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It's just that mask fell off completely. People should've got a clue when Ethereum forked the chain because it turned out the "immutable" smart contract had bu

by xani_ 4y ago

It's just that mask fell off completely. People should've got a clue when Ethereum forked the chain because it turned out the "immutable" smart contract had bugs and it lost the money of important people

arcticbull 4y ago
Trustless for thee but none for me thanks. I still can't believe anyone uttered the phrase 'code is law' unironically again after the ETH/ETC fork. After all, Vitalik effectively said he didn't care if your grandma's life savings got stolen, that's decentralization - but when it happens to the important people, well, it's time to have a come to Jesus and fork the chain.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  When crypto currency companies started to raise billions from the markets and have Superbowl commercials just like normal banks I knew the anarchist libertarian Cyberpunk experiment was subverted.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Hey, if I'm targeting my product at iconoclastic free thinkers, I can't go wrong with a Superbowl ad!
- em_te 4y ago
  Forking requires consensus among the decentralized miners. If the majority of the minors didn't agree to fork, they wouldn't have been able to fork the chain.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Anyone can fork any chain, nothing more than a single miner is required on the new chain. In fact the pre-rollback chain lives on as ETC. A parallel universe where code actually was law. One entity decided they were sad about code being law and decided to roll back the outcome of a faithfully executed smart contract using their influence. When one person can influence enough miners to make it the principle chain simply to undo what is in their opinion an outcome they disliked, that's centralization. Or at least a plutocracy. Today that power rests principally with Jeremy Allaire since of course only one chain can represent the real world dollars in his bank account (USDC).
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      What are you even trying to say? The rules of a blockchain protocol are not immutable, they can and often do change. Users decide to follow the new rules, or they decide not to. The 2016 fork showed that the majority of users and the market chose to follow ETH instead of ETC. In a few days we will probably see another fork, and most likely the majority of users will follow the PoS chain instead of the PoW chain.
      - imtringued 4y ago
        If you want to rollback things build that into your smart contract and stop pretending. If you think your code is mature enough to survive attacks then disable the rollback feature forever.
        zeroclip 4y ago
        Smart contracts can add rollback and revert functions but it won't save them from an exploited code path. At that point the only way to 'revert' exploited funds is rolling back the entire blockchain by creating a new fork. The market will decide whether to follow the fork. It has happened once, and might happen again one day, but only at the will of the majority of users.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Not the majority of the users, the majority of the miners, influenced by leadership/the wealthy. This is plutocracy. And very much not an improvement over the status quo.
        zeroclip 4y ago
        In Ethereum's proof of stake model, validators do not control the rules and cannot force a change in the protocol. People choose to run nodes, these nodes may or may not be validator nodes, and this software is what enforces the protocol rules across the network. A majority of nodes would have to come to consensus on a change for it to be successful - this happened with DAO, EIP-1559, and probably soon the PoS merge. It is free to run a node, and the market can freely decide to not support a chain. This is how you end up with ETC being relatively worthless even though there was a group of "rich plutocratic elites" that tried to make it succeed. There are "influencers" like Vitalik, EF, several client teams, and thousands of hobbyists who work on research and development for the protocol, and these people do lead the direction of the technology moreso than the average user. But this is how all open source works: a small number of people make decisions, and a much larger group of people opt-in to those choices, becoming users. This is also how you end up with multiple blockchains: not everybody was happy using Bitcoin, so some people started to develop Ethereum instead.
idiotsecant 4y ago
The community supported it, what else do you think should have happened? A small minority of people were opposed to it and they made etc and nobody used it. The system worked as intended for an alpha level product. I think you'd have pretty substantial trouble getting the community to agree to it today, which is appropriate for a more mature system.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  If the majority stole from the minority, is there no recourse?
  - sumedh 4y ago
    What recourse do you have when the US fed keeps on printing money and reducing your purchasing power.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      The dollar has risen vs almost every other currency. The DXY is back to 2003 levels. Bitcoin fell from $67k to $18.8k. Where have you been the last few months?
      - sumedh 4y ago
        > Where have you been the last few months? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      The United States is a democracy, so you vote. Again, what recourse do you have with crypto?
      - nbbnnn 4y ago
        Vote what? Monetary policies are independent from the federal government.
pa7x1 4y ago
Ethereum has never reverted the blockchain which is what breaks immutability. In fact, you can go back in history and find the DAO creation, the hack, and even the transaction that reverted the stolen funds. This is, by the way, unlike Bitcoin which did revert the blockchain and break its immutable nature in 2010. https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creator https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creat... Not sure that this matters much but as it's a frequent point brought we might as well get the details rights.

