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The points on immutability are incorrect. When Ethereum was rolled back to reverse the 2016 DAO hack the data was not lost, it continues on the Eth Classic chai

The points on immutability are incorrect. When Ethereum was rolled back to reverse the 2016 DAO hack the data was not lost, it continues on the Eth Classic chain - it is still immutable. That chain is no where near as valuable today - that's true of most forks, one wins and the other loses. For most Ethereum users, and for the Polkadot users for which a similar fork happened recently, the early reversion to remedy loss caused by an exploit is considered a feature, not a bug and it was the community that decided which fork would win. There has been much more money lost to similar exploits in various contracts since the infamous DAO hack, and the chain was not rolled back - if it ever was it would likely be a losing fork unless the community of users agreed on its value. For Ethereum specifically this is more problematic as its full nodes are expensive to run and don't have much say compared to miners or centralized node providers like Infura, but this type of fork in principle isn't an example of immutability, and chains which do subsidize node costs to avoid the centralization seen in Eth's user facing nodes remain in control of the users. In total, picking out the worst parts of the Ethereum network and generalizing it to 'blockchain' is lazy, and doesn't even fulfill the modest goal of the essay to "[discuss] how these technologies work in practice today," as it ignores the nascent systems whose developers were the first on scene to many of these problems and decided that they were solvable rather than bloggers with slightly deeper than surface level understanding seeing the same problems years later and deciding they were unsolvable.

consp 5y ago
Considering this only happens to "big" projects and not a simple user making a mistake it's pointless to see it as immutable. It's immutable in practice only for you, but not in practice (like the article claims) for bigger projects who happened to make a mistake. It's all 'in practice' as yes, the original data is not lost but for all practical purposes it is. Calling it out to all blockchains is valid in my opinion, as it counts for all blockchains despite happening more often around some than others.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  With smaller chains that have much smaller amounts of total mining power its feasible for people to just jump in and run a 51% attack. So even in that sense they're not necessarily immutable.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Fine, let's talk about practicality. The practicality of a blockchain protocol which is never allowed to 'update' via a fork is fairly kludgy. So if we allow forks, how can we be sure that in practice, for users, their account balances are immutable? Well its easy, a sufficiently decentralized protocol, like Bitcoin for example, can have a large group of miners and nodes agree to scam one or more users out of their account balances by simply forking the chain. Anyone not in on the scam, even if it was as small as to take $10 from a single user, has no reason to even consider that fork - the fork which scams any user to any degree is worthless, as well as being provably invalid. It only takes one node with the honest history to maintain what users care about. Saying this is practically mutable is like saying today's newspaper is mutable because we can all agree to print an altered version of it, while ignoring the fact that it is trivial to find and prove ownership of the original (being generous with my analogy, carbon dating, time-stamping the paper, w.e.).
bloockchaain 5y ago
I don't think it's fair to say their point is incorrect. If you're talking in absolute technical terms about what "a blockchain" is in the abstract then, sure, a blockchain is immutable... but cryptocurrencies don't use "a blockchain" they have "the blockchain" and "the blockchain" is just whichever blockchain the network has decided is the blockchain. For all intents and purposes, "the Ethereum blockchain" is mutable because it can be swapped out if everyone agrees.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Well if everyone agrees then what is the grievance?
smcl 5y ago
All us crypto-skeptics know about this is that it's technically possible to effectively erase and redistribute transactions by doing a hard-fork and that "the community" have shown they're quite willing to do so. Saying that they technically can't be erased but that they'd always exist in a potentially-worthless fork isn't exactly reassuring. In fact it's a little bit disingenuous because I think it's pretty clear what people's issue is with "immutability" (namely "they say it's immutable, but it looks like they can and will mutate it") and this is quite an artful dodge around around that. And people like us see that the world of cryptocurrencies is rife with scammy activity and bad actors, so we go "ah ok, it's just another one of those" and move on.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  If worth matters to you you should be reassured that in the Ethereum style fork of 2016 no matter which side you agreed with you owned your coins in both chains (unless you were a hack victim or hacker). No one was punished for "choosing wrong." The concern about forks happening willy-nilly at the expense of users is sometimes legitimate in smaller chains or maybe even chains like Ethereum which do not incentivize decentralized node services and as a result has majorly centralized nodes, but for Bitcoin and more nascent protocols which understand this problem the concern over arbitrary forks is thankfully frivolous.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
The blockchain that we now know as Etherium does not contain the blocks that were erased. The fact that those blocks still exist on a completely different blockchain is irrelevant. They have been deleted from the Etherium chain.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  If you are calling that "The Ethereum Chain" then it seems your preferred fork won. Those who believe rolling back exploited funds was wrong see what you call "The Ethereum Chain" as the fork and Eth Classic as "The." Either way, members of each fork kept their account balances, so anyone who really believed in Eth Classic but held their forked tokens is no worse off. If you want to talk about Eth politics and immutability (which is a good conversation) then it shouldn't be applied to all blockchain; not all chains are subject to such political influence if you claim that was a factor.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    But everyone (even you) refers to Eth Classic as Eth Classic. I think we can accept that the fork succeeded and "Etherium" is not Eth Classic. I don't claim anything, except that the blockchain we now call "Etherium" does not contain the deleted blocks, and that therefore blockchains are not immutable.

