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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

I think this misses the elephant in the room: the tech may have flaws, but there's far worse flaws.

Who is it that actually has control and influence in crypto?

1. The developers. 2. The miners. 3. Everyone else (very distant from the rest)

The developers aren't decentralized at all, they typically are a single, small team with some sort of leader. They can make a lot of decisions almost unilaterally.

Then very close below are the miners. The miners have serious economic concerns, so they can do things like refusing to run the software the developers provide. So we can expect devs and miners to be in close contact in most cryptocurrencies.

And very far below that is everyone else. You can run your "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or doesn't on the network.

And that's why Bitcoin is the way it is. Back when fees rose to $50/transaction because the capacity was overwhelmed...

Did the devs have a problem? No, because they had ideas how to sell add-on products to deal with that issue, and such products are much easier to sell when there's a problem that needs fixing.

Did the miners have a problem? No, because the network was still heavily used and they were reaping all those juicy fees coming their way.

Did the users have a problem? Yes, their experience sucked badly. But for both parties actually in control solving those problems would require losing money.

And thus crypto ends up being controlled by a small cabal of elites, while the normal users get screwed.

View on HN

> You can run your "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or doesn't on the network.

Limiting myself to BTC, this is not how it works.

Miners can emit as much nonsense, noise, malformed information as they want. Full nodes perform validation: they decide what a compliant chain looks like, and only accept contributions from miners which have that shape.

This is why there was such a vicious fight about block size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node remains feasible forever.

Validation is a huge problem with more profligate blockchains, some/many of which are de-facto centralized due to the excessive hardware requirements.

It is on an architecture and algorithm level a critical part of the decentralization of bitcoin, something I expect HN to get right regardless of their position on bitcoin's worth to civilization.

Edit for more detail: an object-level example is that miners cannot unilaterally start issuing larger blocks. These will fail validation by the full nodes, ergo, it is the full nodes which determine what Bitcoin is or isn't. Miners merely construct data which has that shape.

I don't think this clarified it at all. The crux: miners can decide to OMIT transactions, REORDER transactions within a block, or DELAY them for later. All of those actions pass "validation", because they cannot be detected by a validator. Miners do so at the expense of lost transaction fees, or with reordering, for free, or with delaying, with the possibility that some other miner will reap the transaction fee first. There is a lot of money in doing this, called 'miner extractable value' / MEV, which is bigger when you are processing complex smart contracts with funky clauses to exploit. They are not able to INVENT new transactions (as that would be caught by a validator, miners don't know your private keys and couldn't easily forge a transaction). A validator cannot detect a missing, silently dropped transaction. Nobody can detect such a thing except whoever submitted it and doesn't see it in a block. Nobody at all can detect a reordered or delayed transaction; you just have to assume the miners will act according to their own interests as much as possible.

The paper goes into this, of course. Miners are not even the only ones who can decide to omit transactions -- submitting a transaction is not secure, so any intermediaries between the transactor and the mining nodes also have a chance to silently drop it or MITM it for delay etc. It could have done more on high-end MEV though.

Which doesn't contradict a word I said. The things you describe are all on the miner side of the contract.

Most of the problems you are describing are less relevant on BTC, which doesn't support complex smart contracts in practice, but yes, the miners are the only entity which can generate data of the valid shape, and only when they get lucky.

So OMIT/REORDER/DELEY are privileges which a miner has to sweat to earn temporarily. If 80% of the hash rate hates you they can probably keep your transactions out indefinitely, presuming willingness to bear the cost, which y'know, war is hell, it could happen.

Yeah, I wasn't saying you were incorrect, your answer just didn't dig much deeper than "miners do whatever they like, validators check it". The matter of centralisation is answered by what miners can get away with, not the mere fact that validators exist. You must examine this because miners are the ones that are subject to centralisation through efficiencies of scale at buying electricity and computing power. So attacks are possible that are plausibly deniable as accidents, software glitches, dropped packets, etc., but in fact involve coordination by majority miners.

