The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence | Hacker News Reader

The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence

ethereumclassic.github.io

72 pointsETH_Classic71 comments

Fair critique about theatrics aside, I appreciate the write-up of their grievances, their rationale, and their goals. For those who aren't active in the blogosphere or discussion boards, this document serves as single, concrete manifestation of the things the ETC folks have been saying as of late.

Well, okay. But this isn't an answer to the fundamental dilemma of the DAO hack: either Ethereum should have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren't really a good idea, or it shouldn't have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren't really a good idea. This manifesto just argues that the second option is right, but that doesn't change the conclusion.

Specifically, I have seen a lot of buggy software. I don't think I've ever seen any truly bug-free software. I expect, therefore, that if I put money into a smart contract, that contract is going to have a bug in it somewhere. What happens when the bug is discovered and exploited? If you say "Some humans will decide that's not what was meant," that's wonderful--but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's very well-supported. If you say "No, the contract is the contract" (as these people do), fantastic: you have a compellingly different product, not just a bunch of complicated math on top of a system that's as squishy as my current financial system. But why at all should I believe that it's different for the better? Now I have an expectation that a bug will exist, and be exploited, and it will be correct for the bug to be exploited. If the goal is correctness, that's great. But if the goal is getting me to use the system, why would I want that?

Or, as Matt Levine put it in his writeup of the DAO hack (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...):

"Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong."

> but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's very well-supported.

Totally independent of Ethereum, this style of argument is kinda weak. We really should be trying to build something better, either by improving the existing system or building a parallel system that will slowly replace what's there. Good enough is the enemy of great.

Unfortunately, building better stuff winds up requiring building a bunch of stupid stuff that doesn't work out.

It's smart to avoid being an early adopter, unless you have some unique interest in whatever the topic might be, photography, self driving cars, or Ethereum.

Back to Ethereum, yeah, i agree smart contracts aren't a good idea. They may be a good idea in the future, but today they're a mess. I think, in general, some sort of blockchain transaction history is a great idea; it should be adopted somehow. I can't say exactly what that might look like though.

>Totally independent of Ethereum, this style of argument is kinda weak. We really should be trying to build something better, either by improving the existing system or building a parallel system that will slowly replace what's there. Good enough is the enemy of great.

While I agree that this style of rethoric is often overused, GP does raise an important question. Now that Ethereum has forked, there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the real benefits of the system, and about whether the benefit is worth the risk of switching.

The Ethereum project has always marketed the value of the system by emphasizing the predictable, deterministic, and impartial nature of the blockchain. Now that it has failed this first trial by fire, it is up to the project to present a new value proposition for why it is an improvement over the traditional legal system. We as the public must ask questions to analyze and critique this value proposition.

>GP does raise an important question. Now that Ethereum has forked, there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the real benefits of the system, and about whether the benefit is worth the risk of switching.

Oh, absolutely. We should always talk about what was good, what was bad, and what was irrelevant.

I feel the "what we have now is ok" argument is dismissive. It actively prevents us considering the good, bad or irrelevant perspective.

After rereading everything, perhaps i was harsh. The OP presented things in comparison to the current system, which is the right thing to do. I think the emphasis on "the current system works" distracted me.

You bring up a fair point. The only reason I feel the need to emphasize "the current system works" is that so much cryptocurrency discourse seems to act as if the current system is horrible beyond repair and literally anything would be better than it. That's far from true, and it's definitely far from true when you've reintroduced humans caring about fraud--just human programmers writing soft-fork code (that didn't even work right, according to this manifesto) as opposed to people who make a profession out of understanding fraud.

There's a lot to be fixed about our current financial system. But I think both Ethereum-with-fork and Ethereum-without-fork are demonstrably worse than the status quo (which I think you also agree with). Ethereum is great as an experiment, but now we have experimental results from the DAO hack, showing something that clearly needs to be rethought. This manifesto seems to instead be presenting Ethereum-without-fork as a good and complete option, and all of its reasoning could have been written the day before the hack.

I look forward to reading the response where the Ethereum (non Classic) community writes their Constitution where they declare how to govern future forking.

Ha ha only serious.

Edit: Seems people don't know HHOS: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

The answer is that any time there's a proposed fork the one that changes less rules is called "Classic" and the other picks the new name. If there's a truly ambiguous split, one side tactically cedes the name, like "Classic" did with "Ethereum".

Ideally the system would have splits as a first class feature and we could have some kind of versioning system where the more splits a system had the longer its "name" or effective address

They'll make a modest proposal that they can replace the Kansas City Federal Bank. Missouri has too many federal reserve banks anyway.

