Comment by mistermumble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistermumble | Hacker News Reader

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum".

The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company has increased trust, not decreased it. As the saying goes: "What does not kill you, makes you stronger."

More and more developers building applications on top of this platform. The MelonPort token sale ICO (on the Ethereum platform) sold out in 2.5 minutes yesterday.

It's not just independent Ramen-fueled startups, but "enterprise Ethereum" has become a thing. JP Morgan, Santander, Microsoft, Redhat, Cisco, Accenture, etc -- for better or worse -- are joining the Ethereum bandwagon.

I think it is still way early to call a winner in the blockchain platform wars. There are dozens of well-funded competitors trying to gain dominance over established platforms like the Bitcoin technology stack and the Ethereum platform -- including IBM-led Hyperledger Fabric and the bluechip banking consortium led by R3CEV.

But if there is one dog at the top of the blockchain platform heap right now, it is Ethereum.

See:

http://www.coindesk.com/jp-morgan-santander-said-join-enterp...

https://media.consensys.net/the-birth-of-enterprise-ethereum...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5u6uhb/melonport_...

I am also bullish on Ethereum. A few points to notice:

- the price is pretty stable relative to early Bitcoin.

- Vitalik and the other devs are still building out economic/game theory models. And Ethereum has successfully made a hard fork. That suggests the organization has some leeway to skate where the puck is going, so to speak.

- it's very early days in terms of building out the "standard library". Lots of people working on this, collectively and privately. It's a little like the railroad tracks have been laid but they are still building the trains, not to mention stations.

- Ethereum has the benefit of being overshadowed by Bitcoin, which insulates it a bit from speculators and scammers. This is only a temporary effect, but I think obscurity helps Ethereum grow smart and slow right now.

- the forums are all about things being built with Ethereum. Bitcoin has a chicken and egg problem, where retailers need to get on board for consumers to care. But nerds can sit down and make something useful on Ethereum today.

I would put one check on this endorsement, though. Ethereum is uniquely useful in situations where you can't trust anyone. It shines in that environment.

Mostly though, we do trust the people around us. I think once the Ethereum community starts releasing big trustless e-institutions, it will be clear that most of them could run just fine with Venmo, WebRTC, and a little JavaScript.

So I think Ethereum will always have a more back-office feel, and I don't quite see it being on The Today Show any time soon.

But Vitalik Buterin is very smart and I wouldn't bet against him.

How did hard forking after the DAO hack increase trust? Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract?

Now it's established that there's a chance a contract can be "too big to fail".

I think it would have built more trust if they had let the money go. To paraphrase a saying, they would have spent 15% of ETH on training everyone to build safe contracts, and to vet contracts properly before "investing" in one.

> Wasn't the whole point that "no one" could modify the block chain or the results of a contract?

If you hold this view you're going to be very unhappy with the many innovations we'll see in the blockchain space in the coming years: Almost every technology in the future is going to put the desires of the community ahead of any specific piece of code- Computer code is a tool, not the final decision maker.

Forking to add features and expand capabilities is great. I'm not arguing against that. I disagree with forking to undo the effects of a hack on a contract.

You speak as if this was an individual's decision. It was not. Vitalik may be influential, but it was not his decision to fork. The community decided so, by a significant majority.

Didn't the majority of the people deciding to fork stand to profit? I.e. they would restore their DAO funds? That's my understanding and makes me not want to touch Ethereum with a 10ft pole. Seems very much like mob rule vs a system of rules and contracts.

No, the people deciding to fork were the ETH holders. A lot of them owned DAO tokens, but not a majority, probably about 10%. There was a coin vote before the fork which showed about 85% support, and the result was confirmed by the market after the fork (ETH is about 10x more expensive than ETC).

>Computer code is a tool, not the final decision maker.

Yeah, especially in systems where the fundamental model is code is law

Not sure how anyone could trust it after they reversed a perfectly legitimate transaction.

The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said.

Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and reversed the whole thing.

If I wanted a contract system where humans were able to void contracts, I would use the traditional legal contract system. Ethereum no longer has any advantage.

> "The code is the law", they said.

And the law can change if the community deems it wise.

