11 ms·

The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by “normies”. With fiat currency, we ha

by efitz 5y ago

The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by “normies”. With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute resolution and restitution. They are not all perfect but they work often enough that people still have faith in the system. Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work.

layer8 5y ago
It also works the other way around: When in conflict, law (and force) will always have precedence over smart contracts.
omegalulw 5y ago
I would agree in any free society, where you can trust institutions to fix such mistakes when they happen, this risk of irreversible transactions is not worth the reward. But when the alternative is a dictator arbitrarily seizing/taxing your money, devaluing it through poor economic policies, the risk doesn't seem so bad eh?
- webmaven 5y ago
  > I would agree in any free society, where you can trust institutions to fix such mistakes when they happen, this risk of irreversible transactions is not worth the reward. > But when the alternative is a dictator arbitrarily seizing/taxing your money, devaluing it through poor economic policies, the risk doesn't seem so bad eh? I'm skeptical that reducing (at the margin) the pressure to transact via (and thus expand use of) free society's institutions is a particularly good side effect.
siliconc0w 5y ago
You could design a contract that could be bug-fixed and upgraded provided some % of stakeholders consent to the upgrade. These platforms are still in their infancy so upgradability or even just thorough testing and auditing is rare.
mekster 5y ago
While it's true, on the other hand, third parties can't confiscate crypto without interacting with you. But crypto should become smarter for real world use case than just following "logically right" rules like some rescue protocol that without a receipt signal, it gets rolled back.
TimJRobinson 5y ago
There are many thousands of contracts that work perfectly securing tens of billions of dollars. You have an anti-survivorship bias because only the failures make it on HN and in the media. If you work in the space you realize only a tiny fraction of wealth gets lost to bugs. This $34M is roughly 0.02% of the wealth locked in smart contracts ATM.
rvz 5y ago
Well: > The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by “normies”. Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or gained significant adoption by normies? > With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute resolution and restitution. They are not all perfect but they work often enough that people still have faith in the system. Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is good as well? Is that why when the payment processor encounters tons of friendly fraud in a merchants account they lock up your account and you're unable to accept payments anymore, effectively killing your business. The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or not and will take the money from you regardless of you wasting time countering the disputes to prove that it is fraudlent. Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer and that system can be abused. > Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work. Yeah, most businesses and banks are doing just fine with the reversibility of wire transfers aren't they? [0] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345
- Volundr 5y ago
  > Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or gained significant adoption by normies? ACH has reversal built in. Wire transfers are harder but there are remedies through the legal system. In neither case is the money simply locked up and never usable again.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  >Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is good as well? Is that why when the payment processor encounters tons of friendly fraud in a merchants account they lock up your account and you're unable to accept payments anymore, effectively killing your business. >The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or not and will take the money from you regardless of you wasting time countering the disputes to prove that it is fraudlent. Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer and that system can be abused. Merely because the US system of handling chargebacks is dogshit and your companies have taken to making processes so unpractical that chargebacks are common practice. European banks perform 2FA checks for online purchases, and chargebacks are harder to execute, while still doable. But sure, throw the baby with the bathwater, the bath, the house and the city's water system because you forgot to decrement a counter in a shitty contract.
JofArnold 5y ago
My friend took a year, over 150 calls and legal intervention to get money back that HSBC stole. Obviously not the same but to say that banks are faultless just isn't true; their systems also have edge cases from which there is often little hope of return.
- zelon88 5y ago
  And in those cases you escalate or you lawyer up. You can't sue a typo.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    That is the best Web3 quote I’ve heard all year.
  - fidrelity 5y ago
    But there is insurance for smart contract integrity already deployed and in use for a multitude of projects (see unslashed finance for example). I don't need to sue as long as I get my money back.
