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Without going into a lengthy discussion, I respectfully disagree with the author: adaptability is NOT more important than immutability. If you don't have immuta

by snitko 10y ago

Without going into a lengthy discussion, I respectfully disagree with the author: adaptability is NOT more important than immutability. If you don't have immutability, it means there is a potential to avoid consequences for your actions, which, in turn, means the evolution goes in the wrong direction. In fact, even in nature, you cannot evolve back: creatures evolve, try new things, if they don't stick - the branch dies off. What is being suggested by Ethereum is that you can try an evolution path, see it's not actually working and then rollback - it seems like a good idea at first because you can supposedly iterate fast. But I think Ethereum would lose confidence of investors either way: 1) if you hardfork, you set a precedent and now no one is sure what can be rolled back, when and for what reason 2) if you don't fork - then money is stolen. I seriously see no way out of this. It probably was a good decision to fork, because that at least allowed to save the face and the investment short-term.

drcode 10y ago
I view ethereum as a tool for automation: It lets us automate legal contracts, currencies, synthetic assets, etc. All forms of automation in our world go wrong sometimes: This is why we have car repair shops and appliance repair technicians, for instance. Saying that ethereum is only useful if the automation holds 100% of the time is like saying cars are useless if you have to occasionally take them to the shop for a tune-up. I agree that having a car that never needs a repair would be AWESOME but it would probably be unrealistic to try and build one. That said, ethereum is still extremely good for writing immutable computer code involving financial assets, it's just that there is now some philosophical (and practical) controversy as to whether it is 100% good or just 99.9999% good (depending on whether you view the code or the community as the ultimate arbiter of "good".)
- Tinyyy 10y ago
  You can already create legal contracts easily - sign on a piece of paper. This piece of paper is interpreted by a relatively robust legal system with a long history. How is Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners?
  - drcode 10y ago
    > Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners? Ethereum can guarantee that the sum total of the enforcement costs will always be a few pre-paid pennies (or fraction of a penny) and not the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands it costs to enforce a contract in a traditional legal system- Even if the community steps in, this will be the case. (This ignores the fact that ethereum has applications that go well beyond legal contracts)
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Ethereum cannot guarantee anything about enforcement costs if the real-life courts get involved. They have jurisdiction, and will definitely end up being involved if two parties to an Ethereum contract sue each other in real life. Ethereum does not exist in some kind of alternate reality outside of the legal system and contract law.
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
        Sure, but by the same token, if Ethereum effectively automates the 1) specification and 2) execution of contracts in the vast majority of cases, then the expected probability of ending up in a courtroom falls compared to doing transactions elsewhere. Unfortunately, it's still too early to say whether that will happen or not.
    - cel1ne 10y ago
      I always read this "few pre-paid pennies" statement, but that does not seem to include energy cost and carbon footprint of the miners doing proof-of-work?
- DSMan195276 10y ago
  I think you outlined a bigger issue: It is now clear that the community will ultimately decide what is right, and the 'community' is actually a much smaller subset of people using ethereum then you would hope. The original idea was that ethereum is 100% immutable to anybody - that no entity can go back and modify it. But as we see here, that's not true, because through a hard fork (that they are clearly willing to do) they can force things to change. The issue is that ethereum isn't the only option here - standard legal contracts exist, and are by far more common. The only real advantage ethereum offers is the immutability aspect - that no one can go back and argue the contract is wrong or invalid. But now, without carrying an immutability guarantee (Or you could say, now that it is clear that it never had such a guarantee), is there really much of an advantage to holding your contracts at the whim of the few controlling ethereum vs. the legal system? If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen? I can't imagine that it is out of the realm of possibility for such a situation to happen.
