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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The reason to let the attackers get away with the money is that it would show Ethereum is what they say it is: a secure way to execute smart contracts. If you don't allow it to happen, then it's just another boring human organization with a few powerful people calling the shots, and everyone who uses it as a platform for smart contracts will wonder if theirs is the one that crosses the invisible line and gets rolled back.

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We like to pretend Ethereum and Bitcoin are controlled by the code, but they're not. They're controlled by their communities, which decide what code to run. That's how it's always been.

Indeed this is the elephant in the room with the more ardent libertarian niche; the community as a whole has beliefs of many shapes and shades. Once the mob, for lack of a better term, decides to move it is very difficult to steer. And the mob is a mighty powerful force that has a tendency to sweep all before it, rational or otherwise.

People are not just rational beings, neither is the community. The 51% is dead, long live the 51%.

I agree, and I had money invested in The DAO. Admittedly not a lot of money, but still enough to miss. I'd rather never see that money again than have the ethereum network compromise its principles to revert the theft. I'll happily invest in the next version of The DAO, and other DAOs - once they have gone through extensive code review, of course.

Except that it isn't powerful people calling the shots. It's powerful people making suggestions, and then the shots being called by the network participants. There is nothing happening here that is contrary to the ethos of smart contracts or decentralized governance. If any sort of fork is accepted it will be because a majority of miners thought it was a good idea, not because Vitalik said so.

That just means that a majority of miners can be swayed into breaking the whole thing by a few people at the top.

That's what power looks like. A few people decide and many people willingly make it happen.

I disagree. The miners are the network. It has always been the case that the ability to influence the miners is equivalent to the ability to manipulate the network however you please. This isn't a new property of the system.

The miners choosing to do this or not to do this changes nothing about the fundamental security assumptions of Ethereum. Even if they choose not to fork, that doesn't mean that they couldn't choose to do so in the future for some other case. So i'm not really sure what it is that's being lost if they choose to do so now.

There's an assumption with these systems that the miners value the integrity of the system, whether out of idealism or just because they're invested in it, so you'll never have most of them try to subvert it.

If they roll this back, that will show that this assumption is wrong. They are not sufficiently invested or sufficiently idealistic to preserve the system. At least half of them value expediency instead.

Technologically it changes nothing, but it totally alters the human element.

Idealists will get wiped if they don't agree with majority consensus. It was always a human system and "the code is the network" is just ideology.

It is ultimately a human system, but human systems can include an element of rule based order. Humans can decide to have one process for making the rules and different one for enforcing/honoring the rules.

So the best way to proceed, in my view, is to honor the current version of the contract (which equals the current version of the code including the "exploit") and then change the rules/code so that the same thing cannot happen again in the future.

The miners are not the network; the expectation of market reaction is the network and the miners make their choice just like everyone else. Miners don't want to be on the wrong chain.

That may be even worse. This would basically be a "majority robs minority" attack. Not necessarily a great thing...

That's every cryptocurrency ever though.

What does the mining situation look like for Eth? Is it like Bitcoin where it's less than a dozen guys in China? Or is it more spread out.

It's much worse.

Where did you get the idea that Bitcoin is mined by less than a dozen guys in China. This is absolutely false. There are major miners in the US, Georgia and elsewhere.

Around 70% of the hashrate is controlled by 5 Chinese-controlled mining pools.

the hashrate chart.... ? the recently mined blocks perhaps?

what they wrote was only BARELY hyperbole, barely.

Three pools (dwarfpool, ethpool/ethermine, and f2pool) control around 64 % of the hashrate currently.[1] I don’t know how many people are behind these organizations, but their vote, if coordinated, would be decisive in whether any kind of fork takes place.

[1] https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners

Correction: ethermine, much to my delight, has enabled individual voting. (I don’t know about the others.)

Even if they let the attacker get away with it this time, it would only be showing that Ethereum community used their discretion and chose not to in this case.

I'm not sure it matters whether or not they do it; having people realize that they can is pretty damning in itself.

It would also be an incredibly valuable, long-lasting learning experience for the entire community, especially the ~23,000 who put money into TheDAO. Bitcoin had this in its early years and resulted in a highly critical, street-smart community. Ethereum community has been more on the risk-taking experimental side b/c until recently they had no real money at stake. Now that they've crossed that boundary, the ethos and attitude needs to catch up to the reality.

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