For those who havent been paying attention to the drama: this is a breakaway blockchain for people who want to use ethereum but refuse to use a blockchain in which a $50MM exploit was reversed. There's a lot of false information out there, particularly about how/why the exploit was reversed. Don't take anyone's word for it; ask for sources.

> a $50MM exploit

Calling it an exploit seems politically charged. There wasn't an exploit in the Ethereum software itself, which behaved exactly as intended. Instead, someone wrote a shitty, poorly-designed contract that had a loophole in it. Someone took advantage of that loophole and make a bunch of money off of it. To me, "exploit" has connotations of breaking the ethereum system somehow, which was not the case.

Ethereum Classic seems to be sticking by the original stated purpose of Ethereum (to have fully automated, non-repudiable contracts).

The other Ethereum seems to be instead stating that it's acceptable for the judgement of the Ethereum devs to have ultimate control and veto power over anything that happens on the Ethereum blockchain. In other words, Ethereum is more of a fiduciary contract system than any sort of "objective" contract platform.

To be clear, I have no vested interest either way. I have never been involved with Ethereum.

exploit: "a software tool designed to take advantage of a flaw in a computer system"

The exploit was on a poorly written smart contract, not ethereum itself, correct -- I never said otherwise.

>the judgement of the Ethereum devs to have ultimate control and veto power over anything

This is the misinformation I'm talking about. The Ethereum devs had neither control nor veto power. That's simply not how hard forking works.

It was made clear multiple times that the decision was up to the community.[1][2] The decision was coordinated via a decentralized community hashpower vote,[3][4] and executed via a majority hashpower commitment.[5] Exchanges and the foundation carried on with the longest chain[6] as is intended with nakamoto consensus.[7]

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4r9yud/the_curren... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ro2p9/options_in... [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tlb1y/hard_fork_... [4]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tffta/hard_fork_... [5]https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tsl16/new_blog_p... [6]https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2016.07.15-Ethereum-Hard... [7]http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/

The "vote" was opt-out of the hard fork, and most people are not involved enough to opt out. Effectively, the devs just decided for everyone else.

That is incorrect. The Mist browser forces you to select a choice upon startup. There was no default. Mist is the most popular client.

And for those who didn't open mist while the vote was taking place?

Nothing happened for them... Mist is a client that lets you see your balances and send ether or other tokens from one account to another. If you don't open Mist, you don't send any coins on one chain or the other, and nothing happens with your accounts.

The "vote" is ETC. Your examples make me happy you are not an authority figure and also makes me want to donate to the NRA

The devs, or the miners?

I thought this is the original blockchain?

The original blockchain was deprecated on 3/14. Neither ETH nor ETC are using it. http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/introduction/the-homestead-rele...

That's technically true but not actually so and is very misleading. Quoting you,

> Don't take anyone's word for it; ask for unbiased sources.

>That's technically true but not actually so

Not sure what you mean by this. In case you need a refresher, this is how hardforking works: http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/1952/what-is-a-h...

I thought meanings should not be literal but based on interpretation? Is that principle thrown out of the window again?

> The original blockchain was deprecated on 3/14.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Ethereum used to be a protocol but now it is an interest group. You said it best, just study the facts.

It is very refreshing to see people stand up for principles against narrow self-interest of a political group or authority.

It's principles either way. The principle of binding contracts vs. the principle of agreements performing as intended.

What happens when V.B. has too many hard fork decisions to make, or even delegate to his Foundation Lieutenants?

I bet you non-ironically have uttered "just this once" too

"Just this once" would be the stupidest idea in the world, preserving neither principle.

I don't even know who VB is. I only care about this from a technological perspective. But presumably such a drastic action would not be happening often, if you have to get most of the network to vote.

Was there something that gives a ruling council the ability to override miners? If not I think you're being unreasonable in the way you're criticizing.

Due to the nature of mining on Ethereum (and most cryptocurrencies) you do not need the consent of many.

Miners work in pools, and it's up to the pool operators to make decisions for a hard fork. In the case of Ethereum it took about 4 or 5 mining pools to reach majority (over 51% of network hashing power).

A great deal of miners simply leave their mining rigs running and didn't make a decision either way. Miners largely do not care about any cryptocurrency. They will, understandably, mine whatever is most profitable.

Miners also depend heavily on ping times and the total mining power of their pools. With 15 second block times every millisecond counts to make sure you're the first with the right block and get your reward. There was really no time for anti-fork mining pools to get setup well and it takes months for a pool to amass an attractive amount of miner hashing power.