consp 5y ago

Considering this only happens to "big" projects and not a simple user making a mistake it's pointless to see it as immutable. It's immutable in practice only for you, but not in practice (like the article claims) for bigger projects who happened to make a mistake. It's all 'in practice' as yes, the original data is not lost but for all practical purposes it is. Calling it out to all blockchains is valid in my opinion, as it counts for all blockchains despite happening more often around some than others.

meheleventyone 5y ago
With smaller chains that have much smaller amounts of total mining power its feasible for people to just jump in and run a 51% attack. So even in that sense they're not necessarily immutable.
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Fine, let's talk about practicality. The practicality of a blockchain protocol which is never allowed to 'update' via a fork is fairly kludgy. So if we allow forks, how can we be sure that in practice, for users, their account balances are immutable? Well its easy, a sufficiently decentralized protocol, like Bitcoin for example, can have a large group of miners and nodes agree to scam one or more users out of their account balances by simply forking the chain. Anyone not in on the scam, even if it was as small as to take $10 from a single user, has no reason to even consider that fork - the fork which scams any user to any degree is worthless, as well as being provably invalid. It only takes one node with the honest history to maintain what users care about. Saying this is practically mutable is like saying today's newspaper is mutable because we can all agree to print an altered version of it, while ignoring the fact that it is trivial to find and prove ownership of the original (being generous with my analogy, carbon dating, time-stamping the paper, w.e.).

bloockchaain 5y ago

I don't think it's fair to say their point is incorrect. If you're talking in absolute technical terms about what "a blockchain" is in the abstract then, sure, a blockchain is immutable... but cryptocurrencies don't use "a blockchain" they have "the blockchain" and "the blockchain" is just whichever blockchain the network has decided is the blockchain. For all intents and purposes, "the Ethereum blockchain" is mutable because it can be swapped out if everyone agrees.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Well if everyone agrees then what is the grievance?

smcl 5y ago

All us crypto-skeptics know about this is that it's technically possible to effectively erase and redistribute transactions by doing a hard-fork and that "the community" have shown they're quite willing to do so. Saying that they technically can't be erased but that they'd always exist in a potentially-worthless fork isn't exactly reassuring. In fact it's a little bit disingenuous because I think it's pretty clear what people's issue is with "immutability" (namely "they say it's immutable, but it looks like they can and will mutate it") and this is quite an artful dodge around around that. And people like us see that the world of cryptocurrencies is rife with scammy activity and bad actors, so we go "ah ok, it's just another one of those" and move on.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
If worth matters to you you should be reassured that in the Ethereum style fork of 2016 no matter which side you agreed with you owned your coins in both chains (unless you were a hack victim or hacker). No one was punished for "choosing wrong." The concern about forks happening willy-nilly at the expense of users is sometimes legitimate in smaller chains or maybe even chains like Ethereum which do not incentivize decentralized node services and as a result has majorly centralized nodes, but for Bitcoin and more nascent protocols which understand this problem the concern over arbitrary forks is thankfully frivolous.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

The blockchain that we now know as Etherium does not contain the blocks that were erased. The fact that those blocks still exist on a completely different blockchain is irrelevant. They have been deleted from the Etherium chain.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
If you are calling that "The Ethereum Chain" then it seems your preferred fork won. Those who believe rolling back exploited funds was wrong see what you call "The Ethereum Chain" as the fork and Eth Classic as "The." Either way, members of each fork kept their account balances, so anyone who really believed in Eth Classic but held their forked tokens is no worse off. If you want to talk about Eth politics and immutability (which is a good conversation) then it shouldn't be applied to all blockchain; not all chains are subject to such political influence if you claim that was a factor.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  But everyone (even you) refers to Eth Classic as Eth Classic. I think we can accept that the fork succeeded and "Etherium" is not Eth Classic. I don't claim anything, except that the blockchain we now call "Etherium" does not contain the deleted blocks, and that therefore blockchains are not immutable.