It was pandering to big stakeholders. That's the problem with all cryptocurrencies, they don't solve big players having huge influence over the underlying currency. It is still very much a "who you know" and "how much profit is at stake" kind of game, which is one of the main reasons people hate state-run currencies. The little guys lose thier shirt and get a "too bad,so sad" response. A big player losses thier shirt and they go cry to thier dev friends who fix the boo boo with a fork. How about we fork on every compliant of someone making a mistake?

I agree with what you're saying 100%, actually. Egalitarianism in the blockchain world remains an elusive goal, just as it does in other fields.

You agree with what I stated, but what you wrote that I responded to suggested the community was in agreement on the fork. It was powerful members of the community who stood to lose a lot of money who pushed for the fork, and everyone had to follow unless they also wanted to lose a lot of money. This doesn't look good on Ethereum and saying "the community changed the law" isn't the actual truth, nor really how Ethereum was advertised.

I think any time you get people together to hammer out a plan it's going to be messy and imperfect. However (1) Vitalik didn't have final say on anything (2) Various vote attempts and the message boards seemed to indicate preference for a fork, and this was also the case in my social network. This to me indicates the right decision was made, even if there was probably unfair favoratism on some levels.

> nor really how Ethereum was advertised

This meme is kind of silly to me: Would it be false advertising for BMW to say "Pushing the gas pedal makes the car go forward" after a single BMW had to be taken to the shop because of a broken gas pedal?

(I'm talking about advertising for ethereum in general, not for the DAO itself. I agree the DAO advertising was totally inexcusable for many reasons. I wish I had had the guts to say so more publicly at the time.)

It's much more fundamental than that example though. BMW only guarantees that the gas pedal moves the car forwards in normal operation.

Ethereum even now advertises itself on its homepage as

>Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

But clearly, we had a program that very specifically ran exactly as programmed, and its operation was interfered by a third party (the community hard-fork). Ethereum offers a guarantee that is not held; this is false advertising.

If it is a guarantee that cannot be held, it is still false advertising.

But even more so, Ethereum imagines itself to have no established authority; to be decentralized. But obviously, it is not. The final say clearly remains with the Ethereum developers, even if the community has the option to secede. (You can renounce your citizenship from the US, everyone can wholesale, but this does not mean the US has no centralized authority.) Bitcoin, of course, offers the same situation; the difference being that bitcoin's authorities do not collude, and by community happenstance, it is unlikely that they will. Such a fork is unimaginable in that universe.

Ethereum (and its many users) imagines itself to be of Bitcoin's equivalence, a large enough and stable enough network that offers little ability and incentive for its authorities to collude. But, of course, this is false. It remains small enough that a hard-fork is viable; proven by the act of a hard-fork.

This is false advertising, in the sense that it misrepresents fundamental components of the system. It might support decentralization given a sufficiently large network, but it does not (yet) have sufficiently large network. But either it pretends its network is sufficiently large, or it pretends that requirement does not exist.

This hasn't been a problem with Bitcoin. No transactions have been reversed because a big player got robbed. The only hard forks in Bitcoin have been due to implementation bugs, and it's only happened once or twice.

You still have most of the power concentrated within the developers, pool owners, and exchanges. This has resulted in major instability due to some of these major players operating effectively scams via either outright stealing or the hiding of major losses.

Most of the issues with currencies(and most everything) is trust and the motivations of other people. Technology might help democratize a world currency, but those who corner the market first will have major influence over it, which in turn will quickly result in the same imbalance in power which was trying to be avoided.

> And the law can change if the community deems it wise.

In other words, the code isn't the law, which is exactly what I said.

In otherer words, the constitution is above the law. And the constitution allows laws to be changed, in this case by the will of the majority. The same is true for all public blockchains btw.

So you're saying ethereum definitely doesn't have any fundamental advantages over the traditional legal contract system? I agree.

I'm saying that the main rule for all blockchains (not only Ethereum) is that consensus is decided by the majority. This is their "constitution". The majority of the stakeholders in a blockchain can decide to change the consensus rules. In a traditional legal system majority is not required, laws can be changed by relativly few people.

That's only true with a restricted definition of stakeholders and majority (e.g., miners weighted by mining capacity in Bitcoin). It's not a majority of individuals in the community using the blockchain.