Overall the vote was about 5% for the fork, 1% against, and 94% abstaining. Ideally it would take a true 51% to change the network.

This isn't about principles, its about money.

How is splitting into ETC earning anyone money?

ETC is a pump and dump scam.

Hilarious that this comment is downvoted. The coin has been quite literally pumped and dumped over the last week or so, and its value has fallen to around half of its ATH and around 15 percent of the value of the winning fork.

However one feels about the principal of the decision to fork and the decision of the market to follow the Ethereum Foundation, downvoting factual descriptions of recent price movement on the ETC chain constitutes inherently scammy behavior.

That people tried to profit by manipulating the price doesn't mean that the chain itself is a scam.

I don't think it's correct that the only relevant component of people using it is people speculating/pumping -and-dumping .

So, I would think that saying that it is a scam, is not true.

Note: I do not own any of it. Nor have I owned any cryptocurrency that was available on any exchange. (I've owned testnet ether, both pre release, and recently, but that's it)

The ETC fork has %16 of the mining power of ETH, and the price of ETC is at this moment about %15 the price of ETH. This implies its price is following mining power, roughly. That's not a "scam" that's just a smaller alt.

It's worth noting that before the fork there was no ETC "movement", there was just people who were unhappy with the fork. Everyone expected the fork to go to ETH.

However, when sufficient mining power refused to fork, a movement coalesced from the people who opposed the fork.

ETC is still up %300 from its stable post-fork price. The current mining power is up 2x-4x what it was post fork as well. Most of the rise of its price was preceded by increases in its mining power.

This implies that people are putting money into mining it.

When a fork happens you end up with a lot of people who have duplicated coins, so you would expect the "losing" fork to have some significant price dynamics.

But the growth in hash rate and the sustained price implies this is not a "scam".

That said I don't know what its future is- it needs a roadmap and a reason to exist to become viable long term. But at this point you can't say that won't happen.

I hold neither ETC nor ETH.

Sometimes it's hard to tell a manifesto from a pump-and-dump. A good heuristic might be: "does it contain a stock ticker symbol?"

No one will dethrone the great Satoshi/NSA.

Eth is a pump and dump scam using every buzzword in the book

Short ETH.

They could still do that without splitting into ETC. In fact, without splitting into ETC, it's even easier to stay in the sideline and yell into the sky that fundamentally, the technical aspect of ETH is shit. By splitting into ETC, they gave up a lot of arguments against ETH, leaving themselves with only the ideological argument.

ETH and ETC aren't the only games in town. You can still short it wrt other currencies.

No one disputes that. What you said is true, and completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand (splitting into ETC would allow more profit when shorting ETH -- considering that shorting ETH is something you can already do).

I've pretty much lost all faith in Ethereum and its motives. The way this has played out pretty much demonstrates that a good idea, no matter how beautiful, while still subject to being ruled by people capable of corruption/greed/or whatever you want to call it, can be tainted absolutely.

It's interesting because for so many years, Ethereum was hailed as this ultra-resilient alternative to Bitcoin. Developed slowly and deliberately after Bitcoin had already gotten traction, it was supposed to fill in where Bitcoin couldn't.

Instead, it's proved to be far more chaotic and unreliable than Bitcoin at its worst hours. Building currencies (or a "decentralized smart contract platform") is hard.

Really it was doing ok, they were warned about the bug and released it anyway. Their problem is simple, you can't have people or persons in charge of the blockchain, it's not their property. Same old same old in crypto, human greed and egos ruin things everytime.

I think that's what Ethereum Classic addresses.

I was curious what the respective chains hashrate is:

Ethereum classic: 650~ GH/s

Ethereum: 4400~ GH/s

The minority chain is honestly doing better than I expected. I wonder how long it will last?

What about price:

Classic: $1.87 USD

Ethereum: $11.69 USD

That's fairly significant volume for both. It will be interesting to see where this ends up.

Surprisingly, the volume of Ethereum Classic trades has been much higher than the volume on the fork side since the fork.

Most of it has been from BTC-ETC markets, which shows that support for ETC came mostly from outside the original Ethereum community.

No, its because things are traded against bitcoin.

I don't remember the hash power on classic, but it is definitely up since the fork.

One amusing consequence of the "fork" is that it demonstrates that there are few Etherium contracts outstanding that matter. Otherwise, the people on opposite sides of the contract would be having big disputes over where their contract ended up. Did anybody other than the DAO crowd actually use that feature for anything big enough or long term enough to matter?

DigixDAO has and decided to stay only on the ETH chain. It's still no where near as large as The DAO though.

