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Comment by 467568985476 | Hacker News Reader

Most people didn’t know, didn’t care, or couldn’t figure out how to vote. Carbonvote is a poll that weighed user votes by their ether account holdings. Only 5.5% of the total ether holders bothered to vote. A quarter of the DAO-Fork votes came from a single account.

That's wild. It seems like the largest holders of Ether can tie their investments together and agree to "undo" anything that loses money. Am I misunderstanding how the hard fork process works? Why would anyone bet on this being the "killer cryptocurrency" if it already has entrenched interests capable of manipulating it for personal gain? How is this system decentralized beyond the trivial, technical sense?

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The reality, every blockchain is vulnerable to such forking. The system is still decentralized, as the miners have to make their choice. However, the Ethereum Foundation decided to force the fork upon geth users, as the software defaults to pro-fork. So in effect a lot of users will be coerced into forking, without knowing.

This particular fork is political and not technical. The previous ETH forks were modifications to the protocol. The current fork is a modification to the account balances. The rich Ethereum fanatics are completely and absurdly delusional in thinking this will be a great event in their history. To me, the canonical chain is all but dead. The protocol will survive, just not on this chain.

Not quite. Ethereum's trie allows transaction paths like this to be clipped with almost no collateral damage to the rest of the data structure. Bitcoin's UTXO model makes it very difficult to roll back transactions since it would cause havoc on every other transaction on the network.

What is "not quite" referring to?

> as the miners have to make their choice

Miners don't make stances. They mine whatever is economically viable.

A fork without exchanges would not have economic value, for example, and would be useless to mine.

Carbonvote is an informal vote. It has no consequence in reality. That's why there was such a low voting rate.

As of now, the amount of ether you hold doesn't increase your ability to affect a fork. That's entirely controlled by miners. The amount of computing power you bring to the ethereum blockchain controls how much your vote counts.

If Ethereum switches to a "proof-of-stake" system as planned, then yes, the amount of ether you hold will effectively be how many votes you have in making decisions like these.

> That's entirely controlled by miners.

This is why I found all the "voting" stuff such nonsense and somewhat deceptive in nature.

Miners that adopt the code that implements the hardfork is the only measure that actually matters. Everything else is mice voting to bell the cat.

The "proof of stake" vote wasn't binding.

In the bitcoin world, this would be called a 51% percent attack. What really matters is what the miners choose to do.

Thanks for clearing that up - rereading the article, I see now that I missed the sentence describing the informal, non-binding nature of the vote.

Miners majority decides only with soft forks. A hard fork is a consensus protocol change, the economic majority can split even without the majority of miners (of course it is nice to have the miners on board as well).

The vote wasn't official, it was just an indicator of community sentiment. The fork is happening because, in addition to carbonvote, the miners are voting 80% in favor of forking, the exchanges are ok with it, and all the major implementations built the code for it. Any cryptocurrency can pull off a hard fork if 80% of its community wants to do it.

The vote was used to set default options in the client.

This is why some one us have been calling the crypto-cultists...well cultists for some time now.

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