Ah, hardcore libertarians. You're all completely mad, but I won't deny you're consistent.
Many of the people who are backing Ethereum Classic (the non-fork) are doing so because they like the ideas of Ethereum but want it to be truly independent. If the fork succeeds many people take it as a sign that Ethereum is a "proprietary" coin rather than a more open "nobody owns it" system like Bitcoin.
I have no dog in the fight but that's how I understand it.
That's a good analogy, but not for the reason you're thinking. The expert consensus on the 2008 bank bailouts is that they had to be done, because letting them fail would've turned the recession into another Great Depression, and that much harder to recover from. Does that mean bailouts are good and proper? No, bailouts are terrible. It means the right way to avoid the moral hazard would have been to better regulate the banks and never have let them get "too big to fail" in the first place.
I feel the same way about Ethereum. The DAO hack was a no-win situation, because these "smart contracts" should never have been created to begin with. They're always going to end up in situations like this, because they involve the affairs of messy, imperfect humans. The correct answer to the DAO mess was never to get into it in the first place.
I don't think this is true at all. The DAO is (and was) a very cool idea. The only problem was that the code was complex enough that those who casually reviewed it failed to notice the vulnerability that the attacker noticed.
As for the financial crisis, it was a combination of an unexpected event and entrenched interests scrambling to benefit as much as possible from it. By definition, entrenched interests want a continuation of the status quo, and that is what happened. We think about how bad it would have been if some homeowners would have foreclosed, but we fail to think about the people who would have been able to afford a home at a great price.
Of a carefully curated set of worse choices, such as "A: Sit back and watch the banks keep going.", sure.
There are a ton of ways the bailout could have been done that don't involve giving money to the same people who screwed up before. For instance, let those banks fail but insure the individual depositors (trickle-down to insuring individual holders of MBS-backed retirement funds, etc.) and recapitalize a new set of banks.
> because letting them fail would've turned the recession into another Great Depression
Yes, letting all banks fail would. But there's no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
> It means the right way to avoid the moral hazard would have been to better regulate the banks and never have let them get "too big to fail" in the first place.
Yes, we should try to regulate, but there'll always be new loopholes so we need to stop rewarding the bad actors when, not if, they find a new scam.
> [Smart contract]. They're always going to end up in situations like this, because they involve the affairs of messy, imperfect humans.
And yet your solution is to add another layer of humans?
> The correct answer to the DAO mess was never to get into it in the first place.
Like buying Enron. But not all companies are scams and not all smart-contracts will be ineptly written.
The key point is that while laws may be minimally, moderately, or highly flawed, the rule of law is the idea that we should have a proper way of changing them to prevent future events, not just decree one person an evil hacker and a group of other people victims.
The hard fork is like if a no parking sign was installed on a street and tickets were issued to everyone who had parked there the previous year, before the sign was in place.
Putting up the sign is not a problem, nor is enforcing the rule post-sign, the problem is making a decree that impacts what happened in the past.
A ban on ex post facto law is such a core concept in Western civilization that it's pretty shocking anyone would actually think such a rule is a good idea.
I suppose one thing that is a universal among humans is the strong desire to form corrupt groups to extract wealth from human systems.
Not really a fair comment IMHO. Western Civilizations also have the core concept that intent matters and that not every potential conflict/problem can be foreseen. Thus, you have vaguely worded laws that are subject to human interpretation (courts).
I understand that ETH billed itself as being above all that. So I can see why some are justifiably upset. I just think your comment about ex post facto law is a little misleading given that there is, in fact, a great deal of wiggle room afforded to the courts in the West.
While I think smart contracts are somewhat modeled after Western courts, the beauty of them is that they are predictable and deterministic. Doing various sorts of forks is quite messy, so perhaps the ideal smart contract system would have another layer between VM and forking.
I've heard it said that these folks are a form social-darwinists who have decreed (in their sandbox) that "code is law" and that, as such, any and all manipulation of the working code is perfectly acceptable without regard to external factors such as ethics, intent, and reasonable behavioral mores.
Its like they've taken the WORST aspects of the real financial systems such as money begetting money, rampant speculation, intractably complex and arbitrary rules, etc and jacked it up to the Nth degree for their monopoly-money world and are now taking it dead seriously (and getting offended when people suggest that their "coins" aren't _really_ worth what they think they're worth-- because, yep, conversion to REAL money is a problem for them).
I like the concept of a crypto currency as a way to exchange goods, services (and possibly contracts), but the players thus far leave me completely turned off.
The beauty of a "code is law" system is that its behavior is not subject to human interpretation and human biases... we can run a simulation on a test instance of the VM to test whatever scenario we choose, and we may review code and decide whether or not to trust it.
Systems like this are inherently adversarial. The idea of a "code is law" sort of system is that code could be developed to deal with the myriad adversarial situations in far more efficient and predictable ways than the way humans have historically dealt with them.
Legal uncertainty is a transaction cost and an existential risk in all contracts. In order for Ethereum to avoid this added cost, it would reduce the unpredictability of a contract's outcome. If a hard fork might happen to nullify a transaction, then anyone who is expecting to depend on it must add some uncertainty to his/her portfolio.
There there would still be risk of code bugs in a code-is-law system, but over time contract code would be discovered to be trustworthy in the same way that apache's source code is considered largely to be devoid of major security holes.
The law is the law.
And, when effective steps have been taken to prevent real remedies under the law, then, in practice, the war of all against all is the law.
Well, in a decentralized distributed system, the "law" may not be clearly part of any jurisdiction, and enforcement may be impossible, making the law somewhat less helpful at resolving disputes.
Your country's law applies to you, as you use the system, but not to the contracts themselves. If you contract for something illegal you can be tossed in your country's prisons but the contract can't be altered.
Then this debacle has been a spectacular failure on that front, and given the fact that no system can be perfectly secure, this will happen again in the future.
Yes, and I would have hoped/expected the curators of the Ethereum ecosystem to have greater respect for moral hazard.
And that's the core reason this rubs people the wrong way: it smells like financial shenanigans. We don't like it when people do that stuff in real life, and we don't like it when it happens in a "funny-money" system that deigns to become serious.
The good news is that (as far as I can tell) no serious real money has been poured into or out of this system. If it has, the money was hopefully treated as a highly speculative investment-- thrill money if you like. Not counting Watt-hours and personal time as money, obviously.
Once the hacker or whitehats start selling, this could end up being a pretty significant transfer of wealth from BTC to ETH
Once the DAO hacker or whitehats start selling the price of ETC is likely to fall off a cliff. Should bring the fork episode to a conclusion.
Both of these factors improve ETH's prospects in the short term.