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Comment by baobabKoodaa | Hacker News Reader

No it didn't demonstrate that. Vitalik et al reached consensus for rolling back the DAO hack. A major reason why they reached consensus was that so many players had a vested interest in the rollback. If Vitalik had tried to push something unpopular, he wouldn't have been able to push it through, because - in contrast to your claims - Ethereum is not a centrally controlled blockchain.

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The only difference between this and an attack is that the purpose was altruistic. It's one thing to shift to new/updated infrastructure, it's another to manipulate blockchain transactions. We just have to hope that Vitalik or whoever holds the most sway over Ethereum doesn't ever act in bad faith (in a way that may not be immediately discernable to others).

It’s increasingly hard for any person to have that much influence with so many different client implementations for Eth2, and the nodes will have to accept those changes, whereas Bitcoin is pretty much Bitcoin Core.

I guess you'd better hope you're never on the wrong side, politically, from a majority of ETH miners.

"This guy who we all hate now owns $100MM in ETH? Now he doesn't."

Yeah, miners and node operators. That’s how this has always worked.

Yeah they can always coordinate, but these things are never so clean. They'd also need to be convinced it wouldn't undermine the network faith in a way against their interests, beyond being a well hated figure. And that no fork would emerge reinstating the person (as their deed is far from hidden)

This is also how nation states work. And it takes probably far fewer people, less time, and can be done in secrecy when the US wants to enact a sanction and freeze accounts than it does to hard-fork ethereum.

Miners can't just take money out of your account without your consent. That would require a change to how the protocol works.

At best a cabal of miners could censor you by refusing to include your transactions into blocks, and refusing to mine on top of any block that includes your transaction. But only while they maintain a majority of hashing power.

> Miners can't just take money out of your account without your consent. That would require a change to how the protocol works.

But that's exactly what we were talking about: hard forks that change how the protocol works. The parent comment that you responded to is correct in that theoretically a majority of miners could fork Ethereum to steal $100M from a single person.

The majority of nodes/users (not miners) would need to switch to the miners' new fork. Otherwise if the miners mined a block that doesn't follow the current protocol, it would be an invalid block and rejected by the network.

> The majority of nodes/users (not miners) would need to switch to the miners' new fork. Otherwise if the miners mined a block that doesn't follow the current protocol, it would be an invalid block and rejected by the network.

In the event of a contested hard fork both chains would continue to live, because some miners would mine chain A, and some miners would mine chain B. Yes, miners who mine the old chain would not accept blocks from miners who mine the new chain, you are correct about that, but the same statement holds true in reverse: miners who run the new chain would not accept blocks from miners who mine the old chain.

If a majority of miners decided to steal $100M by forking the chain, they absolutely could do that, even if the majority of users would support the old chain. In that event the tokens (which used to be worth $100M) would now exist on both chains, and it would be up to the market to decide how much the tokens are worth on each chain.

You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork. I still maintain it is up to the majority of nodes/users to determine if it is valid. If there has been a hard fork then by definition the network has rejected an invalid block(s). It is up to nodes/users to determine which network is "the" coin and thus mining valid blocks.

> You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork. I still maintain it is up to the majority of nodes/users to determine if it is valid. If there has been a hard fork then by definition the network has rejected an invalid block(s). It is up to nodes/users to determine which network is "the" coin and thus mining valid blocks.

Nope, I was very clear that in this context there is more than one network, so expressions like your "by definition the network has rejected invalid blocks" doesn't make sense. Network A rejects blocks by network B, and network B rejects blocks by network A. There is more than one network. You don't need to look further than Ethereum Classic to see that this can happen in practice. The "minority chain" doesn't just disappear magically.

I think we are losing track of the original claim which was miners could steal $100M from a user. Let's say I create a fork (network B) in which a user's account is set to 0 and mine has the amount that the user once had. In no sense have I stolen $100M from the user if it's on a chain that people don't recognize as being the one that represents the user's money (network A).

The original implication was you don't want to piss miners off otherwise they can unilaterally decide to take your money away. That is false.

The original claim was simply that the miners could delete $100M, not that a single person could unilaterally steal it.

I think it's not impossible to imagine miners and nodes voting to hard-fork a coin because some genocidal villain, Mr LiterallyHitler, had a large amount of wealth wrapped up in it.

> The original implication was you don't want to piss miners off otherwise they can unilaterally decide to take your money away. That is false.

If you are retreating your argument to that goal post, then we are in agreement: pissing off miners will not result in miners stealing your money. Your original argument was stronger, however. You were asserting that a minority-supported fork would not be able to steal money, which is not true.

I'm not retreating anything, that is still my assertion. The miners alone cannot delete your money. That was the original claim[1]. My responses[2] from the beginning have been addressing that.

It is a common misconception that miners, because they are the ones who produce new blocks, have power over the network and set the rules. That is not the case. Miners determine the order and inclusion of __valid__ transactions. Deleting your money would require a fork. Even if a majority of miners mined their own fork but didn't get users/nodes on board they would be wasting their time on what is essentially an altcoin that they alone care about. The network would ignore them and your $100M has not been deleted because it still exists on the chain everyone actually cares about.

There are only so many different ways I can state the above idea (going-on 4 times in this thread alone). If you still disagree, then I'm sorry I wasn't able to explain it any better. I'm going to politely decline from responding any further to this thread because I think we are just wasting each others' time.

[1]

"I guess you'd better hope you're never on the wrong side, politically, from a majority of ETH miners."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678451

[2]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28681802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682258

You're talking about minority-supported forks as if it was some kind of hypothetical scenario, where these forks couldn't possibly have any value. But it's not a hypothetical scenario, it's a scenario which has occurred multiple times in practice. So we don't have to discuss in hypotheticals about whether those minority-supported forks would have any value or not; we can look at what actually happened in those instances. For example, Bitcoin Cash right now has $9B market cap (not $0, like you imply).

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