Onward from the Hard Fork | Hacker News Reader

Onward from the Hard Fork

blog.ethereum.org

62 pointssethbannon43 comments

So we now know that contracts on Ethereum mean what they say, unless there is a community consensus that the contract actually means something else, and the machine meaning doesn't properly reflect the intent of the parties.

But it is a little unsatisfactory to have this ad-hoc method of hard forking. Maybe there should be in future some sort of public process to determine whether an action is consistent with the intentional meaning of the contract (as opposed to the machine meaning). We could all agree to appoint some qualified person to hear disputes and determine whether the code has got it wrong and we should fix the code with a hard fork. Let's call that person a 'judge'.

Now that judge will need to have procedures and rules. He or she isn't deciding on a whim, after all. These rules will set out things like what evidence the judge can look at to determine the intentional meaning of the contract. Just for giggles, let's call one of those rules the 'parol evidence rule'. Also, we don't want anyone to be able to bug the judge and waste their time, so we need some rules as to who can ask the judge to look at a dispute. I'm feeling creative, so let's call those rules 'standing rules'.

What would be really fabulous is if this system could be paid by the taxpayer out of general revenue. That way we can reduce the likelihood of the biggest, richest investors bribing the judges.

But this is obviously all fantasy. No one would ever build such a system.

Interesting. But I'm a widget maker, not a specialist in any of those fanciful terms you threw around. I'd like to participate in the judges' world, but my widgets take all my time. Is there someone that can sort through the precedents and rules on my behalf if I tell them what I need in widget-speak?

good point! another thing is, i don't really have time to read all these meta-rules for judges, and i certainly don't have time to write new ones in detail or to argue or vote for each one of them. is there anyway i could help choose a representative that'd consider my interests and the interests of others and then do the actual nitty-gritty work of writing and selecting such rules?

Unfortunately, it has been found that the principle-agent problem is just to much to overcome in this case.

And perhaps there should be some government-approved body to decide how one goes about becoming a specialist. Perhaps they could organize a system of specialist education and exams so as to ensure that members of the public aren't duped by charlatan specialists.

Maybe that right there is the issue: maybe the public doesn't need to be protected of duping charlatans, but needs to adopt a standard to identify them and propagate information about their incompetence? Problem remains that a fair, common protocol to measure and communicate about trust seems somewhat of a research subject still(?).

i propose we formalize this system in a protocol with a snappy acronym: "TRUST Resolves Users' diSputed Transactions" (it's my loose recursive acronym, i do what i want). parties who implement the TRUST protocol would be "TRUSTed" parties.

"So we now know that contracts on Ethereum mean what they say, unless there is a community consensus that the contract actually means something else"

We always knew this, and we always knew that the same was true of Bitcoin (so-called 51% attack). The only point of note is that there was a coordinated effort to take this option - one which will not likely be possible in a future larger network.

> The only point of note is that there was a coordinated effort to take this option - one which will not likely be possible in a future larger network.

Saying "this is possible in Bitcoin" despite its large size then try to downplay Ethereum's same risk when it gets bigger just seems an odd way to justify Ethereum's value to me (an outsider to all cryptocurrencies). Between the two, Ethereum has the proven history of generating the coordinated effort. Bitcoin does not. So if both are the same size, the cryptocurrency's specific community and history is a factor in its value. I would rather avoid the smart contracts that Ethereum has as it seems like a liability.

It's not an argument for justifying its value, it's an argument for dismissing devaluation simply based on the hard fork. Network size advantages could end up being temporary, so the remainder of your argument is based on the premise that Bitcoin retains its size advantage.

The remaining question is if you think that the actions of a developer and early-adopter community around one of those technologies in its infancy should affect it's long-term valuation and capability. This seems silly to me. It would be like if Reddit wiped out everyone's karma when there were 100 users and then debating if this meant Reddit was no longer valuable - of course not. In this case it's even stronger, because having large numbers of users implicitly makes these sorts of events more difficult to pull off.

And yet, the Bitcoin community seems to stand behind their words and has yet to fold on their principles.

In effect, people actually trust Bitcoin to be a "source of truth", and that transactions won't go away just because a small oligopoly of developers decided they didn't like the way a perfectly legitimate transaction went down.

"small oligopoly"?? Majority of Ether holders supported the fork.

It's easy to get the feeling that the "default support" setting may have helped that, from a casual following of the ethereum scene

No, they just didn't care enough to make the effort to protest.

