Comment by flashmob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flashmob | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So you are saying that people who run a piece of software with a certain configuration option set to "yes", are breaking the US law?

> agree to sell the assets of FooCo to BarCo for $1

This is where your analogy breaks. The classic chain was not sold to the forked chain.

It would be more comparable to Alex & Beth getting together and creating new company, copying all the books & records from the old company (that were public domain), minus Casey's balance. Without buying the old company. Customers of the two companies could go to any company at any time they wish, except for Casey, who is not a customer of the new company. That would be legal in US?

There are a few other issues with your interpretation:

- Coins do not represent shares of a company. There's no stock.

- There's no voting: At most, the miners probably have voting power with their hashrate, however as the linked article stated, a soft-fork was impossible to do, so even the miners could not vote.

- Hardfork was not a vote. Even if you said "Yes" to the hardfork config option, you could still go back and say "No" to play with the classic chain at any point in time. (Refer to the screenshot in my OP)

This is the wrong level of abstraction to think about the problem at. You're talking about how it was done, in terms of technical implementation. Focus on the effects, in terms of real-world exchange value -- that's what matters, both to the law and to human beings.

In my analogy, Casey owned 1/3 of X (a corporation), where X is some social construct with real-world market value in terms of dollars or bitcoin or gold or whatever. The other owners of X worked to transfer real-world market value from X to a new social construct, Y, in order to capture Casey's share of the value. Under the US-law ruleset this is a violation of their fiduciary duty to Casey as a minority shareholder.

In the Ethereum example, the DAO hacker owned 1/20th (or so?) of X, where X (ether) is some social construct with real-world market value in terms of dollars or bitcoin or gold or whatever. The other owners of X worked to transfer real-world market value from X to a new social construct, Y, in order to capture the DAO hacker's share of the value. Under the Ethereum ruleset this is OK.

So we have two different rulesets with different protection for minority stakeholders. It's an interesting question whether (despite this example) Ethereum could end up being more favorable for minority stakeholders overall. But it's not at all interesting to spend time arguing about whether a minority stakeholder was injured by the Ethereum split -- that was the entire, explicit, point of the split, and if you focus on real-world exchange value there's no way to disguise it.

Again, I think this is where we differ - you're thinking in terms of stocks and shareholders, but there are no shareholders here. There are no shares that represent ownership of anything, and the most important distinction here is that when the fork was created, there was no transfer of ownership, which is the key concept in your argument.

Also, if I change my level of abstraction to think about the problem as you say, it would appear that the attacker was trying to injure the project, opposite to your Casey example, where she was the victim. Those that had 'skin in the game' did what they had to do, to protect themselves from the attacker. I don't think the attacker was naive, they would have known that such a move would inflict a loss of value for the project.

I also think that the hardfork was the best outcome for both parties: Classic represents the value of Ethereum should it have chosen to keep on going with the attacker, and Ethereum Fork is the value representing the attacker absent. Everybody wins, the thief would be pretty happy with their loot regardless (if it's legally theirs, maybe it's not). In your Casey example, she was left with nothing, so it's another important distinction to make.

Btw, thanks for replying and for the debate. It's been a pleasure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com