And further, MEV is a problem even if you ignore % of hash rate and centralisation of the mining market -- any single miner will exploit any opportunity you give them if they can, especially the undetectable/unprovable ones. So much of MEV is not a matter of adversarial voting but literally 100% of miners are incentivised to do it, independently and unanimously. It's just a matter of who figures out how to extract it, who has relevant conflicts of interest, or who has enough cash to snap up opportunities that arise. That's less about centralisation though.

And the scope of this discussion was never just bitcoin. TrailOfBits' paper is about the technology generally.

> Miners can emit as much nonsense, noise, malformed information as they want. Full nodes perform validation: they decide what a compliant chain looks like, and only accept contributions from miners which have that shape.

That highly depends on who the full node is. A random joe with $100 worth in the wallet can be safely ignored. If their node refuses to see the new blocks as legitimate, the owner doesn't get to use their money for anything anymore. The likes of Coinbase though would have a lot more influence.

There were plenty full node owners that were onboard with big blocks, but since they didn't have the pull, they didn't matter. They could reject validating the blocks all you like, but the network can keep on working fine without their approval.

> This is why there was such a vicious fight about block size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node remains feasible forever.

No, the side that won is the side that wanted to make profit from selling L2 solutions and collecting fees. There's no technological reason for a 1MB limit that makes any sense.

Bitcoin started in 2009. Since then there have been 4 main generations of the Raspberry pi, disks went in size from ~1-2TB maximum to ~20TB maximum, gigabit internet became fairly commonplace, and CPUs also improved greatly.

Plus, the modern BTC is pretty much useless for small transactions anyway -- if you have any use for it, you can certainly afford decent hardware.

>There's no technological reason for a 1MB limit that makes any sense. Bitcoin started in 2009. Since then there have been 4 main generations of the Raspberry pi, disks went in size from ~1-2TB maximum to ~20TB maximum, gigabit internet became fairly commonplace, and CPUs also improved greatly.

Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ... will inevitably reduce the number of participants able to run full validating nodes. Consider various discussions on network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0

So the question is: Is the reduction of participants from the higher technical requirements significant enough that it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)

I guess someone can put together a spreadsheet model with some "reasonable" guesses for the ripple effects of a hypothetical 20MB block size and try to predict game theory of what might happen. Has anyone done such a math exercise?

Sure, many participants already processing 1MB blocks today can easily switch to bigger 20MB blocks with no problems. But many can't and we don't seem to have a consensus prediction on what the percentage is.

> Increasing the block size from 1MB to say... 20MB ... will inevitably reduce the number of participants able to run full validating nodes. Consider various discussions on network traffic patterns for existing 1MB blocks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3286296.0

That discussion is from 2018, that was 4 years ago. Surely things have improved somewhat since then.

> So the question is: Is the reduction of participants from the higher technical requirements significant enough that it weakens Bitcoin? (I honestly don't know.)

No, that's far too simple of a question. A better is: where do you find the balance between technical requirements for the network and the usability of the network for end user?

It makes perfect sense that as the usage grows, the network will become more expensive to operate. More users is more data, and more bandwidth. If you just refuse to increase the requirements an inch, you're refusing to support the growing userbase.

Many other projects have to make such decisions. Your space sim gets more popular -- that costs more bandwidth, requires more polygons on the screen. Do you bump up the system requirements, or do you stall your growth to allow 10 year old hardware to be usable? And pretty much all of them bump the requirements. You can't play modern games on a 386.

You're optimizing for the wrong thing here IMO. You should optimize for decentralization. Without it, there is no point to Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency for that matter). Increasing the block size won't solve the inherent problems with scaling the bitcoin blockchain. The only thing it will end up doing is push the can down the road and result in less full nodes running on the network.

The solution is of course to not increase the block size but to scale in other ways, like for example the Lightning Network.

The size of the blockchain right now is 390GB. It grows at 144MB/day. You can get a 2TB hard disk for $50 right now, and it'll be enough for 30 years more.

