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Comment by xani_ | Hacker News Reader

It's just that mask fell off completely.

People should've got a clue when Ethereum forked the chain because it turned out the "immutable" smart contract had bugs and it lost the money of important people

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Trustless for thee but none for me thanks.

I still can't believe anyone uttered the phrase 'code is law' unironically again after the ETH/ETC fork. After all, Vitalik effectively said he didn't care if your grandma's life savings got stolen, that's decentralization - but when it happens to the important people, well, it's time to have a come to Jesus and fork the chain.

Forking requires consensus among the decentralized miners. If the majority of the minors didn't agree to fork, they wouldn't have been able to fork the chain.

Anyone can fork any chain, nothing more than a single miner is required on the new chain. In fact the pre-rollback chain lives on as ETC. A parallel universe where code actually was law.

One entity decided they were sad about code being law and decided to roll back the outcome of a faithfully executed smart contract using their influence. When one person can influence enough miners to make it the principle chain simply to undo what is in their opinion an outcome they disliked, that's centralization. Or at least a plutocracy.

Today that power rests principally with Jeremy Allaire since of course only one chain can represent the real world dollars in his bank account (USDC).

What are you even trying to say?

The rules of a blockchain protocol are not immutable, they can and often do change. Users decide to follow the new rules, or they decide not to. The 2016 fork showed that the majority of users and the market chose to follow ETH instead of ETC. In a few days we will probably see another fork, and most likely the majority of users will follow the PoS chain instead of the PoW chain.

If you want to rollback things build that into your smart contract and stop pretending. If you think your code is mature enough to survive attacks then disable the rollback feature forever.

Smart contracts can add rollback and revert functions but it won't save them from an exploited code path. At that point the only way to 'revert' exploited funds is rolling back the entire blockchain by creating a new fork. The market will decide whether to follow the fork. It has happened once, and might happen again one day, but only at the will of the majority of users.

Not the majority of the users, the majority of the miners, influenced by leadership/the wealthy. This is plutocracy. And very much not an improvement over the status quo.

In Ethereum's proof of stake model, validators do not control the rules and cannot force a change in the protocol. People choose to run nodes, these nodes may or may not be validator nodes, and this software is what enforces the protocol rules across the network. A majority of nodes would have to come to consensus on a change for it to be successful - this happened with DAO, EIP-1559, and probably soon the PoS merge.

It is free to run a node, and the market can freely decide to not support a chain. This is how you end up with ETC being relatively worthless even though there was a group of "rich plutocratic elites" that tried to make it succeed.

There are "influencers" like Vitalik, EF, several client teams, and thousands of hobbyists who work on research and development for the protocol, and these people do lead the direction of the technology moreso than the average user. But this is how all open source works: a small number of people make decisions, and a much larger group of people opt-in to those choices, becoming users. This is also how you end up with multiple blockchains: not everybody was happy using Bitcoin, so some people started to develop Ethereum instead.

There is no rollback feature. There is social consensus, which is sort of the whole point. No one can tell you and your friends which fork of the chain to use. Good luck to you. We might call this freedom.

When crypto currency companies started to raise billions from the markets and have Superbowl commercials just like normal banks I knew the anarchist libertarian Cyberpunk experiment was subverted.

Hey, if I'm targeting my product at iconoclastic free thinkers, I can't go wrong with a Superbowl ad!

The community supported it, what else do you think should have happened? A small minority of people were opposed to it and they made etc and nobody used it. The system worked as intended for an alpha level product. I think you'd have pretty substantial trouble getting the community to agree to it today, which is appropriate for a more mature system.

If the majority stole from the minority, is there no recourse?

What recourse do you have when the US fed keeps on printing money and reducing your purchasing power.

The dollar has risen vs almost every other currency. The DXY is back to 2003 levels. Bitcoin fell from $67k to $18.8k.

Where have you been the last few months?

> Where have you been the last few months?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

The United States is a democracy, so you vote.

Again, what recourse do you have with crypto?

Vote what? Monetary policies are independent from the federal government.

The people who set the monetary policies are appointed by whom?

The federal reserve is an independent unelected agency that’s not accountable to the US public.

I don’t see how people can call our federal system a democracy anymore just become we run elections. You need to judge a system by many other attributes.

The members of the fed are appointed by democratically elected individuals.

I am aware of that. But even that feature is weak. To judge how democratic an institution is you must look at all features or characteristics of an institution. The appointment of its board of governors isn't the only democratic feature we should care about. The federal reserve has weak accountability, lack of citizen participation, lack of transparency, lack of representation, etc.

The people have no direct voice at the federal level, or choosing members of the fed, so now we are talking about representative democracy, as you mentioned.

In a representative democracy the voters are supposed to choose the representatives, but there is a lot of gerrymandering in the U.S. where instead representatives get to chose the voters in their districts. Also those with the most money tend to win elections, like +95% percent of the time, making it look like lobbyist and the rich elect representatives, not voters. Most other western countries countries call that bribery, and make it illegal.

It should be recognized that the current laws around gerrymandering and campaign finance mean that we may not really have democracy or representative democracy in any true sense of the word. Some would go so far as to say we have a two party oligarchy.

Personally I think using gerrymandering to explain the bulk of our political dysfunction is mistaken. If you were to ask me to give you a simple explanation for the dysfunction and corruption at the federal level, it would be that our federal government is not design to be this big and powerful. Just one example... 50~ years ago the federal government contributed nearly nothing to local and state funding. Today, total federal outlays have ballooned to nearly 20% of all local/state funding(depending on how its counted). Everything has trended to be more centralized.

I believe the best solution going forward is to rip power from the federal government and return it to states and local governments, as was intended by the constitution. Resolving gerrymandering and campaign finance laws will not fix the political dysfunction. It's structural. Most federal institutions are not designed to be democratic.

I wholeheartedly agree! The U.S. federal government was first and foremost designed to be responsive to the states, not the people.

I'm a big fan of Leopold Khor and his book Breakdown of Nations. He talks about how national governments that get too powerful become corrupt authoritarian bullies [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaszpQaNwAU

Stole from? Ethereum Classic is still running, hacker has her funds.

The rest of community has decided to disassociate themselves from hacker and forked away.

Ethereum has never reverted the blockchain which is what breaks immutability. In fact, you can go back in history and find the DAO creation, the hack, and even the transaction that reverted the stolen funds.

This is, by the way, unlike Bitcoin which did revert the blockchain and break its immutable nature in 2010. https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creat...

Not sure that this matters much but as it's a frequent point brought we might as well get the details rights.

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