  - caiomassan 5y ago
    it depends on the country u are in. in Brazil the law is a joke. I prefer to risk a typo then be entangle in any legal battle here. I know people that won cases 30 years ago, and are yet to see any money.
- efitz 5y ago
  I didn’t say banks were faultless. I didn’t say that any aspect of a fiat currency based system is perfect. I just said that redress works often enough that people don’t give up on it.
- drdec 5y ago
  I think that the point is not that non-crypto systems are perfect, but at least they do not have flaws which could make the reversal of a transaction a mathematical impossibility. In non-crypto systems if you convince the right humans, things can be reversed.
mylons 5y ago
try to reverse a wire transfer
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  Ah, but you can go an entire lifetime without doing a wire transfer, and even if you don't the risks are well known at this point.
  - yonig 5y ago
    You’re right but I find it funny that before this thread I was reading this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133963
  - gst 5y ago
    In Europe you have SEPA transfers where the reversibility after a transfer is comparable to a wire transfer. You can't really avoid them because they are the standard way of transferring money (if you don't pay by card or use direct debit).
  - gpvos 5y ago
    In Europe you can't, wire transfers are the main way of transferring money.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Apparently, it's done by having professionals in the loop who will usually send the money back. (There are exceptions.) <https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/> > Of course wires are reversible. They were not designed by children, but by professionals who live in a society which has systemically important institutions, and in the event of malfeasance or mistakes society does not tolerate a bank failing or a state missing payroll simply because someone said “no takesies-backsies” fast enough. > Mistakes happen! By, conservatively, the hundreds of thousands daily across all payments systems, millions depending on your definition of mistake. Wire transfers, like almost all payment systems, explicitly contemplate them and have a sociolegal ritual to quickly reverse them. > The ritual is called “hold harmless” and comes from a soft guarantee about the wire transfer ecosystem, which is that transactions are largely between sophisticated counterparties acting in good faith, intermediated by institutions whose probity is almost sacrosanct. Importantly, wires are in expectation worth having a human in the loop for; that is very not true of most payments.
Crabber 5y ago
I agree completely. Even as a person who is extremely confident with using computers I would not feel at all comfortable putting my life savings in a place where one typo or bug could cause me to lose everything. How is the average person expected to feel comfortable doing it?
- mattdesl 5y ago
  The simple answer is to not put your life savings into “Akutars”[1] untested and unvetted token contract. [1] https://www.aku.world/ https://www.aku.world/
  - raesene9 5y ago
    The challenge is, that's just one of many examples of problems that would be very opaque to non-experts. Without deep knowledge of the crypto space, and excellent operational security pratices, putting a significant amount of money into these projects is a risky prospect. For many people that's not a sensible trade-off.
    - TimJRobinson 5y ago
      Yes. If you can't tell the difference in risk between a company that has been around for years and secures tens of billions, and a smart contract literally launched 24 hours ago, you shouldn't be investing in crypto right now. If you have basic common sense though you'll probably be ok.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Users sent their tokens to a contract that is less than 24 hours old, with code that had no prior exposure to the market. It does not take an expert to learn that “sending your tokens to random contracts is a high risk activity.” But I will agree that consumer education & protection does need to improve in this space. FWIW the risk profile is different than interacting with something like WETH contract, which has had an $10+ billion USD open bug bounty for long time frame.[1] [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
It IS reversible. Just whine on social media until the primary stakeholders fork the blockchain!
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Good luck with that
- mannykannot 5y ago
  It only works when they are the losers.
- michaelt 5y ago
  While that was true for the DAO, very few people are rich and powerful enough for the rulemakers to bail them out when they mess up. If the typical NFT buyer has their 'Ape' stolen they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars buying it back.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  This will never happen during such a stable and highly adopted period of Ethereum, FUD.
Workaccount2 5y ago