1 MB blocks take 2 minutes and 30 seconds on at 56 Kbps, which means you can keep up with the blockchain on a freaking dial-up modem.

I'm not seeing exactly where the problem is here, and in what scenario would somebody go "Gee, I'd love to run a full node, if only it took something less amazing than a computer I can find lying in the garbage for free".

If you want more nodes what you need instead is incentives to run a node. Give people some reason to run one other than that it provides some nebulous benefit to the network, and so it's a good thing to run this out of the goodness of their hearts.

You also don't have to store the entire history. Technically keeping a day's worth of blocks is sufficient to run validation.

Sure, but it is very easy for the miners to also run full nodes and validate whatever they want - much easier than it is for someone running a full node to also mine (at any realistic hash rate). So miners can more or less trivially flood the network with full nodes that validate their preferred chains.

> This is why there was such a vicious fight about block size: the side which won the mindshare and economic value fought for a small blockchain so that running a full node remains feasible forever.

This is a tangent, but I wonder how this squares with the people claiming that Bitcoin's (terrible, horrible, no good, very bad) transaction rate is not limited by design, just by some temporary politics.

You are misunderstanding the meaning and purpose of running a full node. Coinbase[0] runs a full node to validate transactions. If miners start mining blocks that Coinbase considers invalid, Coinbase will reject the transactions. The number of full nodes on the network is more or less irrelevant, what matters is your own node.

[0] You can replace Coinbase here with pretty much any Bitcoin participant, including individual users.

If the largest miners switch to emitting larger blocks, and Coinbase starts receiving almost exclusively invalid nodes, what will they do next?

What if Binance starts accepting these blocks, and now users have some BTC balance on Binance, and another on Coinbase?

We don't have to speculate, it has happened multiple times already[0]. What happens is the hard forks are either ignored or they are supported but under a different name to avoid confusion (e.g. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, etc.). The only way I could imagine a hard fork succeeding (e.g. retain the "Bitcoin" name) is if it if it had an overwhelming community consensus, not only from miners but also from users (like Coinbase).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks

What you're describing is a fork, clearly.

The assertion that miners can unilaterally fork and get away with it hasn't been backed up in practice. The creation of a whole bunch of brand-new full nodes which do something besides validate Bitcoin is the creation of something other than Bitcoin. Happens with reasonable frequency, just not the way you've described it.

Right now the Bitcoin network consists of ~59,000 nodes (according to the article), running various versions of the Bitcoin software, implementing the same protocol.

If the biggest mining pools were to launch ~100,000 nodes of their own, initially running the exact same software as the other 59k nodes (until they get some reputation) and then modifying the software to allow larger blocks, that they would start sending to the network as well, what would prevent them from effectively changing what Bitcoin is, leaving the current nodes as a legacy fork? Especially if they were doing this together with the Bitcoin devs?

Edit: more realistically, there are far fewer popular nodes, so the miners would have to create a much smaller number of nodes to achieve this effect.

What you would then have is 100,000 nodes running one piece of software, and 59k which are doing exactly what they were doing, and in your scenario, the 100k chain also has a higher hash rate.

What happens next is a social phenomenon. No one knows. But which chain is original is perfectly clear: it's the the 59k chain, which will still be mining blocks, and it all comes down to who wants to use which one more.

But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining.

> But it is emphatically not the case that a majority of validators can force a minority of validators to choose a new protocol. It's nothing like mining.

Define "force".

Because to me - if you are on a chain that has no future (as in the fork has more resources, better hash rate, better social support) then while you can continue to use the original, the odds that it holds any value is basically zero.

Same is true in the inverse - creating a fork and then expecting to be able to move any significant value off the original chain, when the original chain holds better social support and more resources, is usually folly.

Take bitcoin cash - which is a great example of this.

