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Code hasn’t been law for “defi” since Ethereum reverted the DAO hack in 2016. Then the DAO went defunct later that year anyway!

by wyager 5y ago

bhaak 5y ago
Not “anyway“ but because of the hack. TheDAO was done for after it was hacked. The code was too bad and trust was gone as well. That was clear pretty soon. The only thing to decide was if they would let the hacker get away with at the time 15% of the whole supply. If they did that it would have endangered the decentralization of the eventual proof-of-stake switch.
- wyager 5y ago
  > it would have endangered the decentralization So they decided to kill it outright?
  - bhaak 5y ago
    You have to specify what kind of decentralization you're getting at. The distribution of ETH was less decentralized before the hard fork than afterwards. 15% of the whole supply in one hand is quite a concentration in the distribution.
- canjobear 5y ago
  > it would have endangered the decentralization So the solution to save "decentralization" was for a centralized cabal to literally rewrite history?
  - bhaak 5y ago
    Technically, there was no rewriting of history. Just a single (but very large) transaction was added to the consensus rules that (IIRC) replaced the TheDAO smart contract code. Given that this incident resulted in the Ethereum/Ethereum Classic split, the "centralized cabal" was not very effective. The community voted with their feet and many went to Ethereum Classic.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yokem55 5y ago
Because 'code is law' is a terrible expression to begin with. Law can be expressed with code, but law is ultimately a construct of human consensus. In the case of the DAO hack, the human consensus forked away from the bugs in the code.
- wyager 5y ago
  There are many laws that have nothing to do with human consensus. Physical laws, for example.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    Physical laws and legal laws don't have anything in common except the name.
    - wyager 5y ago
      They have a lot in common. They are admissibility conditions under a rule system. Same thing with laws encoded in a computer system. Your argument is circular; “code isn’t law because I’ve redefined the word ‘law’ to explicitly preclude it”.
grandphuba 5y ago
Code seems to be the law, hence why they're resorting to begging and blackmailing
- miracle2k 5y ago
  Underrated comment. Very wise.
suikadayo 5y ago
Ethereum the project never talked about it as “code is law” anyway. It was the company that created The DAO that memed it into existence.

Code hasn’t been law for “defi” since Ethereum reverted the DAO hack in 2016. Then the DAO went defunct later that year anyway!

by wyager 5y ago

Code hasn’t been law for “defi” since Ethereum reverted the DAO hack in 2016. Then the DAO went defunct later that year anyway!

bhaak 5y ago

Not “anyway“ but because of the hack. TheDAO was done for after it was hacked. The code was too bad and trust was gone as well. That was clear pretty soon. The only thing to decide was if they would let the hacker get away with at the time 15% of the whole supply. If they did that it would have endangered the decentralization of the eventual proof-of-stake switch.

wyager 5y ago
> it would have endangered the decentralization So they decided to kill it outright?
- bhaak 5y ago
  You have to specify what kind of decentralization you're getting at. The distribution of ETH was less decentralized before the hard fork than afterwards. 15% of the whole supply in one hand is quite a concentration in the distribution.
canjobear 5y ago
> it would have endangered the decentralization So the solution to save "decentralization" was for a centralized cabal to literally rewrite history?
- bhaak 5y ago
  Technically, there was no rewriting of history. Just a single (but very large) transaction was added to the consensus rules that (IIRC) replaced the TheDAO smart contract code. Given that this incident resulted in the Ethereum/Ethereum Classic split, the "centralized cabal" was not very effective. The community voted with their feet and many went to Ethereum Classic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yokem55 5y ago

Because 'code is law' is a terrible expression to begin with. Law can be expressed with code, but law is ultimately a construct of human consensus. In the case of the DAO hack, the human consensus forked away from the bugs in the code.

wyager 5y ago
There are many laws that have nothing to do with human consensus. Physical laws, for example.
- canjobear 5y ago
  Physical laws and legal laws don't have anything in common except the name.
  - wyager 5y ago
    They have a lot in common. They are admissibility conditions under a rule system. Same thing with laws encoded in a computer system. Your argument is circular; “code isn’t law because I’ve redefined the word ‘law’ to explicitly preclude it”.

grandphuba 5y ago

Code seems to be the law, hence why they're resorting to begging and blackmailing

miracle2k 5y ago
Underrated comment. Very wise.

suikadayo 5y ago

Ethereum the project never talked about it as “code is law” anyway. It was the company that created The DAO that memed it into existence.