5 ms·

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seco

> This time bomb has, however, functioned more like an alarm clock with a snooze button. In October 2017, when mining time had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, the Ethereum team reset the clock, delaying PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it? From the minute they decided to back out The DAO's mistakes, they proved how centralized Ethereum was - anyone who believed it was a truly decentralized network left at that point.

Iv 8y ago
And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.
- wpietri 8y ago
  But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
  - stanleydrew 8y ago
    Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)
    - wuliwong 8y ago
      My belief is that the recent corporate censorship by large internet companies has created a growing interest in decentralization by some non-technical people. I don't think it is a slam dunk but I do think that currently there is a much greater chance for decentralized applications to gain traction. That being said, I think this new crop of potential users could also buy into new companies that have a centralized architecture but simply market themselves as having an ethos of non-censorship.
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    There is none. It's dumb money and hype. Even if you slash ethereum's energy consumption hundred fold, how much more energy expensive is it than a paypal transaction? Still a factor of a hundred or a thousand? It's meaningless as a store of value, it's too volatile because there's no government backing it or mature monetary policy, and pretty much everyone will take a lawyer and the legal office over a 'smart contract'.
  - ascendantlogic 8y ago
    As with most things the concept of "decentralization" is shades of gray. While there is no central controlling entity in the Ethereum network, there are people behind it and using it and people tend to congregate into groups with power structures. If you want to force a transaction to be reverted you need to either create a cataclysmic event prior to the event you want changed, or you need to own billions of dollars in hardware and spend tens if not hundreds of millions on electricity currently to overpower the network via 51% attack.
  - Nursie 8y ago
    > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? HODL. Lambo. Moon! That's about it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Electronic tulip bulbs are much easier to manage.
  - jerguismi 8y ago
    > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? I don't think "decentralization" is a good term to define cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum. There are lot of properties in these systems. For example limited supply, untamperability of history, irreversable transactions, permissionless use etc. You can compare to older systems offering similar features and how well these systems work compared to them. Transaction capacity & speed is most often not the primary point of blockchain systems, somehow many seem to assume that. For example it is no possible to create truly irreversible transactions in centralized system, since centralized system is always prone to forceful intervention.
    - Nursie 8y ago
      Most people, most use cases, don't want irreversibility. Reversible transactions are a huge positive.
      - jerguismi 8y ago
        Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility, when you are sending you prefer reversibility...
        Nursie 8y ago
        > Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility I think that's a little simplistic. Without reversibility you're not going to receive as much. People are far less likely to trust smaller or newer merchants without these sorts of features. You probably also want your customers to be able to rectify mistakes, such as sending money to the wrong place. I guess we could say when you are receiving you want irreversibility if you're planning to rip off your customers or otherwise not fulfil your contract with them
        logfromblammo 8y ago
        With old money, reversibility is handled by return policies, merchant account charge-backs, liens, and civil lawsuits. If you hand a bearer instrument like a bank note to someone, that transaction is technically irreversible. They put it in their pocket, and you can't recover it without a physical assault. You have to trust them to provide the goods or services that you just paid for. Or you have to trust the justice system that it will allow you to (eventually) recover your payment if the other party reneged. These remedies are often not available with cryptocurrency. You may be unaware of the counterparty's physical location or true identity, and even if you did, they may be in a different legal jurisdiction altogether. You can't round up a posse to go get the money back. If you pay with a finance system account, you can dispute the charge with the payments processor, and your payment may be reversed by them, even after the cash balances have already been altered, by withholding payment from a future transaction through that processor. Criteria for reversal may vary between processors. If consumers trust the reversal policy of the processor, the merchants get more money, because consumers don't have to trust them or the formal justice system. They can get refunded now, and let the processor and the merchant argue over the details. This remedy is available to cryptocurrencies. While individual transactions are irreversible, it is possible to redirect future transactions through a trusted intermediary or a smart contract. Basically, everyone wants an escrow mechanism of some sort built in to the system, so that if a customer doesn't get the goods or services, the merchant doesn't get their money; and if a merchant doesn't get paid, the customer doesn't get goods or services. As long as the transactions are irreversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy. As long as transactions are trivially reversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy. Conveyance of money and delivery of goods or services are each half-trades. We don't like those half-trades. They're too much like gifts, in that there is too little ability to enforce reciprocity without a preexisting social link. If you conduct business in half-trades, you still have to trust, and people can still get ripped off. So far, cryptocurrencies only technologically validate the money-conveyance half-trade. What it needs is a way to validate the other half-trade, for goods or services, and bundle them both into an atomic whole-trade that either reverses or becomes permanent as a single unit. Trade chains would be nice, too, but atomic transactions are what people need to trust the system instead of trusting each other.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? Well, yes, that's the question, isn't it?