So I'm not sure that it's really all that distinct from legislative majorities in traditional legal system (and clearly less of a genuine majority than in legislative systems where the public retains, whether or not it chooses to frequently exercise them, powers of initiative and referendum.)

I actually meant economic majority because that's what gives the token its value. A >50% hashrate majority in a PoW blockchain can censor transactions, but it's powerless if most users (or most precisely, the users who own most of the tokens) collectively decide to hardfork.

Retroactively?

In this system, no transaction is actually final, because it can always be rollbacked because the reversal of a law can traverse time and space. The only gaurantee is once you've got it converted to cash (exited the network) because the network may simply enter a parallel universe where the law never existed (and unlike a hostile government invading another, with all the repurcussions of it, this is a manuever taken by the existing government, and likely it remains the government in the new universe).

This isn't a law then, its simply a communally accepted rule; if the ratchet turns, and community decides slavery is no longer acceptable, then it'll be applied retroactively and you'll be rendered an illegal actor for operating legally at the time of operation, despite operating legally now (no longer dealing in slaves).

I would be hard pressed to find any democratic government that passed retro-active laws.

It's a pillar of modern democracies that the effects of some law, can only be applied to future events not to past ones.

What ETH did, was create new laws and then proceed to apply them to previous actions. Very untrustworthy indeed.

Democracies do this all the time, like for slave emancipation, eminent domain, redistricting, etc.

No, that's not like that at all. In the examples you made, you are giving people MORE rights from THAT point onwards.

In the ETH case, you are creating a law to REVERT a previous deal. Democracies don't do that.

The devs didn't reverse it by themselves. There were multiple independent client teams who all agreed to code the change, then they had to convince the community to run the altered software. Not all the official devs were even on board with the change, some stayed neutral, and some of the community refused the change so now we have both ETH and ETC.

So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community, and in that case you'll likely still have your valid transaction on a working chain, it's just that a lot of people will have gone elsewhere.

Which is the same model as Bitcoin; although my understanding is that consensus would be less likely with Bitcoin since there is a larger and more diverse set of miners.

> So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community

A large economic majority of the community, you mean. Which gets to the heart of my largest misgiving about these networks: They are so transparently libertarian in striving to embody the Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If a big actor makes a mistake that benefits 1,000 small actors, the little guys still get fucked.

If the US operated like this, Bill Gates would have ~500,000 more votes than the average American. You could argue that wealthy actors already exert outsize influence on our meatspace contract system, but I'd argue it's to a much lesser extent, and anyway, I don't see Ethereum offering much of an alternative. They don't even pretend to try to strike a balance between individual and community justice.

Economic majority is a copout, and it looks an awful lot like feudalism. As a little guy, I'm hesitant to hitch my wagon to that particular star.

That's basically because we don't have a good solution for Sybil attacks, other than weighting votes by account balances. There are various people trying to fix that by adding real-world identities to the blockchain; the most prominent on Ethereum is uPort: https://www.uport.me/

Not sure why the url path includes 'rise and fall' in it, it doesn't look like it's the actual headline in the article, nor is 'rise and fall' mentioned anywhere in the article.

The main point of the article isn't that people are losing trust in Ethereum. It's that there's no platform that truly avoids the need to trust other human beings (as some apparently believe). That code is not absolute law because the community can choose to change it and affect pre-existing contracts. I don't think he bashes Ethereum at all, but is just making the case that, if you believe you can rely on a platform like this to avoid the need to trust in human decisions, you're fooling yourself.

> Not sure why the url path includes 'rise and fall' in it,

These days publications are continually A/B testing headlines.

Fair enough. Then I'd argue maybe one headline they're A/B testing is sensationalist, but the article itself isn't, nor does it feel like the article is at all making a point about the 'fall' of Ethereum.

It's in the document title.

I'm the OP and I didn't editorialized the title - I never do that. Probably something out of my control happened in the mean time.

You're right, ethereum has not fallen, it has gotten stronger. However, the content of the article does not reflect the title. In fact, your comment just reinforces the point of the article.

This is that trust can never really be fully automated, it is ultimately a human phenomenon. And that is just what happened, the Ethereum community decided, on the basis of the sorts of reasons that human beings normally use, that the whole project and the people running it are trustworthy, and so has charged ahead.

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