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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 falli

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
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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?

deleted 10y ago

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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?