Whoa. A core BitCoin dev (maaku7) just suggested blacklisting those transactions in miners[0]. More to come, I'm sure.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_sh...
Yes, that's a scary precedent.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_sh...
Yes, that's a scary precedent.
So if you're playing along at home: the consensus Bitcoin chain is the longest one consistent with the rules of Bitcoin Core, the lineal descendant of the Satoshi client.
This consensus chain currently includes 1+ transactions T, which effected this theft.
The proposal is for a large number of miners to abandon the consensus chain and start mining a new chain at one transaction prior to T, replaying all real transactions minus T plus a new transaction which would moot T.
With enough hashpower, this chain eventually surpasses the current longest chain and at that point all points on network, not just mining cartel, will agree that T never happened.
This is supposed to be impossible because it is incentivize-incompatible, as the mining cartel would lose an incredible amount of segniorage to make it happen and it wouldn't be a sure thing. Point #2 is mooted by mining centralization, a ship which has sailed. Point #1 could get mooted by a payment outside the standard understanding of the Bitcoin protocol.
Comedy gold!
It might be one of the first cases of bribery where the briber doesn't have to talk to the bribee to discuss the object of the conspiracy, the price, or how the bribe would be delivered.
Kinda reminds me of Eliezer's concept of acausal blackmail
Comedy. Gold!
(Of course, this would likely drive the value of 1 BTC to exactly $0)
(Edit: This is all a demonstration of how the security of the blockchain absolutely depends on mining hashpower being widely decentralized and distributed)
> This is supposed to be impossible because it is incentivize-incompatible
Enter the wonderful world of coco values and side payments in game theory. Incentive compatibility and strategyproofness arguments break down when parties are compensated (implicitly or explicitly) out-of-band. That's not always a bad thing - it can lead to more efficient, utility maximizing equilibria. That said, under the status quo, we're trading one flavor of centralization (monetary policy) for another (core committers and mining pools).
It has never happened. This time will not be different.
Interesting history: Luke-jr (core dev) blacklisted some addresses in a package install of bitcoin he maintained, but this sort of censorship was never in the mainline source.
Source: joined Bitcoin community in early 2011, been enjoying bottomless popcorn ever since :-)
Very different from the ethereum situation. Miners won't go for it though. Would cost them too much from confidence loss.
The future is all about multiple versions of reality maintained simultaneously. There's no reason there has to be a single monetary system with agreement. Small groups of people with different values can have a totally different view of who has how much money.
You're right it's confusing, that's why this hasn't started happening until the software age. Now that we have software, we don't have to understand the books, we just have to be able to write software that can make sense of them.
There will always be a "main Ethereum" for people who need a single-source-of-truth and don't want to deal with multiple realities. But the point of anarchist software is that everyone doesn't have to agree. Everyone can just do their own thing, and elect to share realities when they want to.
This idea that there is one Bitcoin Network and one Ethereum Network is the biggest misconception people have about federated technologies. People imagine consensus means "one truth". But consensus means many truths, each which only have consensus within themselves. There's always been many Bitcoins. We just ignore most of them, by choice. We're so used to someone forcing us at gunpoint to agree to a single universal legal reality that we have a hard time imagining a world where there are lots of different sets of conflicting rules, and individuals choose which ones to pay attention to.
1) in actual fact, very few votes were cast for ETH. Although many people ran the clients that supported a fork, most of them simply did so because it was the only option for their chosen client - there was no non-fork client option easily available to them. Very few people explicitly chose the clients to support the fork.
2) "Will of the people" defeats the point of ETHs smart contracts. If everyone in the pool decided to buy in on a bet of a digital coin toss, and the bet ends up 51% heads and 49% tails, is it ok for the heads bettors to simply consensus the bet out of the chain and reclaim their money in the event that tails wins?
Despite this fundamental truth, blockchains are extremely useful.