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Nobody forced anything. A bunch of people agreed to use new rules with old data, which is why the new chain is in common use. Democracy in action. The same coul

Nobody forced anything. A bunch of people agreed to use new rules with old data, which is why the new chain is in common use. Democracy in action. The same could happen to literally any cryptocurrency you could think up, unless you can come up with a way of invalidating past state to a point where nobody can use it with a new set of rules - which is impossible unless you can somehow cryptographically encode the rules into the chain to a point where you can't access the data without adhering to the rules. (I think a zkSNARK could help with this if it's something that people actually desire.)

duozerk 10y ago
> Democracy in action For a weird definition of "democracy" where one person has 25% of the votes and the vote itself is badly/too quickly announced and organized to the point where almost no one votes. This doesn't even take into account the incredible amount of shitty actions or plain incompetence from the Ethereum Foundation guys at that time or since then. A quick (tongue in cheek and quite partial in its tone, but also pretty accurate) recap of the events leading to the HF: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereum-so-far-b85ba182bb35 https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereu...
- vertex-four 10y ago
  People could've kept using a continuation of the old chain without breaking anything. In fact, some did - see Ethereum Classic. People decided to use the forked Ethereum because they believed it was the correct choice, not because someone made them.
  - duozerk 10y ago
    Oh, absolutely. I'm still an interested watcher/user of ETC. And indeed, people "voted" in the end with their mining power (which is why the original chain hasn't disappeared). I just believe that their actions basically destroyed any future that ETH (and likely ETC too) might've had - it's dead; if the initial hard fork wasn't enough to remove all credibility in the project, the circus since then (subsequent forks, attacks, incredibly mismanaged communication...) certainly is.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Frankly, the DAO fiasco killed Ethereum for most people on its own, everything else was icing on the cake. This was Ethereum's first real "smart contract" that did something you couldn't really do without it, and it failed quickly and miserably, showing most reasonable people that they can't trust smart contracts to do what even their creators believe that they do. At least with a legal contract, the intent of the people agreeing on it matters.

duozerk 10y ago

> Democracy in action For a weird definition of "democracy" where one person has 25% of the votes and the vote itself is badly/too quickly announced and organized to the point where almost no one votes. This doesn't even take into account the incredible amount of shitty actions or plain incompetence from the Ethereum Foundation guys at that time or since then. A quick (tongue in cheek and quite partial in its tone, but also pretty accurate) recap of the events leading to the HF: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereum-so-far-b85ba182bb35 https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereu...

vertex-four 10y ago
People could've kept using a continuation of the old chain without breaking anything. In fact, some did - see Ethereum Classic. People decided to use the forked Ethereum because they believed it was the correct choice, not because someone made them.
- duozerk 10y ago
  Oh, absolutely. I'm still an interested watcher/user of ETC. And indeed, people "voted" in the end with their mining power (which is why the original chain hasn't disappeared). I just believe that their actions basically destroyed any future that ETH (and likely ETC too) might've had - it's dead; if the initial hard fork wasn't enough to remove all credibility in the project, the circus since then (subsequent forks, attacks, incredibly mismanaged communication...) certainly is.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Frankly, the DAO fiasco killed Ethereum for most people on its own, everything else was icing on the cake. This was Ethereum's first real "smart contract" that did something you couldn't really do without it, and it failed quickly and miserably, showing most reasonable people that they can't trust smart contracts to do what even their creators believe that they do. At least with a legal contract, the intent of the people agreeing on it matters.