Blockchains fork constantly. Most forks aren't ever treated as a source of truth by anyone, but there's always the freedom to do so. We've created these fancy spools of receipt paper and we're all just trying to decide which one to pay attention to. Software can never make that decision for you, nor can a particular development team. I consider the freedom to choose one's own source of truth to be valuable. Others seek to force people to treat something as the truth even when it says something they disagree with, which is untenable without the use of actual force.

Blockchains are as immutable as the people who look at them decide they are. They're still pretty useful for creating reliable sources of truth.

It was adhoc because there was a time limit on avoiding the greater disaster

I like how the market is quickly rejecting it though

It's like if you liked a company but disliked the board, and the board accidentally fired themselves

Then you have Ethereum Classic

It has been interesting to witness ETC (the original non forked chain) gain momentum in the past 48 hours.

According to Poloniex, as of this post, trade volume for ETC (via BTC) is double that of ETH today. And asking price for ETC is up 140% while ETH is down -8%.

So this fork isn't over - in fact, there's still no guarantee it will succeed; the ETC vs ETH battle has just begun.

It makes sense volume would be high on ETC, the market is trying to resolve its price. The price of ETH is basically what it was before.

It also makes sense that it would be making big gains. It just crashed basically to zero, there's nowhere to go but up.

Neither of these metrics suggest long term viability to me. Although I am surprised it's trading as well as it is. 10% of ETH is pretty good!

"Nowhere to go but up" is perfectly logical reasoning, but may be an over simplification; as it implies speculation only.

There may be another factor involved here; perhaps the 'hive mind' (market) is arriving to a realization...

It's not clear how that's going to resolve. But ETC is still only at $2, vs. $12.23 for ETH. [1] Since you can still turn ETC into ETH at 1:1 (right?), that can't last.

The really strange thing this week is "Steem", which came out of nowhere a month ago and is now supposedly the #3 cryptocurrency. This appears to be some kind of heavily premined scam.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Not sure how you can change ETC int ETH 1:1... Any address that had a nonzero balance (except for the attacker ;) ) at the point of the hardfork has the same balance in both ETC and ETH. Since the private key for that address can sign on both chains. Some exchanges allow you to manage the two balances separately and you can exchange ETC for ETH but not 1:1, at whatever the market rate is.

Does anybody else find that, even though this might have been a "sensible" decision, particularly for people who have a vested (i.e., financial) interest, that now a lot of the "wow" factor and everything that made Ethereum exciting, has just evaporated? Now it's clear that rather than being idealistic and principled for the greater good, it's simply nothing more than a way for people to make money and for the powers that be to retain the status quo. Business as usual, "the system" will prevail. The magic has gone.

Yes. It will never be the same. Part of the appeal was to entirely delegate decisions to autonomous software. The autonomy aspect has been diminished at a meta level.

It had always been clear that there would be bugs and exploitable logic flaws in contracts. It's inherent to the platform. It does feel like a change in philosophy has happened now that people have invested in it, their principles are more pragmatic and less idealistic, which might be good short term but inevitably undermine the project.

The idea behind the project are still good I think, and position regarding this type of incidents will be a litmus test for future platforms based on similar concepts.

This situation perfectly demonstrates the possible repercussions of performing rushed and contentious hard forks (which is actually the worst way one should do a hard fork). Possible replay attacks alone cause considerable confusion amongst Ethereum users. I believe Vitalik and the whole Ethereum dev team sound much more relaxed than they really are at this point.

Note that Ethereum was just used for speculation so far. Had the same thing happened on Bitcoin, it would wreak havoc to its reputation and utility as a token to transfer wealth...most importantly because it would destroy two very important properties: Immutability and fungibility.

Ethereum developers don't seem to care that much about those properties so far.

The hardfork was on a clock to prevent the "hacker" (a.k.a. the person who just executed the code as it was coded and therefore inteded) from cashing out.

No doubt developers went through a few extremely stressful weeks.

Generally in real currency, when the government has difficulty managing things (like in Brazil with years of inflation), people seem to have no trouble returning to the currency after things are apparently fixed (for example, in Argentina where foreign investors are happy to buy government bonds now).

For that reason, I suppose Ethereum will continue to exist and draw support.

The reason why fiat currencies are stable is because they are backed by governments. Governments who can collect taxes, set monetary policy through central banks and mints, control inflation through various means, and so on. Recoveries from periods of instability usually involve massive efforts from governments to do all of those things better. Virtual currencies generally lack all of those mechanisms, so transitioning from "trust the protocol" to "trust the people in charge" is a huge and risky step.

Going off this, let's say I'm paid in Bitcoin and think the US Dollar is dumb. I still owe taxes in US Dollars and if taxes are 20-50% of what I spend money on in the world, then I'm going to have to use the US Dollar whether I want to or not. That gives the fiat currency weight - someone that is a third of my budget will only accept payment in it.

