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Comment by flashmob | Hacker News Reader

Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules set in the future. The users of the new version also had a choice if they wanted to support the fork or not, the majority went with the fork.

This is a screenshot of the choice everyone was asked when starting up their wallet: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et...

Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to Proof of Stake (PoS) mining in the future.

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Nice whitewashing. While you are technically correct that no transactions were undone, in practice a theft was (largely) reverted. You are also misrepresenting "users' choice" with regards to supporting the fork. If you make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order to effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions. Censorship was a good choice in this case, but let's not pretend it's something it wasn't.

> If you make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order to effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions.

If you don't like what NYT says, and you cancel your subscription and subscribe to WSJ (and let's just say that millions of people do the same thing, possibly due to some event), have you effectively censored NYT then?

The fact is, censorship has a meaning, and the way you're using the language, abuses that. We didn't censor Ubuntu when because of their unity decision lots of people moved to Linux Mint or to other distros.

We didn't censor Digg when it lost a huge traffic to Reddit after the v3 changes.

Uber wasn't censored when after the controversial immigration changes by Trump, people started to delete uber app and ride Lyft.

Censorship is when an organization forces your speech from all effective expression.

Will ETC be invoking censorship when they hard fork to eliminate the upcoming Ice Age baked into the Ethereum protocol?

Your analogy breaks down because we don't trade newspapers as currency, we consume them for information.

And until 2016 nobody used the phrase 'censorship of transactions'.

Your analogies about choice do not really play here. This is about telling someone "we didn't cancel your transaction, everyone just decided to move onto a chain where it doesn't exist". (Also, you are correct that I was abusing the term 'censorship'.)

It's not censorship - it's called consensus.

Look back to the screenshot in my post. Censorship is when you conceal information. The screenshot clearly specifies a yes/no choice without leaning to any choice. (it specifies you can use any chains you want, both buttons are blue).

If only the bitcoin core developers were as brave as that to put something like this in their client and let the community reach consensus! "Hi, we are over capacity. Do you want bigger blocks? Yes / No". Instead, we see any post that doesn't fit their narrative deleted. Now that's censorship.

New rules... to effectively undo one specific transaction.

Fine: it wasn't wiped from the block chain. That's irrelevant; that argument is nonsense.

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