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Comment by pietjepuk88 | Hacker News Reader

Well, "traditional" law can be changed as well, so I'm not sure why a blockchain should not be able to. Some changes are more controversial than others, but in the end the majority (more or less) decides. Either by vote in congress/senate, or by users picking a particular client/chain.

Ethereum has had one particularly controversial fork, and so did Bitcoin. In both cases, both chains survived, with one significantly more popular than the other (in both hash rate, transactions, and market cap). (Un)fortunately, traditional law in real life does not permit two realities to coexist, so there the analogy falls apart somewhat.

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Well, national currencies do get "forked"[1], but this would be like if they did extremely narrow forks to fix problems of someone's own stupidity, and only the stupidity of the most important people.

Like, imagine if twenty members of congress kept their life savings in cash in uninsured briefcases and surprise, those briefcases were stolen. And they responded by passing emergency legislation invalidating the specific serial numbers stolen, and requiring every merchant and bank to screen for those serial numbers (and not those from any other e.g. bank robbery).

I would consider that kind of action to be very delegitimizing to the currency.

[1] I would consider it to be analogous to a fork when they e.g. deprecate an old design or migrate to the Euro.

Isn't the whole point that this shouldn't be like traditional law and can't change because it's in code?

Well blockchains work by consensus is the difference: the rules can only be changed if enough people agree. This sounds better in principle but breaks down using proof of work when a small number of parties control most of the computing power.

Once again, this is supposed to be better than, and different from, "traditional" law! It has no purpose if the contracts don't actually do what they say. The whole point is that computers evaluate the contracts and do what they say.

As seanwilson says above, blockchains work by consensus. Leaving aside the "better", that does mean it is different. The instructions are still executed by computers as it was programmed as you say, but if enough users/miners agree this was not the intention of the contract/code, they can fork.

I do think that calling blockchains "immutable" can be confusing to users not familiar with the concept and its nuances. And I personally hold no opinion on whether the currently locked up funds need to be returned to their owner with a fork. There is something to be said for both options, specifically in this case where there the "rightful owner" is clear (like the other cases mentioned in https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/156 ).

Well, turns out that it is in fact worse, not better.

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