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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already

Isn't this the exact problem? That the blockchain isn't actually immutable and community will step in to revert transactions?

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It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample code on ethereum.org.

When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.

Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to restore funds with a fork.

Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a systemic network risk. Since the DAO fiasco we've had a number of high profile incidents and the community has rejected stepping in (look at the failure of EIP 999). I'm not sure if there's presently anything on Ethereum, that should it fail, would be as bad as the DAO failure. Maybe MakerDAO?

>Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a systemic network risk.

that sounds awfully like the justification for bank bailouts.

If they didn't go forward with the DAO fork, I'm not sure Ethereum would even exist today.

I think they meant more system technical risk than financial. as in, a change to prevent bypassing private key checks, or minting quadrillions of BTC / ETH beyond the issuance schedule.

Blockchain is just the tech to get consensus, consensus built by a community can change and does not have to be immutable.

So no, not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

Why bother with an "immutable" ledger then? Why not just have people vote on what the current state of the network?

How do you get people to vote in a way that actually decentralized and trustless? IOW, how do you build consensus about what the total vote count is?

I mean, no? There are two cryptocurrencies, ETH and ETC, and apparently most people think it's fine to revert a transaction for the reason ETH reverted it. The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.

>The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.

But if all we cared about is the "right" thing to be done at the end, why bother with smart contracts? Why not use the courts?

I'm not the right person to ask, as I don't believe that there's a way to somehow make software bug-free enough to deal with huge amounts of money for an indefinite amount of time. However, it seems that enough people think that "do the right thing automatically unless someone steals millions, in which case revert it" is a good compromise.

Smart contracts are defense in depth on top of the courts. Neither is perfectly foolproof.

If you want to move fast and break things, choose ETH.

If you want to move slow and never break things, choose ETC.

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