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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

The vitriol in r/ethereum is an amazing sight. There are cult-like levels of declarations of support for either chain. It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system, and that prior to the DAO 'theft', everyone seemed to be proponents of the 'code is law' viewpoint. How quickly things change, and how little time it takes for people to switch their beliefs and villify those who still hold the old beliefs.

It's certainly fun to watch the fallout...

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> It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system

They aren't at all. Immutable smart contracts are the basis of ETC and not ETH. It's only one difference, but it's a difference as fundamental as the difference between gold and dollars.

ETH is now a centralized currency. I have trouble seeing any purpose to using ETH now that it's centralized, given that existing centralized money/contract systems are much more mature. But given both ETH and ETC are too buggy for me to use, I've no skin in the game, so I'm happy to wait and see if some benefit to a centralized cryptocurrency emerges that I wasn't aware of.

Doesn't this episode illustrate that ETC could go the way of ETH, whenever the miners decide? ETH was always ETH, it just took a while for people to realize it.

Mathematically yes, there's nothing preventing ETC from doing the same thing. But ideologically, the lines have been drawn. At least for the time being, I think it's a safe bet that people who aren't committed to decentralization will just go with ETH instead of investing in ETC and voting for future forks.

Again though, I think the design of both cryptocurrencies is prohibitively error-prone, so it's kind of a moot point.

No, ETC will still be ETC, new forks will just get new monikers. I'm holding out for ET-TNG.

The ETH camp still defends the "code is law" principle. The point in which ETH and ETC proponents differ is how that principle should be prioritized relative to "the majority is always right" principle.

It's about the same as your typical video game console war, really.

Except the vocabulary is smarter. This only highlights the point that human hate for each other is orthogonal to apparent reasons behind it.

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