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And why is this a problem? Sure, they can change it arbitrarily to their benefit, but they only benefit if the value of their holdings is high. If they do somet

by darawk 8y ago

And why is this a problem? Sure, they can change it arbitrarily to their benefit, but they only benefit if the value of their holdings is high. If they do something that people don't like, that value will fall. So they are strongly constrained by behaving in such a way that they do not make the users of Ethereum unhappy.

nivexous 8y ago
Network effects are too powerful. If they’re smart, they’ll make small changes over a long time, only ever upsetting a minority at once, and so the users stay. That’s Facebook to me, other things to other people.
bigiain 8y ago
One only needs to look at modern democratic politics to have _serious serious_ doubts about that argument... It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...
- darawk 8y ago
  Except that in this case, if you think you have better ideas, you can code up your own fork, and try to drum up support for it. The open source ecosystem works far better than the political system, I find.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Like now, you can drum up support for your own new party.
    - darawk 8y ago
      Yes, but in the case of the US government at least, there are structural reasons why the two party system is a stable equilibrium. Those structural reasons do not exist for cryptocurrencies. The most important of which is that there can be only one president of the US government, only so many senators, judges, etc... There can be infinitely many concurrently competing forks of Ethereum. You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.
      - jacobush 8y ago
        Half the point of a cryptocurrency is the network effect - so I don't see how your argument holds, at all. It is not clear at all that a small political experiment will scale to a super power. It is equally unclear that a small crypto currency experiment will scale. This is without even touching on how easy, or difficult to it is rally support for a new system. Quite difficult, I'd say.
        darawk 8y ago
        > Half the point of a cryptocurrency is the network effect - so I don't see how your argument holds, at all. It holds because you can demonstrate its utility on a small network.

by darawk 8y ago

nivexous 8y ago

Network effects are too powerful. If they’re smart, they’ll make small changes over a long time, only ever upsetting a minority at once, and so the users stay. That’s Facebook to me, other things to other people.

bigiain 8y ago

One only needs to look at modern democratic politics to have _serious serious_ doubts about that argument... It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...

darawk 8y ago
Except that in this case, if you think you have better ideas, you can code up your own fork, and try to drum up support for it. The open source ecosystem works far better than the political system, I find.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Like now, you can drum up support for your own new party.
  - darawk 8y ago
    Yes, but in the case of the US government at least, there are structural reasons why the two party system is a stable equilibrium. Those structural reasons do not exist for cryptocurrencies. The most important of which is that there can be only one president of the US government, only so many senators, judges, etc... There can be infinitely many concurrently competing forks of Ethereum. You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      Half the point of a cryptocurrency is the network effect - so I don't see how your argument holds, at all. It is not clear at all that a small political experiment will scale to a super power. It is equally unclear that a small crypto currency experiment will scale. This is without even touching on how easy, or difficult to it is rally support for a new system. Quite difficult, I'd say.
      - darawk 8y ago
        > Half the point of a cryptocurrency is the network effect - so I don't see how your argument holds, at all. It holds because you can demonstrate its utility on a small network.