They split in 2017 and began trading at ~240 USD to bitcoins ~2700 USD. So they started with the assumption that their fork had roughly 1/10 of the value of bitcoin. Today they trade at 119 USD, to bitcoins 21170 USD (and this is after the HUGE drop over the last month): Roughly 1/200th the price.

Further - I strongly suspect that the reason BCH is still worth anything at all is that we're well into a crypto bubble - there are FAR too many completely worthless coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values. The fact that a usable chain forked from BTC for genuine technical reasons (and a social disagreement over segwit) drops so much value is a BAD sign for that group of original folks on the 59k chain.

They can certainly keep mining away on that chain, and if the goal is to still facilitate exchange only in that original chain, they're fine. The second they need to get off that chain and on to something else (whether it's another coin or USD) then they're probably fucked - their chain won't have held value, because value is a social construct, not a number on a chain.

>there are FAR too many completely worthless coins floating around that serve absolutely no purpose and still trade at ridiculous nominal USD values

Correction: No cryptocoins have any value or serve any purpose, besides gambling and fraud. It's scams and wash trading all the way down. I have still yet to see a single valid use for blockchains that actually requires this inbuilt mechanism, where the participants pump the value of some token that serves as payment access to the chain. The whole point of any of them using a blockchain is apparently to take something that serves no purpose and trade it at ridiculous values.

I mean - I mostly agree (I'm fairly clear about my distaste for the current crypto market in many of my comments).

That said - there is a floor value for a single coin that captures the dark market space. The original use-case for crypto is still there: There are folks who want to exchange stored value for black market goods, in a scope where government regulation is already assumed to be absent because the goods being exchanged are forbidden items.

This is basically what bitcoin was originally. It kept a fairly stable price point around the single dollar mark for use on the silk road ~2010/2011. The problem is that folks started noticing that any time the media talked about it, the price would spike. And that started the whole rollercoaster of speculation that I find absolutely immoral and greedy, that ruined the whole thing.

So basically - amend your comment to "besides gambling and fraud and dark market exchange" and I'd agree.

This is just your opinion, and wow is it a privileged take. Of course there is value in being able to trade with whoever you want, regardless of jurisdiction. Just because YOU do not see the value doesn't mean it's not there.

>being able to trade with whoever you want, regardless of jurisdiction

That has absolutely nothing to do with blockchains at all. Blockchains do not enable that, they have never enabled it. You can indeed build a service that does that with blockchains, but you can also build it without them. Black markets existed for a very long time before bitcoin was created.

If you're suggesting there is value in having totally unregulated unrestricted trade, then no, I would still have to say I don't see value in that. There is actually negative value in allowing people to trade illegal weapons, or trafficked humans, or counterfeit products, or contract murders, or tainted animal products that infect humanity with a plague, and so on... you get the picture. These things are actively destructive to a functioning society and market. It's even more of a privileged take to try and suggest that these things don't exist or won't happen if everyone can just trade whatever they want without any restrictions whatsoever.

Edit: I'm thinking about this a bit, and it's really insulting to be told I have a privileged take when in the past several years myself and my family members and friends have been actively harmed by ransomware and crypto scams. It's not nice to kick someone when they're down. In my case, the people evading jurisdictions were doing it entirely to harm me. I'm really not seeing how I'm supposed to be the privileged one.

Yanis Varoufakis recently called crypto currencies “oligarchic” which is very fitting. Quote:

“I do not believe that the… ‘oligarchic,’ by definition, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is ever going to replace [conventional currency]. It shouldn’t, it can’t, and it would be a nightmare if it did.”

Full interview in which he also discusses his proposal for cryptocurrencies run by central banks and why that’s (according to him) the way to go: https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-27/Gold-and-Bitcoin-won-t...

There's not really a word for it that I'm aware of, but Crypto IMO is best described as an "Initialarchy", or rule by the first people on the scene. Since almost every crypto project starts with dirt cheap prices, the first people who create or invest end up controlling the entire project given that they have millions of coins or access to the devs.

