 0 again." Aren't you confusing Etherium with The Dao ? Yes, the dao needed to be abandoned due to its insecurity, but my understanding is that the Etherium base itself was not at fault.
  - jude- 10y ago
    Sure, the EVM may be fine, but the biggest flaws lie in the design of Solidity. Solidity makes it very easy to introduce reentrancy bugs like the one that led the DAO to be exploited. As long as Solidity remains the de facto smart contract programming language, I don't expect overall security of smart contracts to improve much.
  - zanny 10y ago
    My point is that if 60 million dollars were stolen in Eth without no recourse that would permanently tarnish the name Ether. Nobody would care that the DAO did not represent the whole project, the fact a huge portion of the economy was pushed and then destroyed would ruin the brand entirely.

skybrian 10y ago

One way to justify it might be to consider this a beta period. It is still early days for this new currency and perhaps when the system is more robust, they will be able to walk away. But the question is whether that day will ever come, or the currency will always need emergency overrides.

davidgerard 10y ago
"beta" isn't really an excuse for a clustercuddle involving $150 million.
- skybrian 10y ago
  Maybe it's not an excuse, but it seems like a reasonable explanation. The system clearly isn't ready to handle $150 million but some folks did it anyway.
- daveguy 10y ago
  Upvoted for the term clustercuddle. A couple of points: 1) It's probably not unusual to have $150 million in value tied up on the success or failure of a beta. 2) Calling this "beta" was a stretch. I'm of the opinion that the first "beta" should almost always still be called an "alpha" until in-the-wild bug fixes. However, it would be difficult to get $150 million invested on alpha software. It may have been beta for etherium, but it was definitely alpha of DAO.
bdcravens 10y ago
Once you start handling money, you lose the "beta" cop-out. If they had succeeded in redefining what a business is and proving out the success of smart contracts, would they say, "but we're just in beta" or would they be trumpeting it as a success and a revolution?
tlrobinson 10y ago
That would be fine if they advertised it as such. There's no mention of "beta" or "pre-release" or anything like that on any of Ethereum's marketing materials, AFAICT.

dnautics 10y ago

Disclaimer: I don't really have much of a stake in ethereum, although I made some money off of it during the craziness last month (I cashed out when early warnings about the DAO hit hn, and bough back in when it was at the bottom, and cashed out again) > I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that. I think the situation is the opposite. After the DAO there were broad calls criticising the lack of leadership, criticism about decentralized/consensus decisionmaking, and comparisons with the broader economy and how the Fed can orchestrate a bailout (and why that's better - in the eyes of the critics). In a way, through consensus with this hard fork the Ethereum stakeholders squared the circle - orchestrating a bailout with majority assent (and if anyone didn't like it they were free to leave). I'm not going to pass judgement on whether or not that is a good precedent to set (or whether a turing complete blockchain - or the EVM implementation in particular - is a good idea in the long-term), but if anything the decisiveness of action should give more confidence in the short-term.

zenogais 10y ago
So the interesting thing here is the "majority assent" phrase. All the polls I saw included < 15% of Ethereum stakeholders / hashing power. Some included < 5%, but were taking by many (who already had a chosen outcome in mind) as definitive proof of community preference. Really this shows that a small group of people plus a core team already leaning in one direction are probably enough to fork the network.
- dnautics 10y ago
  that's fine. Those figures just say that many people are ok with whatever. Ultimately: If you don't like it, then you can leave. And if you aren't paying attention, then, well, you obviously don't care enough about that asset.
  - zenogais 10y ago
    There we go, just wanted you to backpeddle on this "majority" thing.

DennisP 10y ago

The Foundation took no official position. Some of the lead developers supported the fork, some opposed it. The decision was made by the miners, by the exchanges (which decided to follow the miners), and indirectly by a public vote of ether holders. Vitalik expressed only a mild preference for the fork, and was careful to say that the opposition had good points and there would be no censorship of anyone. The fork code was implemented in all the major clients, some of which are independent of the Foundation. From what I've seen, none of the devs or community leaders had especially large DAO holdings, compared to their likely ETH stashes. Their economic incentive is heavily weighted towards keeping Ethereum healthy and supporting the price of ETH.

throwaway2048 10y ago
supporting the fork in the official client is very much taking an official position.
- DennisP 10y ago
  Not implementing the fork would be an official no-fork position, enforced on everyone running the client. Implementing the fork gives users the ability to choose. The default was set pro-fork, but that was clearly the most popular option before the software was released. The real decision was made by the miners, and I think it'd be hard to argue that the miners weren't aware of the issue, or didn't have the technical chops to set the option however they liked.

twilightfog 10y ago

Exactly... and if you reverse the roles, the hypocrisy just becomes more clear, to quote Emin Gün Sirer: "Had the attacker lost money by mistake, I am sure the devs would have had no difficulty appropriating his funds and saying "this is what happens in the brave new world of programmatic money flows." http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao-hack/#what-s-a-hack-when-you-don-t-have-a-spec http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao...

Jd 10y ago
Emin supports some variant of a hard fork regardless.

patmcguire 10y ago

The code is still the contract. The code says that the majority of mining determines the state of the blockchain. That hasn't changed. The logic of "the code is the contract" is that whatever happens is in and of itself legal. You cannot break the law, you can only mold the law to conform to your current reality.

Maro 10y ago
Disclaimer: non-expert. I think that's mixing two things: the code that the miners run, and the code that is the digital contract. I think the idea behind digital contracts is that, once the parties commit to it, it should be set in stone (set in code), un-changeable, even by a majority of miners, irrespective of the fact that the algorithm used for distributed mining is majority based. In other words if a small set of parties do a digital contract (eg. the DAO people), then the whole point of the blockchain is that, once it's in the blockchain, it can't be undone---even if some people don't like it, change their minds, whatever. It assumes the miners just supply the mining power, but don't go in and conspire to remove specific blocks. This situation shows that in the case of Ethereum, a small set of people are able to influence a lot of mining nodes, and hence get a majority, and have no problem going in an changing specific things in the blockchain (by changing the source code of the mining software).

baby 10y ago

> Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum This basically answers your question. A few pointers: * you cannot do a hard fork alone, if no one follows you it own't work. You need the majority (to become the majority fork) * hard forking, soft forking, are always possibilities that can happen at any moment (same for bitcoin) * There was no reason not to fork at this point. Ethereum is at an early stage. Bitcoin had the same thing happened to it during its birth stage. * If you cannot have confidence in this system because you were planning to "steal", then wait until the system gets bigger so that not enough people get affected by your theft * If you cannot have confidence in this system because you were planning to truly write smart contracts or use them in a legit way. Then wait until the system gets bigger as well.

arisAlexis 10y ago
No reason not to fork? This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about
- baby 10y ago
  > This is 100% against everything the crypto world is all about That statement came out of nowhere :D care to expand?
  - arisAlexis 10y ago
    Not sure why I nee to expand.Crypto is about immutability and decentralization. If you see no reason for that I see no reason to explain. the hard fork was for getting money back.
    - baby 10y ago
      > Crypto is about immutability and decentralization if crypto was about immutability, then we wouldn't have things like homomorphic encryption would we :)? Decentralization? A hard fork is something that only happens because of decentralization. If your system was centralized you would never have seen a hard fork.