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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

> After all, you can't take a smart contract out of ethereum

You absolutely can. Ethereum has forked in the past to alter inconvenient data / network state.

I've not looked at there contract but contracts can kill themselves if setup for it. See the SUICIDE opcode.

Ethereum has hard forked once with the DAO. It needs a significant divergent of opinion - like 10% of all miners splitting off into their own network, client tooling, platforms, and ecosystem.

It is not something that can be done on a whim and can’t happen every time the US adds a new address to their sanctions list.

Technically, Ethereum has hard forked multiple times, for example to avoid "ice age" difficulty cliffs that were supposed to force the switch to proof-of-stake multiple times now. But the vast majority of miners, and importantly, the currency exchanges, have all been on the same side of those forks.

The contention was that it can happen to remove/censor contracts or transactions, not that forks don't happen more broadly. It seems the point still stands that there was a single fork around the DAO and the odds of anything like that again are basically zero.

The benefit of crypto is that somebody will automate that forking, and they won't have to put work into it

In theory you could fork it away, if you can talk everybody into it. What you can't do is prevent someone from launching a similar contract afterwards.

Don't you think the type of contracts that are likely to be sanctioned by world governments are exactly the type of contracts that will be unlikely to implement a suicide method?

No. Ethereum has never forked any inconvenient data or network state.

I am a huge fan of Ethereum but I think the DAO hack fork unquestionably falls into this category.

Ethereum was only a few months old at that point and you could say it was alpha software with training wheels.

That’s… a far cry from never.

“It never happened! Except that one time when it was an alpha”

No true Scottish hard forks then.

Movin those goalposts...

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