  - drcode 10y ago
    > If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen? If the rest of the community doesn't agree, then they will take they economic power away from the miners, change to a different mining/staking strategy, and leave the miners to mine an abandoned fork with a greatly decreased market cap.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > The issue is that ethereum isn't the only option here - standard legal contracts exist, and are by far more common. The only real advantage ethereum offers is the immutability aspect - that no one can go back and argue the contract is wrong or invalid. A court would not see it that way. Contract law would apply to these contracts if the parties to the contract sued each other. The legal system applies to all contracts, whether on Ethereum or not. Ethereum does not get to exist in its own reality outside of the law. Therefore, the immutability of an Ethereum contract won't matter very much, because a judge can still invalidate part of it, or all of it, if it contains unconscionable provisions, lack of disclosure, agreement to commit criminal acts, fraud or misrepresentation, simple mistakes, or any one of the many other reasons contracts can be rendered legally unenforceable. So, I don't see how immutability offers any advantage over standard legal contracts. It won't prevent the courts from determining that a contract is wrong or invalid.
- NhanH 10y ago
  I'm not surprised that the non-programmer segment of ETH supports the hard fork, but (imo) it should be very easy for those familiar with software development to see why it has to be absolute 100% or rather completely useless. Specifically, it's about turning real world requirements into code. Most of the legal contracts dispute isn't about blatant black and white issue, it's about whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the same wording is the intentional one. And it's obvious that we have enough issues with just turning requirements for CRUD websites into code, there is zero chance in hell there won't be "requirement bugs" in more complicated contracts. Unless you agree with the 100% "code === law", you will get every dispute from the old legal system, plus a whole new class of dispute from those aforementioned bugs. It does raise the question of whether all intentions of legal contract could be turned into code at all. But if that's a no then ETH is dead even before it's started. In other words, our legal system is already 99.9999% good, it's the last remaining 0.0001% that ETH seems to try to replace. And now it seems like it doesn't want to?
  - drcode 10y ago
    > In other words, our legal system is already 99.9999% good, it's the last remaining 0.0001% that ETH seems to try to replace. Again, ethereum is a tool for automation- Once we can have contracts that can be enforced using code instead of judges, we can create contracts that can work even if we can't afford more than a few pennies for enforcement. That sounds like 90% of potential contracts to me, not the 0.0001% you claim (but neither one of us has citations to know what the real number may be)
    - NhanH 10y ago
      Judges don't get involve in contract that are not in dispute (that includes enforcement), so functionally most contracts do not need costly enforcement either. There are a lot of real world contracts that already automate (bank deduction monthly from your account?). And there is one point where I thought about but didn't want to point out since it was a slight tangent: in ETH, you need someone to write the contract, then someone to vest it still, it's not free. Contract reuse? From what we've seen of CRUD reuse, it's kind of a pipe dream. People can read and copy a TOS, do you think they will trust a "contract TOS" and using it without hiring an "expert" ?
Kinnard 10y ago
I don't think it should be stated as universal. Some blockchains can have immutability as their absolute raison d'être, others may have it as an important goal, but may sacrifice a certain degree of immutability for other features. Whatever is going to happen, monoculture won't be the solution.