Being first to the next hot project is almost all the matters in the Crypto world.

People that have billions of dollars can always break in. And the first adopters also happen to have billions of dollars. So oligarchy seems fitting.

> The developers aren't decentralized at all, they typically are a single, small team with some sort of leader. They can make a lot of decisions almost unilaterally.

That's painting everyone with the same brush...

It may be true for many projects, but the second largest blockchain (by marketcap), Ethereum, has like 10 independent client teams and a strong concentration on client diversity [1].

The media likes to paint Vitalik (one of the original founders) as the "leader" of Ethereum, but everyone that's actually working in Ethereum knows that he's at best an advisor these days, and has intentionally taken a back seat in terms of leadership to avoid the very effect you are describing.

> And very far below that is everyone else. You can run your "full node", but most nobody cares. Miners decide what goes or doesn't on the network.

> And that's why Bitcoin is the way it is. Back when fees rose to $50/transaction because the capacity was overwhelmed...

That is not why transaction fees are high... and miners do not decide what goes or doesn't on the network. That's a huge misconception.

Transaction fees are driven by demand, plain and simple. Demand is high in a scarce blockspace, so the fee goes up to keep the network stable.

Also, miners can't decide to just change the rules, that's a big misconception of the Sybil problem further driven by popular media. The rules are the rules, if miners don't follow them, clients (full or light) won't follow that chain, period.

Even if 50%+ of miners colluded, all they could do is prevent a consensus from forming (called "censorship"), so basically a DDoS. They cannot change the rules and "trick" clients into following them, as it is often portrayed!

If you're referring to miners having influence on what the rules are, as in influence over development, that's been tried and failed multiple times on multiple networks. In reality, devs and companies/user sentiment drives the majority of "social consensus".

If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS will eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening. For a past example, EIP-1559 was opposed by many large mining pools, still happened (because it improved user experience by making gas fees more predictable / reducing failed transactions -- in direct contradiction to your point).

[1] https://clientdiversity.org/

>> If you need evidence of that, Ethereum's switch to PoS will eliminate mining, and yet it's still happening.

This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is delayed because the miners are against it. It seems very important to people who are thinking about doing projects with Etherium because it will be based on PoS. Hoenstly, I don't know anything about this.

Here is my question(s) to the smart people on HN: Could miners or others with financial interest slow the switch to PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if that is happening?

No.

The switch to POS is entirely a socially initiated hard fork being built by Eth holders, users and developers. The miners who don't want to play along are effectively being fired. And there is a lot of economic incentive to get that fork done - mining is a really expensive way to generate consensus on a blockchain. What miners earn via block rewards is coming out of the pockets of other eth holders because of the coin's inflation. Ethereum will be able to reduce it's issuance/inflation by roughly 10x in the switch.

The starting point was launching the beacon chain back in December 2020, a separate chain designed to provide consensus and validation of mainnet ethereum in the (hopefully near) future, whose validating participants fund their deposits through what is just a normal contract on mainnet ethereum. From there that beacon chain has been refined and built into a protocol with multiple implementations, and had its stability monitored and tested.

From here, it's just a matter of forking mainnet ethereum into using the beacon chain as its consensus provider and ignoring the miners. And that step is pretty deep into the final testing phases using ethereum's long running testnets to run through the 'merge' at it is called.

> This has been delayed, and sometimes people say it is delayed because the miners are against it.

They can say that all they want, there's 0 actual evidence of that. It's been delayed a bunch because it's an incredibly difficult thing to do for a network operating trillions of $ in transaction value.

All indications are at the moment that it will happen around September, but definitely this year. The big test (doing the PoS switch on the most similar testnet) was completed successfully last week!

> Could miners or others with financial interest slow the switch to PoS for Etherium? How would I be able to judge if that is happening?

There are theoretical ways, but in practice it's not all that practical, because ultimately what matters is the "fork" developers and users want to follow. There's a negative incentive for miners to do anything disruptive because it could have an effect on the value of the tokens they already hold.

