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Comment by robinhoodexe | Hacker News Reader

No.

It’s “just” a client issue, and OpenEthereum is “only” used by ~11% of the nodes. I believe the former name is Parity, which had a major bug related to frozen coins some years ago.

See https://mobile.twitter.com/etherscan/status/1382662485832994...

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Although the frozen coins bug wasn't related to the Parity client itself. It was a smart contract multisig wallet made by the same company.

Theoretically there’s a protocol standard, and every client implementation is equal. Functionally, whatever Geth does is the actual standard because a supermajority of nodes run Geth.

This is not true, and I can say that because I work on Geth. We take great care to ensure that all clients behave according to the specification, and Geth has had similar faults in the past.

Surely it doesn't matter what the specification says? If the majority of the hashpower is using an implementation which deviates from the spec, then the blockchain will follow that code and not the 'correct' version. By the time the devs have fixed the bugs, it will be too late and too costly to roll back the chain and reverse all the subsequent transactions.

In theory you're right, yes. If the majority of the hashpower runs a specific version with specific consensus rules, then that version of the chain would "win".

But in reality, developers and others write the specification, which gets implemented in the clients and when a new version is available, the miners usually upgrade to the new version without any qualms what so ever. So in practice, the specification is what controls the network, as developers writing the clients implement things from the specification.

I mean in terms of bugs, rather than a 'rogue' client, i.e. not a deliberate attempt to cause a chain divergence.

If a 'broken' transaction gets accepted by a buggy client, and that buggy client has a majority of hash power, then that transaction is, by definition, not actually broken at all and everyone will be forced to accept it (because it will take too long to write a bug fix and re-write the blockchain history)

In practice if an "official" client has a different interpretation of the spec it must be accepted by other clients.

Like with mentioned OpenEthereum (ex. Parity) here: https://github.com/openethereum/openethereum/blob/582bca385f...

Can geth provide the same traces that OE does? I need to be able to detect when some internal tx sends ETH to one of my accounts and learn the txid...

https://etherscan.io/nodetracker only shows 55% on geth; I wouldn't call that a super majority.

EDIT: Actually, that page shows 15% on openethereum so we must be looking at different sources. Where did you get 11% on openethereum?

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