by xani_ 4y ago

arcticbull 4y ago

Trustless for thee but none for me thanks. I still can't believe anyone uttered the phrase 'code is law' unironically again after the ETH/ETC fork. After all, Vitalik effectively said he didn't care if your grandma's life savings got stolen, that's decentralization - but when it happens to the important people, well, it's time to have a come to Jesus and fork the chain.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
When crypto currency companies started to raise billions from the markets and have Superbowl commercials just like normal banks I knew the anarchist libertarian Cyberpunk experiment was subverted.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Hey, if I'm targeting my product at iconoclastic free thinkers, I can't go wrong with a Superbowl ad!
em_te 4y ago
Forking requires consensus among the decentralized miners. If the majority of the minors didn't agree to fork, they wouldn't have been able to fork the chain.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Anyone can fork any chain, nothing more than a single miner is required on the new chain. In fact the pre-rollback chain lives on as ETC. A parallel universe where code actually was law. One entity decided they were sad about code being law and decided to roll back the outcome of a faithfully executed smart contract using their influence. When one person can influence enough miners to make it the principle chain simply to undo what is in their opinion an outcome they disliked, that's centralization. Or at least a plutocracy. Today that power rests principally with Jeremy Allaire since of course only one chain can represent the real world dollars in his bank account (USDC).
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    What are you even trying to say? The rules of a blockchain protocol are not immutable, they can and often do change. Users decide to follow the new rules, or they decide not to. The 2016 fork showed that the majority of users and the market chose to follow ETH instead of ETC. In a few days we will probably see another fork, and most likely the majority of users will follow the PoS chain instead of the PoW chain.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      If you want to rollback things build that into your smart contract and stop pretending. If you think your code is mature enough to survive attacks then disable the rollback feature forever.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        Smart contracts can add rollback and revert functions but it won't save them from an exploited code path. At that point the only way to 'revert' exploited funds is rolling back the entire blockchain by creating a new fork. The market will decide whether to follow the fork. It has happened once, and might happen again one day, but only at the will of the majority of users.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Not the majority of the users, the majority of the miners, influenced by leadership/the wealthy. This is plutocracy. And very much not an improvement over the status quo.
        zeroclip 4y ago
        In Ethereum's proof of stake model, validators do not control the rules and cannot force a change in the protocol. People choose to run nodes, these nodes may or may not be validator nodes, and this software is what enforces the protocol rules across the network. A majority of nodes would have to come to consensus on a change for it to be successful - this happened with DAO, EIP-1559, and probably soon the PoS merge. It is free to run a node, and the market can freely decide to not support a chain. This is how you end up with ETC being relatively worthless even though there was a group of "rich plutocratic elites" that tried to make it succeed. There are "influencers" like Vitalik, EF, several client teams, and thousands of hobbyists who work on research and development for the protocol, and these people do lead the direction of the technology moreso than the average user. But this is how all open source works: a small number of people make decisions, and a much larger group of people opt-in to those choices, becoming users. This is also how you end up with multiple blockchains: not everybody was happy using Bitcoin, so some people started to develop Ethereum instead.

idiotsecant 4y ago

The community supported it, what else do you think should have happened? A small minority of people were opposed to it and they made etc and nobody used it. The system worked as intended for an alpha level product. I think you'd have pretty substantial trouble getting the community to agree to it today, which is appropriate for a more mature system.

endisneigh 4y ago
If the majority stole from the minority, is there no recourse?
- sumedh 4y ago
  What recourse do you have when the US fed keeps on printing money and reducing your purchasing power.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    The dollar has risen vs almost every other currency. The DXY is back to 2003 levels. Bitcoin fell from $67k to $18.8k. Where have you been the last few months?
    - sumedh 4y ago
      > Where have you been the last few months? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    The United States is a democracy, so you vote. Again, what recourse do you have with crypto?
    - nbbnnn 4y ago
      Vote what? Monetary policies are independent from the federal government.

pa7x1 4y ago

Ethereum has never reverted the blockchain which is what breaks immutability. In fact, you can go back in history and find the DAO creation, the hack, and even the transaction that reverted the stolen funds. This is, by the way, unlike Bitcoin which did revert the blockchain and break its immutable nature in 2010. https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creator https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creat... Not sure that this matters much but as it's a frequent point brought we might as well get the details rights.