The DAO Disaster Illustrates Differing Philosophies in Bitcoin and Ethereum
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Wouldn't a fork imply more decentralization? Multiple active forks would imply multiple actors working to their own agendas towards different objectives/goals and no central fiat to realign their interests. That would certainly sound more decentralized to me. (The block size tangle and the inability for Bitcoin to fork recently to deal with that almost certainly sounded like a power/political centralization problem to this lay observer from what I was reading, but I've managed to stay somewhat unfamiliar with much of the technical nuance.)
It seems to me like a truly decentralized system would likely be prone to forking. The issue should likely not be whether the system can fork (and how difficult it might be), but how the system handles forks when it does fork.
(This is the "DVCS criteria": a DVCS must realize that merges must be common and handle sometimes heavily divergent forks well and with grace, otherwise it is a bad DVCS that users will hate.)
I think that until Vitalik pulls a Satoshi, Etheruem will never be as decentralized. This has pros and cons, especially with sharding/PoS around the corner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rohdy/vlad_zamfi...
As a self-described fairly intelligent tech person, the blockchain and its working is still fairly magical to me, so answer me this:
Would it be theoretically possible for big players on the market (read EvilCorp) to push the market over to a fork by convincing enough of its cronies to make the switch?
I'm assuming what you mean is that market consensus is (at least) 51% of the market accepting the fork as "the truth" in terms of value by making further business there instead. Or would it not even require 51% but merely (for example) 20% of the capital that covers 80% of the transactions?
I also assume anyone that wanted could still stick to the former blockchain as long as it has other participants to deal with?
Am I wrong in expecting a synecdoche to the current "real world economy" within cryptocurrency that it loses its democratization when the top X% can force for example a fork?
If the protocol developers and exchanges switch to a fork, there's very little the community can do.
Sticking with the former chain is difficult because 1) everyone else is calling a different chain "Ethereum" therefore you probably need to change your name to something else, 2) You need to be concerned with mining attacks
In this case the sentiment among actual ETH holders is ~ 85% in favor of the hard fork. Check http://carbonvote.com/ (it's not a binding vote, just an indication showing which way the wind blows).
Did you mean to say that it _would_ be more difficult?
If by centralization you mean control of the mining power by a small group of people, then Bitcoin is a lot more centralized than Ethereum.
It's just that the response to the DAO problem was one of consensus, instead of the response to the block size issue in Bitcoin, where they behave like playing a zero sum game and every proposed fork is rejected by someone.
This is what I find so galling. If code is code is code, then the outcome should be what the code says it is. But whoops, we decided we don't like the outcome so let's toss that out.
There are several reasons why this is not the case with Eth/DAO:
1) Every fraction of Ethereum is accounted for in the public record.
2) No additional Ethereum was created to compensate the losses of investors, only the original stolen Ethereum is being returned.
3) No politician's pockets are being padded, the only receivers of value are the rightful owners of DAO Tokens. (Only ETH was stolen, not tokens - everyone still has their tokens.)
4) If some government took this as precedent to force a bail-out in the future Ethereum Ecosystem, based on the standards of the Ethereum community, the value of Ethereum under an actual government-instituted bailout would plummet. It goes against everything we believe in, and the subjective valuation of Ethereum on a mass scale would plummet, effectively making any funds doled out worth only a fraction of their value by the time the receiver had any chance to use them.
I could go on giving more reasons, but is it really necessary? No one should be attempting to make analogies between fiat currency controls and an Ethereum fork unless they've considered both the philosophical and economic implications of their arguments, and it's obvious that most anti-forkers haven't bothered to give due diligence to the question of what's really at stake here.
Oh, and the government doesn't print money. Well it does in the strict interpretation of fixing color on some substrate. But government spending does not increase the amount of money in circulation.
The analogy between the DAO fiasco and real currencies is almost brutally obvious: a fake currency, powered by the conspiracy theories of a population shocked by the financial crisis suddenly needs market intervention because an institution that's 'too big to fail' is threatened.
Some cavepeople figured out what stealing is a long time ago. We haven't quite decided if executing a contract code is stealing just yet.
[1]Where?
I don't think Nazis are still around are they? I also don't see how lying to Nazis about Jews has any relevance here?
Personally, I don't trust much that doesn't have a simulator, or at least some kind of test procedure.
Edit: Parent has since removed Nazi references. My post will remain unmodified except for this edit.
What's unfortunate is that it's taking the form of a dystopia. Instead of realizing that humans are a factor of the equation, and people doing business in God faith... We're entering a ruthless period where anything goes, and because it's all anonymous no one feels bad about it.
There's crazy potential in the ideas here, but it's way too Wild West.
Not possible without proof-of-work
All they need to do is show two coflicting blocks signed by the "approver"
Decentralization denies the nature of courts. Courts exist to do those things that the market and the mob cannot. Heaven help the litigant who, while in all reality an upstanding person who has done no wrong, must now have his fate decided by popular vote. Why bother with laws. Just put every issue to the vote and let the one with the most twitter followers win.
Courts are where we go when democracy fails. They are where you go when what you want isn't necessarily what everyone else wants of you.
Smart contracts are one-sided. The exploiter always wins if the contract writer made a stupid mistake.
WHY would you want that system?
Why would you need Ethereum if the contracts you want to enforce shouldn't be "smart"?
Sure, if the judges can use their power of personal persuasion to convince the dispersed population of anonymous miners/stakers that they should adopt the contract modification (as ethereum community leaders did during the DAOsaster) they will be able to enact changes.
Perhaps this is confusing enough to trick regulators, however I'm not so certain.
Maybe it's me, but ideas like being able to reverse funds do not belong in crypto currencies. If risk is presented, escrow the transfer, buy insurance, etc.
Why are people so unwilling to take responsibility for themselves?
B) escrow, insurance, etc. are just poor attempts at implementing reversible transactions, so if can why not just have them instead of using a greenspuned tangle of partially overlapping partially conflicting tools with who knows what kind of jurisdiction issues
This question - and the answer - has implications far outside of crypto currencies and you could probably write very large books about it. It goes to the heart of why we have religions and many other social phenomena.
We certainly could insist the victim live with it, but that seems like a worse world for everyone.
When programming for hardware began, it was very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with languages of the time, but over time new languages which made it harder (or eliminated certain foot-guns entirely) appeared.
For Etherium, I'd look at whether the ISA (set of opcodes) is complete enough to allow one to create a contract specification language with enough flexibility to do something while allowing a degree a safety.
Have there been attempts at alternates to Etherium's Solidity which generate smart contracts?
I think the future the ethereum smart contract options will consist of (1) Solidity with many static analysis tests added to generate warnings about dangerous code use and (2) an ML-style language that is less novice-friendly but allows for deep type-level constraints to mitigate potential attack scenarios.
The only time you are probably talking about is when someone made a block with a 9 billion bitcoin reward. Even then, they just convinced the miners to start a different chain. Thus, the chain with the 9 billion coins block just died. So yea, no reversal without a signature, ever!
I'm also referring to the march 2013 hard fork
so congratulations you just helped me prove my "multiple times" for the lay man
I never said the hard fork was specifically to target a particular transaction, the result is that every transaction on the dropped chain was reversed.
(But maybe I have entirely the wrong idea of what the attack vector was here)