Additionally, Ethereum has a built-in "difficulty bomb", which basically ensures that a network upgrade happens at a certain cadence, which gives impetus for miners to follow new upgrades or no new ETH will be generated anyways past a certain point.

Financial interests push heavily towards PoS. Ten percent of all ETH is already deposited in the PoS network (currently running in parallel), and can't be withdrawn before the merge happens. The development teams were granted staked ETH by the EF, and can't withdraw it before the merge happens. All ETH holders are likely to benefit from the PoS merge, which will reduce issuance to the point where the ETH supply will begin to shrink because 90% of the fees are burned.

Ethereum has five independent execution clients, five independent staking clients, and an open community of researchers.

And one Infura node to bind them all

Any Ethereum node can talk to the network, and runs on a modest home computer. Infura is popular but not everyone uses it, and it's easy to replace.

Not even Vitalik runs a full node lol. He checks Infura nodes to verify shit. That was a hilarious moment

Everybody who is insanely dissatisfied about the direction some blockchain develops into can drum up a following and do a hard fork of the blockchain if they desire.

It doesn't really solve the problem satisfactorily.

Somebody still has to develop the software. The end result is a single download, produced by some form of authority. And typically there's one project, with one group controlling it.

And miners are more or less the same everywhere, they want to make a profit.

You can get somewhat better. You can find a dev group that aligns with your interests. Maybe you can even find a cryptocurrency where there are multiple independent implementations led by multiple groups with none being the clear winner.

But that's an unstable situation. The dynamics of a dev team can shift as people come and go. Balance is easily broken, if a project loses steam, or one becomes the default and gains overwhelming popularity, and you're back to having a single group in effective control.

You can migrate from one system to another, but any conversion has costs to it, both in terms of money and knowledge, attention and time resources.

This libertarian utopia seems very much like some sort of bureaucratic hell to me. To exist in such a society without getting royally screwed you have to invest immense amounts of your time to pay attention to everything and correctly and prompty react to it. You go on vacation for a couple weeks, and oops, suddenly the dev team is changing the rules from under you.

A properly decentralized project has multiple implementations, and a formal process for changing the consensus model. This requires the equivalent of an RFC (Request for Comments, or Bitcoin Improvement Proposal in case of Bitcoin) to be written, motivating and detailing the changes, followed by months long discussion to see if there is overwhelming support for, and few downsides to, the changes. Meanwhile, the changes need to be implemented on all existing clients with extensive documentation and tests and be exercised on test-nets to see if all goes well. Finally, a supermajority of miners as well as economic nodes (such as exchanges) need to be convinced the changes are for the better, and then an activation can be planned on main-net that could take several more months to lock in first. Chains where this process can be bypassed or severely shortened don't deserve to be called decentralized.

> a supermajority of miners as well as economic nodes (such as exchanges)

Is there a formal way of defining this?

Maybe it's possible to at least define "a supermajority X% of miners, weighted by blocks mined in the last Y days" (for values X and Y that have previously reached a consensus), but counting economic nodes in a way that is Sybil-proof and globally consistent, seems like it's just pushing the consensus problem somewhere else.

I think you are underselling the difficulty, especially if the goal is to out-compete the original chain, versus creating yet another worthless chain.

This is theoretically true and in practice false. It comes up every time and every time no one has an answer for what the little guy can in-practice actually do that will be successful.

There are several facets of 'success', and they compete with each other. If a user defines success as cheap transactions, there are blockchains for that.

Great if transaction s are cheap ... but if you don't have anybody to receive transactions from kr sending to it isn't really useful. And the single person rarely has the ability to move a network of people over.

The premise is that at some point one of these chains will win. Forking btc will be no more meaningful than forking usd.

Your analysis seems correct in theory -- but in practice, in terms of "the things that actually affect people," you're overwhelmingly missing that group that is in "3" that's easily number one -- which is the whales who control the price?