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    I think to most decentralization doesn't matter as an end to itself except to what may be crudely put "fans" of decentralization. If they can get music better and easier through torrents they'll do it. If they can get it better from iTunes or YouTube they'll do that.
  - Iv 8y ago
    Competition and bypassing de facto monopolies by big banks.
- pureagave 8y ago
  true. I think many more people cared about permission-less platforms with solid APIs than decentralization.
- codewiz 8y ago
  There could be another reason why most people decided to follow the DAO fork: perhaps it's simply because they agreed with the actions taken by the Ethereum developers to return the money to the shareholders instead of leaving it to the thief? Or do you believe that users would have followed the developers even if they forked the chain to pocket all the money themselves?
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I don't think there was a thief. Before the fork, the very point of Ethereum was that code is law and there is no need for human interpretation. The so-called thief merely noticed that the DAO code had a feature that allowed them to extract money from it, and they did.
    - baq 8y ago
      thus, the code has changed and with it the law. i don't see any problem here.
      - jki275 8y ago
        It was changed to fix the chain retroactively. That's the problem. If the ledger isn't immutable, it has no value as a ledger. The majority of the ETH world doesn't believe that, which is why people like Charles Hoskinson left it.
        jsutton 8y ago
        The whole point of the network is that it's owned and driven by the community. The community decided it was prudent to fork. It's not an issue with decentralization. The majority of the ETH world clearly does believe that, because ETH is where the vast majority of the community has stuck with.
        jki275 8y ago
        The majority of the community believed in the fork, that's what I meant if I wasn't clear. That belief is contra to the concept of an immutable decentralized ledger, which means ETH isn't canonically a cryptocurrency, an immutable ledger, or a decentralized ledger anymore. The upcoming (well, it's never going to happen) POS fork is going to centralize it further among the very small number of massive whales who control the ecosystem.
- healsjnr1 8y ago
  I think what is often lost in this debate is that the are levels of decentralisation. Federated networks, committee structures, even the current miner / node structure all have different levels of power concentrated in different amounts. However, in all cases the power is _less_ centralised than in most current applications and for some people that is enough. The other thing to note is that decentralisation isn't just about ideology. If we forget finance and focus on data, a blockchain solution may in the future provide the ability for open federated data that is provably correct and can operated on transactionally. Think flight availability: right now the majority of flight ticketing is controlled by Amadeus. A highly centralised, controlled and opaque service. Assuming _many_ technical problems were solved, a blockchain flight ticketing service could allow anyone to run a local node with real time availability that was guaranteed to be correct. Even if this was run be a federation of providers, it would be a better solution than the current one.
- tim333 8y ago
  Decentralisation is important if you want the currency to work in an unregulated manner and not get shut down by the government. The largest predecessor to bitcoin was e-gold >The e-gold system was launched online in 1996 and had grown to five million accounts by 2009, when transfers were suspended due to legal issues. The founder, Dr. Jackson, in July 08 - "pleaded guilty to "operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business" and "conspiracy to engage in money laundering" Bitcoin founded in Aug 08 was decentralised so the authorities couldn't easily shut it and the founder went anonymous to avoid the problems of Dr. Jackson. That's what the decentralisation is all about. It doesn't really matter that Bitcoin is effectively controlled by some Chinese miners or that Ethereum forks. It's about governments not being able to control them.
- splintercell 8y ago
  > And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization. Your argument is like how left-liberals claim that poor Americans vote against their own self-interest by voting for Republican. No, they aren't voting against their own interest, they are voting for it, you just don't get what that is and in your mental model that's the case. Specifically to your argument, can you pass an ideological Turing test of representing the opinion of people who supported the hard fork? In other words, sitting behind a computer, someone has to judge whether you are a true DAO hard fork supporter or not, and will they be able to correctly identify you. The fact is, all software is mutable. All software (including Bitcoin) can go for changes (irrespective of the nature of those changes, which could even be, "hand over the write access of bitcoin network to federal govt"). So what is decentralization then if literally any piece of software can be changed if enough number of people go for it?
ascendantlogic 8y ago
1. No one was forced to run the new client that backed out the DAO 2. The existing network with the stolen funds and the DAO lived on as Ethereum Classic There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network. It was entirely up to miners and people running nodes to decide which network they supported. Further the decision to back out the DAO hack was done via vote so that's another important part of decentralization called consensus.
- xorcist 8y ago
  > There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network Is the choice to run a less valuable network really a choice? Remember that the foundation people gave themselves most of the coins that will ever exist before the network was even started, even if a lot was sold long before there was a word for ICOs. Only ~ 20% or so of the supply will ever be mined. It is not economically rational to differ in consensus rules from the foundation.
  - dagaci 8y ago
    > Is the choice to run a less valuable network really a choice? Well yes it is, although people take Ethereum quite seriously the code-base led Vitalik has quite a distance to go before it completes the roadmap delivered some years ago. So it is fair for the foundation to patch hacks as well as provide other upgrades. It you want to continue to use the hackable version because you believe that code should never change and be immutable and never change then that is also a choice.
  - woah 8y ago
    What? Of course it’s a choice. And if the majority of people had made that choice, it would be the more valuable chain.
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      Yes. People literally voted with their wallets.

