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How exactly should I go about convincing 51% of the community to reverse my mistake? Has this ever happened in the history of cryptocurrency?

gruez 5y ago
Obvious caveat is that it only works if you're Too Big to Fail™.
brian_cloutier 5y ago
> Has this ever happened in the history of cryptocurrency? You're replying to a comment which mentions that yes, in fact, this has happened. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao However, it is unlikely that this will ever happen again. The coordination costs behind pulling off this kind of fork are massive. It's difficult to imagine today's more decentralized community could ever agree to do such a thing. As an example, Parity later lost an incredibly large amount of other people's money and the community decided not to roll that particular mistake back: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md
- thebean11 5y ago
  If the bug is bad enough (for example, breaking the VM in a way where even a bug-free smart contract becomes vulnerable) Ethereum will fork again. I agree on how hard it would be to coordinate it, so the issue would need to be existential for Ethereum for everyone to agree.
  - brian_cloutier 5y ago
    If it's a bug and everybody agrees it's a bug then pushing a fix is very easy and uncontroversial. e.g. two months ago the Geth team (and other community members) were able to change EVM behavior without even telling people what the change was. They simply said the EVM does something very unexpected ("there's an EVM vulnerability") and if we all hard fork (immediately update your Geth node) then the EVM will not do anything unexpected. here's the release: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.10.8 https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.10.8
hudon 5y ago
Yes. Satoshi did it in 2010 [0], core devs did it in 2013 [1]. Most of the "community" are just sheep. They will turn on a dime and follow the shepherds wherever they go. So you don't have to convince so many individuals to really convince the whole flock. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
- chitowneats 5y ago
  "This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed" Provable bugs in the system are not the same as accidentally exposing one's keys. Let's say I bought a used motorcycle from someone with BTC. Then I spam the community claiming the individual I bought from had in fact used malware to access my machine and stole the coin that way. The community to my knowledge has never reversed such a loss, nor should they be responsible for doing so.

gruez 5y ago

Obvious caveat is that it only works if you're Too Big to Fail™.

brian_cloutier 5y ago

> Has this ever happened in the history of cryptocurrency? You're replying to a comment which mentions that yes, in fact, this has happened. https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao However, it is unlikely that this will ever happen again. The coordination costs behind pulling off this kind of fork are massive. It's difficult to imagine today's more decentralized community could ever agree to do such a thing. As an example, Parity later lost an incredibly large amount of other people's money and the community decided not to roll that particular mistake back: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md

thebean11 5y ago
If the bug is bad enough (for example, breaking the VM in a way where even a bug-free smart contract becomes vulnerable) Ethereum will fork again. I agree on how hard it would be to coordinate it, so the issue would need to be existential for Ethereum for everyone to agree.
- brian_cloutier 5y ago
  If it's a bug and everybody agrees it's a bug then pushing a fix is very easy and uncontroversial. e.g. two months ago the Geth team (and other community members) were able to change EVM behavior without even telling people what the change was. They simply said the EVM does something very unexpected ("there's an EVM vulnerability") and if we all hard fork (immediately update your Geth node) then the EVM will not do anything unexpected. here's the release: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.10.8 https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.10.8

hudon 5y ago

Yes. Satoshi did it in 2010 [0], core devs did it in 2013 [1]. Most of the "community" are just sheep. They will turn on a dime and follow the shepherds wherever they go. So you don't have to convince so many individuals to really convince the whole flock. [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident [1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...

chitowneats 5y ago
"This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed" Provable bugs in the system are not the same as accidentally exposing one's keys. Let's say I bought a used motorcycle from someone with BTC. Then I spam the community claiming the individual I bought from had in fact used malware to access my machine and stole the coin that way. The community to my knowledge has never reversed such a loss, nor should they be responsible for doing so.