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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 i
by 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 agoDisclaimer: 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).