The "oracle problem" is the reason why I lost interest in crypto after the 2017 boom, when I really got into the nitty-gritty of crypto. The trust built into crypto is rock solid, the problem is that it's scope is so narrow and limited that even after a decade it's still searching for a major trust problem to solve. In this case you cannot reverse crypto payments because there is no oracle that can do it. You would need to find God's own API for reality. I was however totally wrong about the future (monetary) value of crypto in early 2018. I guess sometimes it pays more to know less. Edit: Also of course every single crypto org obfuscates and is opaque as possible about the oracle problem. I'd venture that most investing in the space don't know what it is.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  Same here but I had a much more cynical view of the oracle issue that it is by design aimed at eventual and total financial destruction of most participants. This cynicism were fueled further by the ideology that justified this for some great adoption that was promised even further back. You can have decentralized systems but because monetary wealth accumulation is centralized by nature, and any decentralized system that introduces monetary accumulation and inflation reverts to a centralized state. A good example of this is Bitcoin. Those with the most liquid currency (fiat) can buy more hardware that centralizes wealth. You simply cannot have an MLM scheme without a pyramid.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    > it is by design aimed at eventual and total financial destruction of most participants. Your entire post is about inevitable centralization but that is not the oracle problem. The oracle problem is about providing access to real life data on the blockchain, but the issue is that you still need to trust someone to provide that data. Maybe I am misunderstanding you but I don't get how that by design leads to the total financial destruction of most participants?
    - MrMan 5y ago
      in my opinion oracle problem necessitates more middlemen to act as data / truth providers and of course they will have to be paid, and will impose an information bottleneck which they will leverage. this is centralization to me.
323 5y ago
The DAO debacle showed that it's not really irreversible. Thought experiment: a bug is exploited tomorrow which locks forever $50 billion worth of ETH, including of prominent VCs/users/exchanges. You will see suddenly how consensus crystalizes to do a hard fork reversion of the exploit.
- ironSkillet 5y ago
  So things are only reversible when the vast majority of users get impacted? That does not seem like a recipe for a stable financial system. Too many individuals will get screwed over in edge cases to drive mass adoption.
  - kibwen 5y ago
    > So things are only reversible when the vast majority of users get impacted? Close, but not quite. It's not a democracy, it's a plutocracy. Things are only reversible when those few who hold the majority of the wealth are impacted.
- thinkmassive 5y ago
  The Parity multisig bug locked 509019 ETH, which is around $1.5 billion today
- zapdrive 5y ago
  The DAO fork was exceptionally sinister. In essence a new transaction was inserted into the Blockchain without an accompanying signature!
- fidrelity 5y ago
  Since The DAO incident 'the code is the law' ceased to exist on Ethereum. It became 'the majority interpretation of the code is the law'.
nathias 5y ago
Layer 1 is not for normies, but abstractions on that can provide any functionality that they need.
- PretzelPirate 5y ago
  I think this is a good point to go deeper on. Layer 1 should be immutable and irreversible, while Layer 2 can have public, multi-sig/vote-based upgrade processes. In this case, on a layer 2, the contract code could be updated, but only if those with locked ETH vote for the upgrade to be processed. Better yet, the Layer 2 could allow ETH to be withdrawn from the contract by the owners and the contract itself could be deleted. I think the general, technically-informed public often miss the distinction between Layer 1 and Layer X and how they differ in the need for decentralization and censorship resistance while still providing users with security.
  - nathias 5y ago
    Even the industry isnt quite there yet, what we will probably see, will be a truly post-maxi crypto that will focus on interoperable dapps and other higher abstract decentralized entities that will be agnostic towards their L1 and will just plug them in as needed ...
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work. This might be true without mattering much -- most people don't have decades of savings. If you're not willing to lose the product of decades of work, but you never have more than a year worth of savings, what does your unwillingness mean?
- progman32 5y ago
  Just because savings won't last more than a year doesn't mean those savings aren't the product of a decade of work.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Most people do not have savings that are the product of more than a year of work.
    - progman32 5y ago
      Think I'm missing your point. Are you suggesting that most people have total savings < one year's income?
      - ddingus 5y ago
        Most people do have savings considerably less than a years income.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        I'm saying something much stronger than that! Most people, at some point within the past one year, had total savings of zero or less. Most people do not have more than a year of savings, because they haven't spent more than a year saving.

