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Like I said in another comment, there was no bug in Ethereum, there was a loophole in the DAO contract script. In my mind, this is somewhat akin to creating a n

Like I said in another comment, there was no bug in Ethereum, there was a loophole in the DAO contract script. In my mind, this is somewhat akin to creating a new currency, and then when a major bank trading in/holding that currency gets robbed due to lax security, the bankers decide that everyone needs to round all the currency up and rewind time and pretend like that never happened as a solution. Who's to say that won't happen again? I know that the DAO is instrumental to the early success of Ethereum, but what if some other major third-party is attacked in a similar way in the future? Are we just going to hard-fork every time something like this happens? What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Will undesired election results cause hard-forks by the dissenting party? It just seems like a slippery slope to me, with no solution other than "well let's hard fork it now and reserve the right to hard fork it again in the future". It also concerned me that it sure seemed like nearly everyone who was in favor of the hard fork had invested in the DAO and nearly everyone who was against it had not.

robomc 10y ago
It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.
- laughingman2 10y ago
  Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-an...
  - baobabKoodaa 10y ago
    I stopped reading this at the point where the author referenced DAO as "Vitalik Buterin's corporation".
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Surely if you're able to undermine the trustless nature of them, they weren't trustless in the first place - i.e. you're merely trusting a possibly larger group of people to fail to come to an agreement on changing the protocol.
- splintercell 10y ago
  If a rogue journalist gets "Donald Trump is great" article published in NYT, bypassing the Editorial board, and 95% of the audience and Editorial board leaves and subscribes to a 'New New York Times' paper started by the same editorial team, has it undermined 'Free Speech'? Has it undermined their motto "All the news that's fit to print"? Keep in mind, the old NYT still exists with 5% of original capacity.
rabbyte 10y ago
forks are part of the protocol but the vast majority of them are tossed away due to the miner incentives to stick with the most popular chain. a hard fork happens when there's either a widespread bug that conflicts with older/other clients -OR- when there's a consensus failure in the population using the chain. in The DAO's case, there was a consensus failure in the population but the majority decided to go along with a recovery. There were good reasons to go either way but most people decided this was an experiment, it's early stage, and a move to PoS would be more difficult with a wealthy attacker. I invested but did not want to fork because I was willing to take on the risks. I lost out but I still stick with the main chain because what matters is where we're going with this not where we are. It was a valuable lesson for the community, devs have heavily stepped up investment in security and stability, I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. still, if you look at the effects it's pretty interesting. You now have ETC and ETH and the market caps for each have waved to reflect the interest in the two competing ideologies. this means blockchains resolve failure through replication and the social effects that happen after can retroactively decide who the winner is or, as it is in this case, you now have two compatible technologies going different directions. ETC is staying PoW, ETH is moving to PoS, both have different governance attitudes and the split has been mostly amicable. not too bad. edit- I should note this is also true of Bitcoin. the only reason it hasn't split is because its miner and user culture strictly adhere to immutability. if the population decided immutability didn't matter, it wouldn't. there are points of resistance to push back on the way people are but ultimately these things don't run themselves. they depend heavily on incentives.
- Aaron1011 10y ago
  > I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. That's one my my main concerns - the hard fork has set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Etherium has shown that it's willing to jettison the idea of 'code as contract' whenever the code ends up doing something 'bad'. In the case of theDAO, 'bad' meant anything from "people losing a lot of money" to "we found a 'bug' in an experiment that still isn't ready".
  - 10y ago
cel1ne 10y ago
> What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Not meaning to be snarky, but does anyone seriously believe that? Sometimes I do think software-engineers should go and try to understand processes of non-techies a bit more.
- AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
  Yep we seriously believe it. It's no more crazy than using crypto for actual money.
  - cel1ne 10y ago
    It is not crazy. I'm fairly certain though, it won't reach the adoption you imagine. Why would a nation ever adopt anything like this? Can you give me a scenario?
vidarh 10y ago
Consider it a light preview of the chaos is to come when courts get involved and make rulings about required transfers of assets and decide to hold people in contempt when they claim they technically can't transfer them. The inability to undo financial transactions based on ownership claims instead of hard currency flies in the face of centuries of expectations of modern society. Evidence of past ability to undo transactions via hard-forks will create "interesting" legal conundrums for anyone trying to claim to a court it can't be done.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  In practice, courts will say "pay the expected value of replacing the loss in USD", as they've always done for transactions that can't be undone. Permanent transactions are not a new thing to the legal system - if, for example, you sell a one-off art piece to someone else, then they sell it to someone else, and a dispute arises between the first two actors, the solution could not be to return the art piece.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    For monetary transactions that's fine. But they are not the only type of smart contracts. Consider the people trying to e.g. bootstrap systems for using the blockchain as a share ledger for a company for example. There the court will just say "X is the owner of those shares. Ensure the record reflects that." If the system they have chosen for the ledger can't let them rollback a transfer because of a bug, that is the company's problem. There are a lot of potential circumstances where people will need to find human workarounds for the supposed immutable nature of these blockchains because courts will simply say "this is how it is; make it happen". The above example is "simple": The company can worst case just pass a board resolution to replace the ledger and/or reissue it. But it is a demonstration that the immutability of the ledger will often be irrelevant, in the face of a court that says "this is the truth now".