Iv 8y ago

And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization.

wpietri 8y ago
But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? One can build these things much, much more efficiently if centralization is fine. Financial exchanges have been doing that for years. E.g., if you look at the LMAX approach, they can hit TPS rates something like 1,000,000 times faster than common blockchains: https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
- stanleydrew 8y ago
  Decentralization matters to a few enthusiasts. Those enthusiasts include the developers of the technology. So the point of these technologies is decentralization, but the "users" of the technologies don't actually care and are hoping to speculate their way to lambo riches. (I put "users" in quotes since there are actually very few true "users", and I'm really just describing people who trade cryptos on exchanges.)
  - wuliwong 8y ago
    My belief is that the recent corporate censorship by large internet companies has created a growing interest in decentralization by some non-technical people. I don't think it is a slam dunk but I do think that currently there is a much greater chance for decentralized applications to gain traction. That being said, I think this new crop of potential users could also buy into new companies that have a centralized architecture but simply market themselves as having an ethos of non-censorship.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  There is none. It's dumb money and hype. Even if you slash ethereum's energy consumption hundred fold, how much more energy expensive is it than a paypal transaction? Still a factor of a hundred or a thousand? It's meaningless as a store of value, it's too volatile because there's no government backing it or mature monetary policy, and pretty much everyone will take a lawyer and the legal office over a 'smart contract'.
- ascendantlogic 8y ago
  As with most things the concept of "decentralization" is shades of gray. While there is no central controlling entity in the Ethereum network, there are people behind it and using it and people tend to congregate into groups with power structures. If you want to force a transaction to be reverted you need to either create a cataclysmic event prior to the event you want changed, or you need to own billions of dollars in hardware and spend tens if not hundreds of millions on electricity currently to overpower the network via 51% attack.
- Nursie 8y ago
  > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? HODL. Lambo. Moon! That's about it.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Electronic tulip bulbs are much easier to manage.
- jerguismi 8y ago
  > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? I don't think "decentralization" is a good term to define cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum. There are lot of properties in these systems. For example limited supply, untamperability of history, irreversable transactions, permissionless use etc. You can compare to older systems offering similar features and how well these systems work compared to them. Transaction capacity & speed is most often not the primary point of blockchain systems, somehow many seem to assume that. For example it is no possible to create truly irreversible transactions in centralized system, since centralized system is always prone to forceful intervention.
  - Nursie 8y ago
    Most people, most use cases, don't want irreversibility. Reversible transactions are a huge positive.
    - jerguismi 8y ago
      Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility, when you are sending you prefer reversibility...
      - Nursie 8y ago
        > Well I guess when you are receiving you want irreversibility I think that's a little simplistic. Without reversibility you're not going to receive as much. People are far less likely to trust smaller or newer merchants without these sorts of features. You probably also want your customers to be able to rectify mistakes, such as sending money to the wrong place. I guess we could say when you are receiving you want irreversibility if you're planning to rip off your customers or otherwise not fulfil your contract with them
        logfromblammo 8y ago
