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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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