Hacker News Reader

Comment by web3isgoing | Hacker News Reader

Vitalik isn’t running any DEXes, he is not in a position where he can steal or move user funds locked into a DeFi contract. He could suggest a change that might do something malicious at protocol level, but the rest of the developer community would reject it.

View on HN

CEO of a bank can't do that too. The board can though. And of course customers can reject that decision and switch bank. But in reality that won't happen both in the bank case and in the tokenbro case. We have already saw how Vitalik stole lawful tokens from the receiver of The DAO program (code is law after all), and everyone has supported him. Exactly the same as banks can do, only without outlandish claims.

A fork is not a theft. The code allows for forking, doesn't it?

It's not that it allows it, it doesn't say anything about a similar-but-different version of the code running on a different network in parallel.

So you are saying that double spending attack is not a theft? "It's only a fork" after all.

A double spend attack is a type of fraud for sure, but obviously one of the remedies for a double spend attack is to fork the main chain and change the consensus to nerf the attack.

Ultimately layer 0 of a blockchain is the community that uses it, and if they decide to fork en masse, they will do so. It's an essential property of the system itself. Blockchains would not be antifragile if they could not fork.

Then the problem becomes the same, who is empowered with calling a fork? If they are just by users who are using it, how is it different than having an election etc.? Except here the agenda comes from a shadow organization within a "decentralized" system. I would much rather my votes happen in public with everyone's consent.

I don't see how double spending and forks are the same thing. Double spending is when the same coin is spent twice on the same chain. When you fork, you are creating a whole new future history (sorry, can't come up with a better word). If I have a ledger for my business, and someone created a copy and added different transactions to it, that would not be double spending, right?

Nothing really got stolen in the DAO case the way I see it. ETC still exists, its just that nobody wants to use that chain. Code is still law, but the users decide which code to run. I can see the beauty in it.

> he is not in a position where he can steal or move user funds locked into a DeFi contract

He already did that once, and could do it again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com