        With old money, reversibility is handled by return policies, merchant account charge-backs, liens, and civil lawsuits. If you hand a bearer instrument like a bank note to someone, that transaction is technically irreversible. They put it in their pocket, and you can't recover it without a physical assault. You have to trust them to provide the goods or services that you just paid for. Or you have to trust the justice system that it will allow you to (eventually) recover your payment if the other party reneged. These remedies are often not available with cryptocurrency. You may be unaware of the counterparty's physical location or true identity, and even if you did, they may be in a different legal jurisdiction altogether. You can't round up a posse to go get the money back. If you pay with a finance system account, you can dispute the charge with the payments processor, and your payment may be reversed by them, even after the cash balances have already been altered, by withholding payment from a future transaction through that processor. Criteria for reversal may vary between processors. If consumers trust the reversal policy of the processor, the merchants get more money, because consumers don't have to trust them or the formal justice system. They can get refunded now, and let the processor and the merchant argue over the details. This remedy is available to cryptocurrencies. While individual transactions are irreversible, it is possible to redirect future transactions through a trusted intermediary or a smart contract. Basically, everyone wants an escrow mechanism of some sort built in to the system, so that if a customer doesn't get the goods or services, the merchant doesn't get their money; and if a merchant doesn't get paid, the customer doesn't get goods or services. As long as the transactions are irreversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy. As long as transactions are trivially reversible, someone can get ripped off, and they have to go out-of-band for a remedy. Conveyance of money and delivery of goods or services are each half-trades. We don't like those half-trades. They're too much like gifts, in that there is too little ability to enforce reciprocity without a preexisting social link. If you conduct business in half-trades, you still have to trust, and people can still get ripped off. So far, cryptocurrencies only technologically validate the money-conveyance half-trade. What it needs is a way to validate the other half-trade, for goods or services, and bundle them both into an atomic whole-trade that either reverses or becomes permanent as a single unit. Trade chains would be nice, too, but atomic transactions are what people need to trust the system instead of trusting each other.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  > But if decentralization doesn't matter, then what's the point of these technologies? Well, yes, that's the question, isn't it?
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I think to most decentralization doesn't matter as an end to itself except to what may be crudely put "fans" of decentralization. If they can get music better and easier through torrents they'll do it. If they can get it better from iTunes or YouTube they'll do that.
- Iv 8y ago
  Competition and bypassing de facto monopolies by big banks.
pureagave 8y ago
true. I think many more people cared about permission-less platforms with solid APIs than decentralization.
codewiz 8y ago
There could be another reason why most people decided to follow the DAO fork: perhaps it's simply because they agreed with the actions taken by the Ethereum developers to return the money to the shareholders instead of leaving it to the thief? Or do you believe that users would have followed the developers even if they forked the chain to pocket all the money themselves?
- adrianN 8y ago
  I don't think there was a thief. Before the fork, the very point of Ethereum was that code is law and there is no need for human interpretation. The so-called thief merely noticed that the DAO code had a feature that allowed them to extract money from it, and they did.
  - baq 8y ago
    thus, the code has changed and with it the law. i don't see any problem here.
    - jki275 8y ago
      It was changed to fix the chain retroactively. That's the problem. If the ledger isn't immutable, it has no value as a ledger. The majority of the ETH world doesn't believe that, which is why people like Charles Hoskinson left it.
      - jsutton 8y ago
        The whole point of the network is that it's owned and driven by the community. The community decided it was prudent to fork. It's not an issue with decentralization. The majority of the ETH world clearly does believe that, because ETH is where the vast majority of the community has stuck with.
        jki275 8y ago
        The majority of the community believed in the fork, that's what I meant if I wasn't clear. That belief is contra to the concept of an immutable decentralized ledger, which means ETH isn't canonically a cryptocurrency, an immutable ledger, or a decentralized ledger anymore. The upcoming (well, it's never going to happen) POS fork is going to centralize it further among the very small number of massive whales who control the ecosystem.