This is assuming the developers are willing to act in the way you are describing but with our ability to audit their work I am not convinced that will necessarily happen.

I was wondering how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is able to walk around without a security detail, going on extensive backpacking trips, what if someone steals his keys?

He’d just fork the entire blockchain.

Normal users don’t have that luxury.

> He’d just fork the entire blockchain.

> Normal users don’t have that luxury.

Everybody else can fork the entire blockchain, too. The difference is that if a "normal user" does such a fork, hardly anyone does care. The central difference rather is that the trust and authority that Vitalik Buterin holds - if he does a decision, it is accepted by and large.

The question that you should rather ask is: why do so many people involved in Ethereum have so much trust in Vitalik Buterin's authority and decisions?

Main reason is Vitalik is one of the brightest minds in crypto. He's a 10 year veteran of the space and a genius.

But no, even Vitalik could not get a split off fork done unless it was something with major security implications for the whole Ethereum ecosystem.

So genius that both EVM and Solidity have huge unforced footguns that have caused gazillions of dollars in damage.

It's not that bad. Solidity does not protect against crypto economic errors. No language does.

Yeah but most languages don't handle things like exceptions, inheritance, and reentrancy so incredibly weirdly that people consistently write basic logical errors when using these concepts.

There are numerous instances where Buterin's suggestions have not been just accepted at face value. He's an influential voice, but is no dictator.

No. Any fork requires a consensus among the community. While it was possible to fork Ethereum for the DAO hack in 2016 (note the DAO hack had affected 30% of all ETH in circulation), a lot has changed in the Ethereum ecosystem since then and break-off forks do not happen willy nilly. Besides all of the applications that need consistent state to make sense (such as USD-backed stable coins), you need a coalition of developers, miners, and community members to back it. No one in their right mind carries their private keys on a backpacking trip.

This is such an ignorant and factually wrong comment.

He literally did this after the DAO hack.

I'm as "fuck cryptocurrency/NFTs" as the next guy, but that's not accurate. As others have said, forks require community consensus, not just the decision of a single individual. Regarding the specific fork you're referring to (italicized emphasis is mine):

>It was initially unclear as to whether the fork would be executed. Though it was proposed by Ethereum developers, they did not have the unilateral power to implement the change. Miners, exchanges, and node operators also had to agree to update their software. After more heated debate in public forums, on July 20, 2016, at block 192,000, the Ethereum hard fork was implemented.

https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...

The crucial question, to me, is: would the fork have happened if Vitalik had not been part of the DAO? I don't think there's any chance he would have entertained that.

There have been many large ETH compromises since then, and the idea of forking for any of them would be considered outrageous.

One of the main reasons it went through is because there was 'only' one losing party - the hacker, and multiple winning parties (developers and investors in the DAO). A couple years later when the parity mutlisig was hacked such that the funds (150K eth from an ICO) were 'permanently locked', the proposal to unlock the funds via hardfork was rejected. More or less specifically because it would only benefit a very small subset of parties, while leaving the frozen funds in place meant the rest of the chain benefited from the effective reduction of eth supply. Since then no one else has seriously proposed forks to move funds out of protocol.

What's crazy is they never "fixed" The DAO "bug." Reentrancy is a feature of Solidity. They just tell people to make sure to do exception checking for it. Which of course makes contracts bloated. Which in turn makes contracts cost more in gas fees. So every now and again a Defi will be attacked by the very, same, thing, that got The DAO, because they didn't put in expensive reentrancy checks. Couple of recent examples: https://ambcrypto.com/how-these-two-defi-protocols-fell-prey...

Yup. The combo of “this is hyper critical financial code” and “every extra instruction to check invariants is very expensive” are two fundamentally opposed ideas and will cause pain forever.

Vitalik was not part of the DAO, and the Ethereum Foundation took an extremely hands-off approach to the DAO hack.

This is pretty well documented in the Cryptopians book; the DAO hard fork was driven almost exclusively by people outside the EF.

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