robomc 10y ago

It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.

laughingman2 10y ago
Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-an...
- baobabKoodaa 10y ago
  I stopped reading this at the point where the author referenced DAO as "Vitalik Buterin's corporation".
vertex-four 10y ago
Surely if you're able to undermine the trustless nature of them, they weren't trustless in the first place - i.e. you're merely trusting a possibly larger group of people to fail to come to an agreement on changing the protocol.
splintercell 10y ago
If a rogue journalist gets "Donald Trump is great" article published in NYT, bypassing the Editorial board, and 95% of the audience and Editorial board leaves and subscribes to a 'New New York Times' paper started by the same editorial team, has it undermined 'Free Speech'? Has it undermined their motto "All the news that's fit to print"? Keep in mind, the old NYT still exists with 5% of original capacity.

rabbyte 10y ago

forks are part of the protocol but the vast majority of them are tossed away due to the miner incentives to stick with the most popular chain. a hard fork happens when there's either a widespread bug that conflicts with older/other clients -OR- when there's a consensus failure in the population using the chain. in The DAO's case, there was a consensus failure in the population but the majority decided to go along with a recovery. There were good reasons to go either way but most people decided this was an experiment, it's early stage, and a move to PoS would be more difficult with a wealthy attacker. I invested but did not want to fork because I was willing to take on the risks. I lost out but I still stick with the main chain because what matters is where we're going with this not where we are. It was a valuable lesson for the community, devs have heavily stepped up investment in security and stability, I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. still, if you look at the effects it's pretty interesting. You now have ETC and ETH and the market caps for each have waved to reflect the interest in the two competing ideologies. this means blockchains resolve failure through replication and the social effects that happen after can retroactively decide who the winner is or, as it is in this case, you now have two compatible technologies going different directions. ETC is staying PoW, ETH is moving to PoS, both have different governance attitudes and the split has been mostly amicable. not too bad. edit- I should note this is also true of Bitcoin. the only reason it hasn't split is because its miner and user culture strictly adhere to immutability. if the population decided immutability didn't matter, it wouldn't. there are points of resistance to push back on the way people are but ultimately these things don't run themselves. they depend heavily on incentives.

Aaron1011 10y ago
> I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. That's one my my main concerns - the hard fork has set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Etherium has shown that it's willing to jettison the idea of 'code as contract' whenever the code ends up doing something 'bad'. In the case of theDAO, 'bad' meant anything from "people losing a lot of money" to "we found a 'bug' in an experiment that still isn't ready".
- 10y ago

cel1ne 10y ago

> What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Not meaning to be snarky, but does anyone seriously believe that? Sometimes I do think software-engineers should go and try to understand processes of non-techies a bit more.

AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
Yep we seriously believe it. It's no more crazy than using crypto for actual money.
- cel1ne 10y ago
  It is not crazy. I'm fairly certain though, it won't reach the adoption you imagine. Why would a nation ever adopt anything like this? Can you give me a scenario?

vidarh 10y ago

Consider it a light preview of the chaos is to come when courts get involved and make rulings about required transfers of assets and decide to hold people in contempt when they claim they technically can't transfer them. The inability to undo financial transactions based on ownership claims instead of hard currency flies in the face of centuries of expectations of modern society. Evidence of past ability to undo transactions via hard-forks will create "interesting" legal conundrums for anyone trying to claim to a court it can't be done.

vertex-four 10y ago
In practice, courts will say "pay the expected value of replacing the loss in USD", as they've always done for transactions that can't be undone. Permanent transactions are not a new thing to the legal system - if, for example, you sell a one-off art piece to someone else, then they sell it to someone else, and a dispute arises between the first two actors, the solution could not be to return the art piece.
- vidarh 10y ago
  For monetary transactions that's fine. But they are not the only type of smart contracts. Consider the people trying to e.g. bootstrap systems for using the blockchain as a share ledger for a company for example. There the court will just say "X is the owner of those shares. Ensure the record reflects that." If the system they have chosen for the ledger can't let them rollback a transfer because of a bug, that is the company's problem. There are a lot of potential circumstances where people will need to find human workarounds for the supposed immutable nature of these blockchains because courts will simply say "this is how it is; make it happen". The above example is "simple": The company can worst case just pass a board resolution to replace the ledger and/or reissue it. But it is a demonstration that the immutability of the ledger will often be irrelevant, in the face of a court that says "this is the truth now".