by snitko 10y ago

drcode 10y ago

I view ethereum as a tool for automation: It lets us automate legal contracts, currencies, synthetic assets, etc. All forms of automation in our world go wrong sometimes: This is why we have car repair shops and appliance repair technicians, for instance. Saying that ethereum is only useful if the automation holds 100% of the time is like saying cars are useless if you have to occasionally take them to the shop for a tune-up. I agree that having a car that never needs a repair would be AWESOME but it would probably be unrealistic to try and build one. That said, ethereum is still extremely good for writing immutable computer code involving financial assets, it's just that there is now some philosophical (and practical) controversy as to whether it is 100% good or just 99.9999% good (depending on whether you view the code or the community as the ultimate arbiter of "good".)

Tinyyy 10y ago
You can already create legal contracts easily - sign on a piece of paper. This piece of paper is interpreted by a relatively robust legal system with a long history. How is Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners?
- drcode 10y ago
  > Ethereum going to do better than that if a disagreement is settled not by inspecting the code, but by the opinion of an arbitrary community of miners? Ethereum can guarantee that the sum total of the enforcement costs will always be a few pre-paid pennies (or fraction of a penny) and not the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands it costs to enforce a contract in a traditional legal system- Even if the community steps in, this will be the case. (This ignores the fact that ethereum has applications that go well beyond legal contracts)
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Ethereum cannot guarantee anything about enforcement costs if the real-life courts get involved. They have jurisdiction, and will definitely end up being involved if two parties to an Ethereum contract sue each other in real life. Ethereum does not exist in some kind of alternate reality outside of the legal system and contract law.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      Sure, but by the same token, if Ethereum effectively automates the 1) specification and 2) execution of contracts in the vast majority of cases, then the expected probability of ending up in a courtroom falls compared to doing transactions elsewhere. Unfortunately, it's still too early to say whether that will happen or not.
  - cel1ne 10y ago
    I always read this "few pre-paid pennies" statement, but that does not seem to include energy cost and carbon footprint of the miners doing proof-of-work?
DSMan195276 10y ago
I think you outlined a bigger issue: It is now clear that the community will ultimately decide what is right, and the 'community' is actually a much smaller subset of people using ethereum then you would hope. The original idea was that ethereum is 100% immutable to anybody - that no entity can go back and modify it. But as we see here, that's not true, because through a hard fork (that they are clearly willing to do) they can force things to change. The issue is that ethereum isn't the only option here - standard legal contracts exist, and are by far more common. The only real advantage ethereum offers is the immutability aspect - that no one can go back and argue the contract is wrong or invalid. But now, without carrying an immutability guarantee (Or you could say, now that it is clear that it never had such a guarantee), is there really much of an advantage to holding your contracts at the whim of the few controlling ethereum vs. the legal system? If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen? I can't imagine that it is out of the realm of possibility for such a situation to happen.
- drcode 10y ago
  > If the miners lose a bunch of money due to X, and your contract happens to also be based on X, what do you expect to happen? If the rest of the community doesn't agree, then they will take they economic power away from the miners, change to a different mining/staking strategy, and leave the miners to mine an abandoned fork with a greatly decreased market cap.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > The issue is that ethereum isn't the only option here - standard legal contracts exist, and are by far more common. The only real advantage ethereum offers is the immutability aspect - that no one can go back and argue the contract is wrong or invalid. A court would not see it that way. Contract law would apply to these contracts if the parties to the contract sued each other. The legal system applies to all contracts, whether on Ethereum or not. Ethereum does not get to exist in its own reality outside of the law. Therefore, the immutability of an Ethereum contract won't matter very much, because a judge can still invalidate part of it, or all of it, if it contains unconscionable provisions, lack of disclosure, agreement to commit criminal acts, fraud or misrepresentation, simple mistakes, or any one of the many other reasons contracts can be rendered legally unenforceable. So, I don't see how immutability offers any advantage over standard legal contracts. It won't prevent the courts from determining that a contract is wrong or invalid.
NhanH 10y ago
I'm not surprised that the non-programmer segment of ETH supports the hard fork, but (imo) it should be very easy for those familiar with software development to see why it has to be absolute 100% or rather completely useless. Specifically, it's about turning real world requirements into code. Most of the legal contracts dispute isn't about blatant black and white issue, it's about whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the same wording is the intentional one. And it's obvious that we have enough issues with just turning requirements for CRUD websites into code, there is zero chance in hell there won't be "requirement bugs" in more complicated contracts. Unless you agree with the 100% "code === law", you will get every dispute from the old legal system, plus a whole new class of dispute from those aforementioned bugs. It does raise the question of whether all intentions of legal contract could be turned into code at all. But if that's a no then ETH is dead even before it's started. In other words, our legal system is already 99.9999% good, it's the last remaining 0.0001% that ETH seems to try to replace. And now it seems like it doesn't want to?
- drcode 10y ago
  > In other words, our legal system is already 99.9999% good, it's the last remaining 0.0001% that ETH seems to try to replace. Again, ethereum is a tool for automation- Once we can have contracts that can be enforced using code instead of judges, we can create contracts that can work even if we can't afford more than a few pennies for enforcement. That sounds like 90% of potential contracts to me, not the 0.0001% you claim (but neither one of us has citations to know what the real number may be)
  - NhanH 10y ago
    Judges don't get involve in contract that are not in dispute (that includes enforcement), so functionally most contracts do not need costly enforcement either. There are a lot of real world contracts that already automate (bank deduction monthly from your account?). And there is one point where I thought about but didn't want to point out since it was a slight tangent: in ETH, you need someone to write the contract, then someone to vest it still, it's not free. Contract reuse? From what we've seen of CRUD reuse, it's kind of a pipe dream. People can read and copy a TOS, do you think they will trust a "contract TOS" and using it without hiring an "expert" ?

Kinnard 10y ago

I don't think it should be stated as universal. Some blockchains can have immutability as their absolute raison d'être, others may have it as an important goal, but may sacrifice a certain degree of immutability for other features. Whatever is going to happen, monoculture won't be the solution.