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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum just forked the entire blockchain to undo a transaction they didn't like. I'm not sure if that's reassuring or a complete violation of the entire premise of smart contracts.

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As long as everyone agrees i see absolutely no problem. The entire value proposition of decentralized blockchain is to establish consensus without trust. If everyone agrees to undo a transaction, it seems perfectly fine to me, as that would require the consensus the blockchain already establishes

> As long as everyone agrees i see absolutely no problem.

They didn't all agree, though. Now there's Ethereum (the people who agreed with the fork) and Ethereum Classic (the people who didn't agree).

Some agreed, others didn't and they decided to create a fork. Consensus doesn't require everyone to agree, just the majority

One way of reading this comment is that you concur that there's a problem.

One way of reading this coontent is that most don't think there's a problem

You're literally talking across yourself, at least that's how I read it.

Your first comment [1]

> As long as everyone agrees i see absolutely no problem

and now

> Some agreed, others didn't...Consensus doesn't require everyone to agree, just the majority

So you literally just said there is a problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27666781

You're being pedantic, it's clear what was meant even if it wasn't properly stated.

It was clear that it was a contradiction even if you don't want to acknowledge it.

Thank goodness we've gotten away from a system where the government can arbitrarily decide to steal my money and towards a glorious future where a bunch of randos on the internet can arbitrarily decide to steal my money. I feel so much better.

(copy-pasting)

The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances.

1. Ethereum had just launched. There was a sense of everything being in beta.

2. The Ethereum stakeholder set was very small, so obtaining consensus for such a controversial hard fork was much easier to accomplish than it would be today.

3. The economy on Ethereum was very small, so

a) a hard fork was far less disruptive than it would be today.

b) an undermining of Ethereum's commitment to neutrality/immutability jeapardized far fewer decentralized application projects than it would today.

4. Smart contracts were completely new, so there was a sense that people could be forgiven for their mistakes.

5. The Ethereum Foundation had promoted the idea of a DAO on their website, and several Ethereum founders had promoted the specific DAO that ended up being hacked. These facts made the DAO appear to be more than a completely third party app.

Ethereum is very different today than it was in 2016, and a DAO-scale mishap would never lead to a hard fork again.

They altered a state of a smart contract with consensus, although I believe this to be a mistake, they didn't roll back blocks or reorganize. Some miners used that opportunity continue a non-edited fork. I personally find this technical understanding to be distinctive from the common narrative.

I also don't think it matters and there is no consensus to do the same thing any longer.

The explanation for why they did it was because the transaction would have a very large percentage of Ether in the hands of one actor who would eventually be able to alter control of the future Proof of Stake network. If it was any other asset they wouldn't have bothered, and now much larger $ values are captured from people without any notice or fanfare. They didn't know it would be 7-9 years before Sharded Proof of Stake or the Beacon Chain would exist, and its likely that the means did justify the ends at that point in time as many of their supporters and institutional supporters had their funds in that contract.

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