Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvcc | Hacker News Reader

That only works when the money is tied to one of the core developers. Don't worry though, blockchains are immutable and safe from centralization.

View on HN

Last time the problem was that a weakness in the contract's definition was exploited, right?

This time it's a "hack" where someone gained unauthorized access to a webpage and modified it somehow?

IMO if there were ever a case for hardforking around problems it should be for the latter and not the former. Maybe Ethereum could publicly declare itself to be a "not-too-centralized" consensus-audited-by-this-particular-committee-of-humans.

Wait what? I'm not up to date on all the cryptocurrency going-ons. What's this referring to?

I think he is being sarcastic. He just means that they call it decentralized except when there's a problem that affects the core developers; it's then that they allow themselves to make exceptions, like I believe it happened a year ago or so.

There was an Ethereum contract called The DAO which had a bug in it that got taken advantage of. They decided to hard fork all of Ethereum to retrieve the appropriated money.

It's seen as some as an admission that the Ethereum ethos of "the code is the contract" is unrealistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

The DAO was hacked by an unknown attacker who stole Ether worth around $50 million dollars at the time. After much debate, the Ethereum community voted and decided to retrieve the stolen funds by executing what’s known as a hard fork or a change in code.

Smart Contracts by definition aren't hackable. The "attacker" just found a loophole or unintended effect in their contract and used it. An Ethereum hack would be like, I dunno, finding an exploit in the implementation of the VM or something.

> a loophole or unintended effect in their contract

Sure sounds like a hack to me.

> Wait what? I'm not up to date on all the cryptocurrency going-ons. What's this referring to?

I am also not up to date on the cryptocurrency du jour, but I believe this is in reference to the current civil war going on in BitCoin about the block size. [0]

Basically the majority of mining power will decide which proposal is selected going forward. I only follow BitCoin tangentially, but I believe a majority of mining power is concentrated in a few mining pools, themselves controlled by a few people. So in reality "decentralized" really means "whoever can organize the biggest army"

[0] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/segwit-segregated-witnes...

One of the main Ethereum code-contracts, the DAO ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) ) had a bug in its code, and someone exploited that bug to extract the value from it. Rather than accept that as consistent with their view of "the code is the contract", the Ethereum developers hard-forked the currency to reverse that result and give everyone their money back.

Oh good, so they should be able to do that now and give everyone there money back again. Thank goodness for decentralization! /s

IIRC this: http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/

tl;dr dude stole coins from ethereum creators, they decided to fork it

"A software fork has been proposed, (with NO ROLLBACK; no transactions or blocks will be “reversed”) which will make any transactions that make any calls/callcodes/delegatecalls that reduce the balance of an account with code hash0x7278d050619a624f84f51987149ddb439cdaadfba5966f7cfaea7ad44340a4ba (ie. the DAO and children) lead to the transaction (not just the call, the transaction) being invalid …"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com