by efitz 5y ago

layer8 5y ago

It also works the other way around: When in conflict, law (and force) will always have precedence over smart contracts.

omegalulw 5y ago

I would agree in any free society, where you can trust institutions to fix such mistakes when they happen, this risk of irreversible transactions is not worth the reward. But when the alternative is a dictator arbitrarily seizing/taxing your money, devaluing it through poor economic policies, the risk doesn't seem so bad eh?

webmaven 5y ago
> I would agree in any free society, where you can trust institutions to fix such mistakes when they happen, this risk of irreversible transactions is not worth the reward. > But when the alternative is a dictator arbitrarily seizing/taxing your money, devaluing it through poor economic policies, the risk doesn't seem so bad eh? I'm skeptical that reducing (at the margin) the pressure to transact via (and thus expand use of) free society's institutions is a particularly good side effect.

siliconc0w 5y ago

You could design a contract that could be bug-fixed and upgraded provided some % of stakeholders consent to the upgrade. These platforms are still in their infancy so upgradability or even just thorough testing and auditing is rare.

mekster 5y ago

While it's true, on the other hand, third parties can't confiscate crypto without interacting with you. But crypto should become smarter for real world use case than just following "logically right" rules like some rescue protocol that without a receipt signal, it gets rolled back.

TimJRobinson 5y ago

There are many thousands of contracts that work perfectly securing tens of billions of dollars. You have an anti-survivorship bias because only the failures make it on HN and in the media. If you work in the space you realize only a tiny fraction of wealth gets lost to bugs. This $34M is roughly 0.02% of the wealth locked in smart contracts ATM.

rvz 5y ago

Well: > The unforgiving-ness and irreversibility of cryptocurrency are the reasons that it will never gain significant adoption by “normies”. Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or gained significant adoption by normies? > With fiat currency, we have many systems for dispute resolution and restitution. They are not all perfect but they work often enough that people still have faith in the system. Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is good as well? Is that why when the payment processor encounters tons of friendly fraud in a merchants account they lock up your account and you're unable to accept payments anymore, effectively killing your business. The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or not and will take the money from you regardless of you wasting time countering the disputes to prove that it is fraudlent. Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer and that system can be abused. > Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work. Yeah, most businesses and banks are doing just fine with the reversibility of wire transfers aren't they? [0] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345

Volundr 5y ago
> Exactly. Such that bank / wire transfer, didn't take off or gained significant adoption by normies? ACH has reversal built in. Wire transfers are harder but there are remedies through the legal system. In neither case is the money simply locked up and never usable again.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
>Chargeback fraud for both the consumer and the merchant is good as well? Is that why when the payment processor encounters tons of friendly fraud in a merchants account they lock up your account and you're unable to accept payments anymore, effectively killing your business. >The bank doesn't even know if the chargeback is fraudlent or not and will take the money from you regardless of you wasting time countering the disputes to prove that it is fraudlent. Thus, it hurts both the merchant and the consumer and that system can be abused. Merely because the US system of handling chargebacks is dogshit and your companies have taken to making processes so unpractical that chargebacks are common practice. European banks perform 2FA checks for online purchases, and chargebacks are harder to execute, while still doable. But sure, throw the baby with the bathwater, the bath, the house and the city's water system because you forgot to decrement a counter in a shitty contract.

JofArnold 5y ago

My friend took a year, over 150 calls and legal intervention to get money back that HSBC stole. Obviously not the same but to say that banks are faultless just isn't true; their systems also have edge cases from which there is often little hope of return.

zelon88 5y ago
And in those cases you escalate or you lawyer up. You can't sue a typo.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  That is the best Web3 quote I’ve heard all year.
- fidrelity 5y ago
  But there is insurance for smart contract integrity already deployed and in use for a multitude of projects (see unslashed finance for example). I don't need to sue as long as I get my money back.
- caiomassan 5y ago
  it depends on the country u are in. in Brazil the law is a joke. I prefer to risk a typo then be entangle in any legal battle here. I know people that won cases 30 years ago, and are yet to see any money.
efitz 5y ago
I didn’t say banks were faultless. I didn’t say that any aspect of a fiat currency based system is perfect. I just said that redress works often enough that people don’t give up on it.
drdec 5y ago
I think that the point is not that non-crypto systems are perfect, but at least they do not have flaws which could make the reversal of a transaction a mathematical impossibility. In non-crypto systems if you convince the right humans, things can be reversed.