Ethereum is still new, and something large and valuable like a DAO should take a long while to develop and test.

I can't tell if the article is serious, knowingly over the top, or even an act of an epic trolling.

In any case, it's an excellent demonstration of how techno-libertarian crypto-currency advocates inhabit an entirely alternative reality.

> techno-libertarian crypto-currency advocates inhabit an entirely alternative reality.

I really don't understand how people keep parroting stuff like this. By any metric, Bitcoin has been a resounding success and has completely discredited any of its original detractors. Despite this, people still go around saying "Haha, Bitcoin, what a silly idea. It will never work.". It already has worked!

If anything, people like you (no personal insult intended, I'm simply addressing your comment) seem to inhabit some alternate reality where Bitcoin isn't tremendously valuable and there isn't a booming economy (with white, black, and grey markets) build around Bitcoin.

Currently approx 2.3 transactions per second

Last I heard it was around 7, but this is an uninteresting self-imposed bandwidth limitation. It's not a fundamental issue with the system.

I read the article. It is pretty clear in its purpose and reasoning and its points are cogent.

Your response is one of characterization, purely. You raise no objections, you provide no argument or reason to believe "they" inhabit an "alternative reality". You do call them names, though "techno-libertarian" is a weird one because how is that different from any other libertarian? I know of no group of people who call themselves "techno-libertarians" so this would seem to imply you are using it as a pejorative or as a code phrase to signal others of a similar ideology to you.

At any rate, your response, like so much commentary these days, contains no addressing of the argument, no specific claims or points, but merely derision and attitude.

If it was Bitcoin I would say putting regulation in place made no sense. If you wanted regulated currency you could use USD, EUR and so on.

As for ETH putting regulation in place makes more sense. What you get is "regulated smart contracts" environment. "Fiat smart contracts" if you will. The real question then turns into: How is the regulatory authority governed? Is it a participatory democracy? A representative democracy? A dictatorship?

That's not to say that there's no need platform for unregulated smart contracts as well.

There's no indication that the Ethereum Foundation intends to treat the platform as a regulated environment.

What the fork shows is that they were willing, at least once, to launch a big effort to save one large faulty contract and its investors, in the still relatively early history of the blockchain.

It seems ridiculous to think that Ethereum as a platform will have a serious system of regulation. And that's part of why this kind of one-off special case fork is so problematic.

No indication? Lol, they act like it's OK to alter the blockchain whenever they stand to lose. Regulation of eth is exactly what they are doing, and what they said they wouldn't during the premine sale. Oh then they tried to steal the coins and sell them but got caught lol! Nobody in their right mind will trust eth again, especially with the actions of the people behind it. Oh and here's some cause and effect for you, don't take my word for it, this is the internet..http://cointimes.tech/2016/08/13/ethereum-reputation-has-bee...

> Nobody in their right mind will trust eth again, especially with the actions of the people behind it.

Let me offer some data points:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4vlk4j/consensys_...

Projects confirmed on ETH: Ethereum Foundation, Digix, Maker, Colony, AKASHA, ROULΞTH, Plutus, REIDAO, vDice, SingularDTV, Braveno, Etheropt, otlw, Etherdelta, Swarm, Gnosis, Augur, Velocity, FreeMyVunk, RealityKeys, Golem, EOL, ConsenSys, ICONOMI, EthSlurp, Decibel.LIVE, cPay, Rex, DinarDirham, Embark, Dindle (Decentralised eBook Market), uPort

Projects confirmed on ETC: Stampery, Daemon Dark Market

What I mean is that there's no indication of a willingness to seriously regulate the platform as in setting up some kind of court and doing routine interventions.

Which makes it seem a bit disingenuous to claim that Ethereum contracts are now "just like" ordinary contracts, or that Ethereum is a "regulated platform."

The hard fork looks like a slightly panicked reaction to a rather extreme situation that threatened to undermine the platform in its very early days.

I don't agree that "nobody in their right mind" would trust Ethereum now and we'll see how that plays out.

If I wanted plain old human-managed contracts, I would just use the legal system. As much as I instinctively distrust the government, I trust the government to handle my contracts a lot more than I trust some random software devs who thought it was a good idea to write multi-million dollar smart contracts in a language inspired by Javascript.

> "Fiat smart contracts"

Isn't this just a synonym for "regular contract"?

I really wish they would both just go away.

Seriously? Dude if you haven't made money on these two then your doing it wrong. Mining trading even buying into the ico which I never do has been extremely profitable. Plus the entertainment value has been spectacular

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