That's what a virtual currency lacks - someone that is a large portion of your spending that won't accept any other currency as payment. The US government is a large portion of my spending and won't accept non-USD payments.

The fact that you need to pay the government money in the currency they mandate means you'll use their currency. That guarantees users. For a virtual currency, there's no one demanding that I use it - at least no one that's a significant portion of my life that I can't avoid. So, I can easily leave and never come back. But if I lose faith in the US Dollar, I still need a significant portion of my income in dollars to give to the government.

I'm not sure that paying (US) taxes is a good example. The effort required to buy some virtual currency is insignificant compared to the effort required to file a tax return.

Yes, but US citizens are also legally compelled to file a tax return if their income is above about $10,000 to $15,000. So that effort is a sunk cost for many people.

> That's what a virtual currency lacks - someone that is a large portion of your spending that won't accept any other currency as payment.

Not if you're addicted to mail-order drugs that is!

To me, looks like people in Brazil have not a lot of other options. $ are always difficult to handle (groceries?) if not the native currency.

For Ethereum no such mechanism exists.

That people are buying and investing in bitcoin is hard to fathom but why would anyone after this bother with ethereum? Oh well, it's good entertainment.

I had my share of moving internationally and it's not trivial occasionally (although Transferwise took most of the hurt out by now!) but https://steemit.com/ethereum/@pauls/ethereum-fork-step-by-st... this is ridiculous.

Ah yes the downvote brigade is here. Hi!

I think it's a good question. And you're being polite. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

My interest in Ethereum is twofold:

1) I got into open source software at a time when you ran software locally. An OSS project could just post a tarball and users could download it, modify it, and use it. That meant hosting costs were low for the developers, and most of the computational cost was born by the users. This system has broken down in the X-as-a-Service era. If an open source developer wants to build a web service, they have to basically pay the entire computing bill for their users, which can get exorbitant if your software is popular.

Ethereum is a way to socialize the hosting costs. I can write software as an Ethereum contract, put it onto the network, and then users can pay for their own hosting. I can do the work of setting up the necessary software infrastructure, and they can pay for it without having to do the work of maintaining their own server instance. Something like Ethereum is needed to bring about a resurgence in end-user open source software.

2) Bitcoin has value because it can do some useful tasks, but not very many. You can keep a ledger, transfer funds to another person. That's about it. That's an advantage: it's the first mover, and it is very narrow in scope. It's easy to reason about, and offers a clear value proposition. It is useful the way Western Union is useful, or the way your savings account is useful. Those are big markets, and Bitcoin is worth whatever amount of value it takes to float some large number of transactions from the time of purchase to the time of sale.

Ethereum does function as a currency, but that's almost a side effect. Instead of just burning cycles on transaction processing the way Bitcoin does, Ethereum actually does valuable work. It is useful the way Google is useful, or the way Microsoft Word is useful. And those are really big markets, and growing. Ethereum is potentially worth whatever amount of value is required to float that computational power between the time of purchase and the time of execution. That could be a quite large number.

I think there will be a lot of projects like Ethereum, which do valuable work in a decentralized way and use a currency to float the running computational costs. Ethereum is the first credible such system we've seen and appears to be fairly general purpose. Whether it is The One, or just The First One leaves to be seen.

But as a speculator in currencies, I think it's a great diversification after you've invested in Bitcoin. And I am quite certain there will be another down the line.

1) Ethereum is a clear scam after this. Your contracts say one thing unless someone posits a vote where a miniscule fraction of the userbase votes one way and from that point on your contract suddenly say something else.

2) Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. It never was anything else and it will never be anything else. That temporarily you can trade shares in a Ponzi scheme without being badly burned is certainly a novelty but beyond that, it's a typical, very old scam.

> The foundation has committed to support the community consensus on the admittedly difficult hard fork decision.

Consensus? The hard fork has majority support, not consensus.

consensus [kuh n-sen-suh s]

1. Majority of opinion: The consensus of the group was that they should meet twice a month.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/consensus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

On Consensus and Humming in the IETF [1]

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282

It was a plurality support, not majority. The super majority didn't even vote.

I tend to think that not voting meant to be implicitly ok with the hf as that was supposed to be the default action. I was for the hard fork, and I didn't vote either. Were I against it, I would have voted.

How would "doing something" be the default action over "doing nothing"?

Regardless, you can make up all kind of reasons (for both sides), to justify this or that being the default action. But in the end, it's all assumptions of other people's intention, and those are always causing trouble.

There is a reason quorum is required for most type of serious voting.

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