mylons 5y ago

try to reverse a wire transfer

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
Ah, but you can go an entire lifetime without doing a wire transfer, and even if you don't the risks are well known at this point.
- yonig 5y ago
  You’re right but I find it funny that before this thread I was reading this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31133963
- gst 5y ago
  In Europe you have SEPA transfers where the reversibility after a transfer is comparable to a wire transfer. You can't really avoid them because they are the standard way of transferring money (if you don't pay by card or use direct debit).
- gpvos 5y ago
  In Europe you can't, wire transfers are the main way of transferring money.
skybrian 5y ago
Apparently, it's done by having professionals in the loop who will usually send the money back. (There are exceptions.) <https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/no-payments-are-final/> > Of course wires are reversible. They were not designed by children, but by professionals who live in a society which has systemically important institutions, and in the event of malfeasance or mistakes society does not tolerate a bank failing or a state missing payroll simply because someone said “no takesies-backsies” fast enough. > Mistakes happen! By, conservatively, the hundreds of thousands daily across all payments systems, millions depending on your definition of mistake. Wire transfers, like almost all payment systems, explicitly contemplate them and have a sociolegal ritual to quickly reverse them. > The ritual is called “hold harmless” and comes from a soft guarantee about the wire transfer ecosystem, which is that transactions are largely between sophisticated counterparties acting in good faith, intermediated by institutions whose probity is almost sacrosanct. Importantly, wires are in expectation worth having a human in the loop for; that is very not true of most payments.

Crabber 5y ago

I agree completely. Even as a person who is extremely confident with using computers I would not feel at all comfortable putting my life savings in a place where one typo or bug could cause me to lose everything. How is the average person expected to feel comfortable doing it?

mattdesl 5y ago
The simple answer is to not put your life savings into “Akutars”[1] untested and unvetted token contract. [1] https://www.aku.world/ https://www.aku.world/
- raesene9 5y ago
  The challenge is, that's just one of many examples of problems that would be very opaque to non-experts. Without deep knowledge of the crypto space, and excellent operational security pratices, putting a significant amount of money into these projects is a risky prospect. For many people that's not a sensible trade-off.
  - TimJRobinson 5y ago
    Yes. If you can't tell the difference in risk between a company that has been around for years and secures tens of billions, and a smart contract literally launched 24 hours ago, you shouldn't be investing in crypto right now. If you have basic common sense though you'll probably be ok.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    Users sent their tokens to a contract that is less than 24 hours old, with code that had no prior exposure to the market. It does not take an expert to learn that “sending your tokens to random contracts is a high risk activity.” But I will agree that consumer education & protection does need to improve in this space. FWIW the risk profile is different than interacting with something like WETH contract, which has had an $10+ billion USD open bug bounty for long time frame.[1] [1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

It IS reversible. Just whine on social media until the primary stakeholders fork the blockchain!

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
Good luck with that
mannykannot 5y ago
It only works when they are the losers.
michaelt 5y ago
While that was true for the DAO, very few people are rich and powerful enough for the rulemakers to bail them out when they mess up. If the typical NFT buyer has their 'Ape' stolen they have to spend tens of thousands of dollars buying it back.
aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
This will never happen during such a stable and highly adopted period of Ethereum, FUD.

