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What's more decentralized than being able to fork an open source blockchain solely on the basis of majority consensus? The hullabaloo over the DAO fork arises b

by ipnon 5y ago

What's more decentralized than being able to fork an open source blockchain solely on the basis of majority consensus? The hullabaloo over the DAO fork arises because decentralization is conflated with fairness. Was the fork fair? Maybe, maybe not. It's irrelevant to the question of whether Ethereum is decentralized. Ethereum prevailed over Ethereum Classic precisely because the majority of users switched to the fork! This would not have been possible if Ethereum wasn't decentralized. A centralized system would have left Ethereum users in the dust and the DAO hacker with all the loot.

mccorrinall 5y ago
The whole idea of the blockchain is to prevent the double spending problem. You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? And that the network is centralized and tightly controlled by $CEO_OF_BLOCKCHAIN_ENTITY? Also, it’s not just their transactions who get rolled back, but everyone’s! People who sent goods after seeing 20 confirmations on the blockchain already dispatched them and lost both: the funds AND the goods. How is this fair?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  The DAO fork only directly rolled back that single transaction, right?
- nootropicat 5y ago
  Everything you wrote is incorrect. >You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? This is how a rollback happened in bitcoin two times: during the value overflow bug and during the database incompatibility bug (2013). The bitcoin blockchain was rolled back via a coordinated 51% attack. In the second case at least one double spend happened. Ethereum never had a rollback, the change was a hard fork that changed ownership of eth previously owned by the dao hacker.

by ipnon 5y ago

mccorrinall 5y ago

The whole idea of the blockchain is to prevent the double spending problem. You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? And that the network is centralized and tightly controlled by $CEO_OF_BLOCKCHAIN_ENTITY? Also, it’s not just their transactions who get rolled back, but everyone’s! People who sent goods after seeing 20 confirmations on the blockchain already dispatched them and lost both: the funds AND the goods. How is this fair?

Dylan16807 5y ago
The DAO fork only directly rolled back that single transaction, right?
nootropicat 5y ago
Everything you wrote is incorrect. >You realize that hacker sends funds to his own wallet -> ETH Foundation decides to roll back and contacts their miner bros, who had ZERO problems performing a 51% attack -> ETH Foundation can send the same funds again is essentially a double spend? This is how a rollback happened in bitcoin two times: during the value overflow bug and during the database incompatibility bug (2013). The bitcoin blockchain was rolled back via a coordinated 51% attack. In the second case at least one double spend happened. Ethereum never had a rollback, the change was a hard fork that changed ownership of eth previously owned by the dao hacker.