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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Serious, not at all snarky question:

It seems like the Ether devs will mess with the block chain anytime something happens. This seems like a terrible way to manage one of the unique coins in the crypto space.

With that said, aren’t they worried about the risk this conveys to oncomers? Wouldn’t anyone think twice if there’s going to be a fork anytime someone screws up a contract at large enough magnitude?

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Ironically, providing a means to reverse disasters is probably good for Etherum; it reduces the number of investors who leave because they've been burned.

It also kills one of the main selling points, which is that code = law. If you want human intervention, go with regular contracts.

I'm mostly on your side on this one, but you have to remember that a lot of folks see decentralization as merely having more than one option for centralized law/money/etc.

Today, I (generally) get one set of a laws if I live in a particular geographic location, but a "centralized" ETH committee/board could serve as an authority for some set of actions by individuals unbound by geography.

Some people just want that choice.

> Today, I (generally) get one set of a laws if I live in a particular geographic location, but a "centralized" ETH committee/board could serve as an authority for some set of actions by individuals unbound by geography.

I believe it should be quite possible to formulate such a thing as part of a smart contract in which the ETH committee/board may always interfer if they desire if this is what people want.

Unfortunately, code = bugs.

All the more reason not to believe in 'code = law'

I claim that the law is much more full of bugs than typical code.

Exactly. Regardless of what cryptonerds might be thinking about it, this actually may be a feature, not a bug. Laws aren't algorithms and court isn't a computer for a reason. There's plenty of space to occupy between "paper contract interpreted by humans" and "a contract where a bug in it is absolutely irreversible".

So it's purely for risk free investing? Investors are after a high reward but don't take on the risk?

The disaster is only reversed in the main blockchain. There can always exist other Ethereum blockchains where it is not reversed.

It's not a systematic means of redress or resolving bugs though though, it an arbitrary action to benefit people with a sufficiently close relationship with the dev team. An approachs which could just as easily burn you as bail you out, especially assuming most people still undecided about getting involved in the ETH ecosystem don't have close relationships with the dev team.

If code or asking Vitalik nicely enough is law, I think I'll stick with lawyers, thanks...

The Ethereum devs have not chosen to mess with the block chain. This is a proposal written by the entity that lost the most money (and also caused the problem in the first place).

It's possible that the devs will choose to go along with this change, but they've previously rejected several other proposals to recover these funds.

You're extrapolating from one incident to "anytime something happens."

One incident is all it takes to open the door. And the fact that this is being seriously considered rather than rejected outright is troubling all on its own.

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