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Comment by markkat | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised how so many seem to think this is a bad thing. Ethereum is very nascent, and this was how the community wanted to fix this issue. It was not just about returning DTH, it was about the implications of the allocation of the DTH in the hands of one individual when Ethereum moves to PoS.

Obviously the HF isn't ideal, but not forking was potentially much worse. This settles the issue, and allows people to get back to work.

Hard forks will become less viable as a solution the larger the network gets, and as more interests are involved. However, blockchains are consensus mechanisms. Anyone can propose a hard fork update at any time.

Here is something to consider: as more than 80% of Bitcoin's hash power is in the hands of a few Chinese companies, the CCP could very realistically enforce a Bitcoin hard fork.

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"Anyone can proposed a hard fork update at any time."

So there is no difference between me and the core developers?

In the ability to propose a hard fork, no difference. However, you need to be able to convince the majority of miners to vote for your fork and that's where being a core dev has a lot of influence.

Of course there is. However, as Bitcoin Classic may illustrate, it is possible to leave the core developers working on a defunct chain.

Core developers represent a double-edged sword. They are critical for getting the network adopted, and for adapting the network to new demands, but they can also be a risk due to their influence. By all accounts, the Ethereum core developers have been open and responsive. Not all Ethereum devs wanted this fork. I do think they could be faulted for not strongly advising Slock.it to cap The DAO. That may be one reason why they were amenable to a refund solution.

You definitely should consider the core devs when investing time and money in a blockchain. They have an inertia that influences the system.

Apparently, the core developers could rally a quorum and gain consensus. Perhaps you could not.

Influence is like money. You have an equal right to pursue it, but no right to some quantity of it. Some people have more of it, others less. If you want more, you're gonna have to work for it first.

From the sound of your post, the Currency of Ethereum must be undefined acronyms.

DTH == DAO Tokens (Money in the DAO) HF == Hard Fork PoS == "Proof of Stake" as opposed to PoW Proof of Work. This means that a large part of what goes into mining will be owning ether, and causes a concern about a hostile entity owning a huge pile of stolen Ether.

ETH miners haven't enforced anything. Do you really believe that they're not playing both forks as an option until it's clear what's going to happen?

If you look at the OP's link:

http://fork.ethstats.net/

you can see that the miners have indeed enforced the hard fork chain.

I have no idea what that page is showing. It's a bunch of figures with no context shoved under three headers.

Is block number the last block number to be processed under the chain? Is it a monotonically increasing number? Is the block hex string meaningful in the context of showing me what's going on (the site seems unable to show me any data related to the non-fork block so who knows.)

What does the difficulty percentage and total difficulty entries mean? How do they relate to each other? The linked reddit post doesn't shed light on it. I am guessing from bits of conversations on that reddit post that "fork" = new client, fork; "non-fork" = new client, no fork; and "legacy" = old client, no fork?

Maybe it's reflecting the difficulty of me figuring out what is going on the page? :)

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