It demonstrates that Ethereum isn't what it claimed to be. ETH was supposed to be smart contracts where the "code is the law". Clearly, after the DAO debacle, that's not the case.
This means that ETH has no actual value. It adds nothing to the legal or economic landscape because it does nothing new (if we repeatedly rollback and hard fork because of "hacks" like this). This isn't a hack. This isn't theft. This is morons who don't know how to code coding in a crappy language meant to run on an even crappier VM. The only victims here are the people who were duped into investing in ETH in the first place. Poor saps.
Because people want to dream this is some anarchist system where nobody controls etherium the same way everyone thinks bitcoin-core isn't a centralized authority on the protocol.
To dispute that de-facto centralization requires miners to collectively decide to abstain from updates to these primary clients en masse. That just won't happen, people don't organize or coordinate like that. The status quo has tremendous inertia beyond what can be reasonably expected of independent actors trying to act in their own self interest.
> To dispute that de-facto centralization requires miners to collectively decide to abstain from updates to these primary clients en masse. That just won't happen, people don't organize or coordinate like that. The status quo has tremendous inertia beyond what can be reasonably expected of independent actors trying to act in their own self interest.
Because it's rolling back transactions that were done under "the law" (e.g. the ether contract stuff) by human intervention when the entire draw of the ether contract stuff was the promise of no human intervention
Yes, and that 'feature' of block chains is never really touted by blockchain supporters. Basically, if 51% of the network think you have too much money, they can just take it from you with no recourse available.
> Basically, if 51% of the network think you have too much money, they can just take it from you with no recourse available.
That's not how it works. Even if you had 99.99% of the hash rate, you still have to work within the rules of the chain, so a "give me your money" without a valid signature would still be rejected as invalid by every full node (and you just wasted your hashing power). What having 51% or more of the hash rate allows is a double spend attack: you can undo recent transactions, so you can spend a coin twice.
But the rules of the chain can be changed. If for instance 90% of the full nodes decide to change their software so that "give me your money" is now valid in some special circumstance X even without a valid signature, and that "give me your money" transaction is sent to the network, these 90% of the nodes will allow it to be added to the chain, and let the chain grow on top of it; while the other 10% will grow a separate chain on top of the last block without the "give me your money" transaction. Soon, each side has an incompatible view of which transactions are in the blockchain; this is called a "hard fork". And if the minority side is small enough, it will no longer matter if they still say you have your money, since everyone else you want to transact with will say you don't.
That's what blockchain proponents tend to omit: the blockchain is a social construct. Its rules are fixed as long as the majority of participants want them to be. When they decide to change the rules, like that time when the Bitcoin developers fixed a database bug which changed the validity of some blocks, the rules will change. Even retroactively.
It seems to me that large blockchains^ are some of the most stable social structures in existence. The rules of Bitcoin have been in place for 8 years with only minor modifications, despite huge sums of money passing through the system.
This compares very favourably with other social structures, such as nation states, especially 8 year old nation states.
^ Large as in Bitcoin and Ethereum, smaller networks are much easier to manipulate.
> It seems to me that large blockchains^ are some of the most stable social structures in existence. The rules of Bitcoin have been in place for 8 years
Indeed. Makes the Swiss federation and the King James Bible look quaint doesn't it.
This is a nice illustration that all property in general is a social construct: you only truly own something if the rest of the society agrees that you do. Blockchain is one particular way to set the rules, but our regular property laws are not any different in principle.
Yes. This was true before and after the hard fork. Seems like common sense to me, but I guess it's a good thing that the hard fork happened because it educated people that this is possible.
The law is written in code, and clearly code can be changed by human intervention. It's even open source, so technically anyone can change the Ethereum protocol, at any time.
Of course, changes to the law are effective only when there is overwhelming consensus, otherwise they're called minority forks.
... because it breaks the basic fundamentals of a block chain. A block chain is supposed to fight against roll backs not support them.
Sure, the core team / devs are using the rollback for good. But will that always be the same in the future? It's an avenue for abuse and one of the primary reasons ether isn't going to take off.
The point is, if the core team made a change that's widely unpopular, clients would just refuse to upgrade to that version.
Discontent users simply switch to a different branch maintained by different developers. If there's enough consensus, people will call it "real" blockchain and the other one will be left behind with few users and hence no meaningful way to spend the balances.
Exactly. You need overwhelming consensus to change the rules safely.
Bitcoin is currently in a state of disarray because groups of developers, miners, industry and users disagree on fundamental aspects of the scaling debate.
There are no fewer than 4 competing Bitcoin fork proposals on the horizon, each one with an unknown number of supporters. The only thing we can measure accurately is "signaling" in blocks, where miners declare their intention to follow one fork when the designated time comes: https://coin.dance/blocks
However, there is such a thing as "false signaling" for strategic reasons, and hashing power can rapidly shift (or just appear, if new mining rigs come online) in favor of a different proposal at any time.
This is indeed a deeply flawed voting system. In contrast, Ethereum still has a capable leadership with sufficient consensus that they can propose and execute hard-forks whenever they feel it's needed, without this level of uncertainty and drama.
Are you asking for a formal definition that could be put in code? Sorry, there just isn't one.
The same laws which apply to stealing tangible things and cash also apply to stealing cryptocurrency.
In the very unlikely event that the perpetrators came out and sued the Ethereum developers for violating their contract and taking "their" money back, a judge would look at the facts and then decide how the law applies to this particular case. IANAL, but I'm ready to bet that the thieves will go to jail for a while :-)