healsjnr1 8y ago
I think what is often lost in this debate is that the are levels of decentralisation. Federated networks, committee structures, even the current miner / node structure all have different levels of power concentrated in different amounts. However, in all cases the power is _less_ centralised than in most current applications and for some people that is enough. The other thing to note is that decentralisation isn't just about ideology. If we forget finance and focus on data, a blockchain solution may in the future provide the ability for open federated data that is provably correct and can operated on transactionally. Think flight availability: right now the majority of flight ticketing is controlled by Amadeus. A highly centralised, controlled and opaque service. Assuming _many_ technical problems were solved, a blockchain flight ticketing service could allow anyone to run a local node with real time availability that was guaranteed to be correct. Even if this was run be a federation of providers, it would be a better solution than the current one.
tim333 8y ago
Decentralisation is important if you want the currency to work in an unregulated manner and not get shut down by the government. The largest predecessor to bitcoin was e-gold >The e-gold system was launched online in 1996 and had grown to five million accounts by 2009, when transfers were suspended due to legal issues. The founder, Dr. Jackson, in July 08 - "pleaded guilty to "operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business" and "conspiracy to engage in money laundering" Bitcoin founded in Aug 08 was decentralised so the authorities couldn't easily shut it and the founder went anonymous to avoid the problems of Dr. Jackson. That's what the decentralisation is all about. It doesn't really matter that Bitcoin is effectively controlled by some Chinese miners or that Ethereum forks. It's about governments not being able to control them.
splintercell 8y ago
> And many crypto-anarchists discovered that day that most people did not care about decentralization. Your argument is like how left-liberals claim that poor Americans vote against their own self-interest by voting for Republican. No, they aren't voting against their own interest, they are voting for it, you just don't get what that is and in your mental model that's the case. Specifically to your argument, can you pass an ideological Turing test of representing the opinion of people who supported the hard fork? In other words, sitting behind a computer, someone has to judge whether you are a true DAO hard fork supporter or not, and will they be able to correctly identify you. The fact is, all software is mutable. All software (including Bitcoin) can go for changes (irrespective of the nature of those changes, which could even be, "hand over the write access of bitcoin network to federal govt"). So what is decentralization then if literally any piece of software can be changed if enough number of people go for it?

ascendantlogic 8y ago

1. No one was forced to run the new client that backed out the DAO 2. The existing network with the stolen funds and the DAO lived on as Ethereum Classic There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network. It was entirely up to miners and people running nodes to decide which network they supported. Further the decision to back out the DAO hack was done via vote so that's another important part of decentralization called consensus.

xorcist 8y ago
> There was no central entity mandating that everyone was required to run the "new" network Is the choice to run a less valuable network really a choice? Remember that the foundation people gave themselves most of the coins that will ever exist before the network was even started, even if a lot was sold long before there was a word for ICOs. Only ~ 20% or so of the supply will ever be mined. It is not economically rational to differ in consensus rules from the foundation.
- dagaci 8y ago
  > Is the choice to run a less valuable network really a choice? Well yes it is, although people take Ethereum quite seriously the code-base led Vitalik has quite a distance to go before it completes the roadmap delivered some years ago. So it is fair for the foundation to patch hacks as well as provide other upgrades. It you want to continue to use the hackable version because you believe that code should never change and be immutable and never change then that is also a choice.
- woah 8y ago
  What? Of course it’s a choice. And if the majority of people had made that choice, it would be the more valuable chain.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Yes. People literally voted with their wallets.