Workaccount2 5y ago

The "oracle problem" is the reason why I lost interest in crypto after the 2017 boom, when I really got into the nitty-gritty of crypto. The trust built into crypto is rock solid, the problem is that it's scope is so narrow and limited that even after a decade it's still searching for a major trust problem to solve. In this case you cannot reverse crypto payments because there is no oracle that can do it. You would need to find God's own API for reality. I was however totally wrong about the future (monetary) value of crypto in early 2018. I guess sometimes it pays more to know less. Edit: Also of course every single crypto org obfuscates and is opaque as possible about the oracle problem. I'd venture that most investing in the space don't know what it is.

tomatowurst 5y ago
Same here but I had a much more cynical view of the oracle issue that it is by design aimed at eventual and total financial destruction of most participants. This cynicism were fueled further by the ideology that justified this for some great adoption that was promised even further back. You can have decentralized systems but because monetary wealth accumulation is centralized by nature, and any decentralized system that introduces monetary accumulation and inflation reverts to a centralized state. A good example of this is Bitcoin. Those with the most liquid currency (fiat) can buy more hardware that centralizes wealth. You simply cannot have an MLM scheme without a pyramid.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  > it is by design aimed at eventual and total financial destruction of most participants. Your entire post is about inevitable centralization but that is not the oracle problem. The oracle problem is about providing access to real life data on the blockchain, but the issue is that you still need to trust someone to provide that data. Maybe I am misunderstanding you but I don't get how that by design leads to the total financial destruction of most participants?
  - MrMan 5y ago
    in my opinion oracle problem necessitates more middlemen to act as data / truth providers and of course they will have to be paid, and will impose an information bottleneck which they will leverage. this is centralization to me.

323 5y ago

The DAO debacle showed that it's not really irreversible. Thought experiment: a bug is exploited tomorrow which locks forever $50 billion worth of ETH, including of prominent VCs/users/exchanges. You will see suddenly how consensus crystalizes to do a hard fork reversion of the exploit.

ironSkillet 5y ago
So things are only reversible when the vast majority of users get impacted? That does not seem like a recipe for a stable financial system. Too many individuals will get screwed over in edge cases to drive mass adoption.
- kibwen 5y ago
  > So things are only reversible when the vast majority of users get impacted? Close, but not quite. It's not a democracy, it's a plutocracy. Things are only reversible when those few who hold the majority of the wealth are impacted.
thinkmassive 5y ago
The Parity multisig bug locked 509019 ETH, which is around $1.5 billion today
zapdrive 5y ago
The DAO fork was exceptionally sinister. In essence a new transaction was inserted into the Blockchain without an accompanying signature!
fidrelity 5y ago
Since The DAO incident 'the code is the law' ceased to exist on Ethereum. It became 'the majority interpretation of the code is the law'.

nathias 5y ago

Layer 1 is not for normies, but abstractions on that can provide any functionality that they need.

PretzelPirate 5y ago
I think this is a good point to go deeper on. Layer 1 should be immutable and irreversible, while Layer 2 can have public, multi-sig/vote-based upgrade processes. In this case, on a layer 2, the contract code could be updated, but only if those with locked ETH vote for the upgrade to be processed. Better yet, the Layer 2 could allow ETH to be withdrawn from the contract by the owners and the contract itself could be deleted. I think the general, technically-informed public often miss the distinction between Layer 1 and Layer X and how they differ in the need for decentralization and censorship resistance while still providing users with security.
- nathias 5y ago
  Even the industry isnt quite there yet, what we will probably see, will be a truly post-maxi crypto that will focus on interoperable dapps and other higher abstract decentralized entities that will be agnostic towards their L1 and will just plug them in as needed ...

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Most people do not have the risk tolerance to use a system where one typographical error can irreversibly lose your life savings (for example), the product of decades of work. This might be true without mattering much -- most people don't have decades of savings. If you're not willing to lose the product of decades of work, but you never have more than a year worth of savings, what does your unwillingness mean?

progman32 5y ago
Just because savings won't last more than a year doesn't mean those savings aren't the product of a decade of work.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Most people do not have savings that are the product of more than a year of work.
  - progman32 5y ago
    Think I'm missing your point. Are you suggesting that most people have total savings < one year's income?
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Most people do have savings considerably less than a years income.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      I'm saying something much stronger than that! Most people, at some point within the past one year, had total savings of zero or less. Most people do not have more than a year of savings, because they haven't spent more than a year saving.