> "The code is the law", they said.
And the law can change if the community deems it wise.
And the law can change if the community deems it wise.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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).
In other words, the code isn't the law, which is exactly what I said.
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.)
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.
In the ETH case, you are creating a law to REVERT a previous deal. Democracies don't do that.