And the law can change if the community deems it wise.
> nor really how Ethereum was advertised
This meme is kind of silly to me: Would it be false advertising for BMW to say "Pushing the gas pedal makes the car go forward" after a single BMW had to be taken to the shop because of a broken gas pedal?
(I'm talking about advertising for ethereum in general, not for the DAO itself. I agree the DAO advertising was totally inexcusable for many reasons. I wish I had had the guts to say so more publicly at the time.)
Ethereum even now advertises itself on its homepage as
>Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
But clearly, we had a program that very specifically ran exactly as programmed, and its operation was interfered by a third party (the community hard-fork). Ethereum offers a guarantee that is not held; this is false advertising.
If it is a guarantee that cannot be held, it is still false advertising.
But even more so, Ethereum imagines itself to have no established authority; to be decentralized. But obviously, it is not. The final say clearly remains with the Ethereum developers, even if the community has the option to secede. (You can renounce your citizenship from the US, everyone can wholesale, but this does not mean the US has no centralized authority.) Bitcoin, of course, offers the same situation; the difference being that bitcoin's authorities do not collude, and by community happenstance, it is unlikely that they will. Such a fork is unimaginable in that universe.
Ethereum (and its many users) imagines itself to be of Bitcoin's equivalence, a large enough and stable enough network that offers little ability and incentive for its authorities to collude. But, of course, this is false. It remains small enough that a hard-fork is viable; proven by the act of a hard-fork.
This is false advertising, in the sense that it misrepresents fundamental components of the system. It might support decentralization given a sufficiently large network, but it does not (yet) have sufficiently large network. But either it pretends its network is sufficiently large, or it pretends that requirement does not exist.
Most of the issues with currencies(and most everything) is trust and the motivations of other people. Technology might help democratize a world currency, but those who corner the market first will have major influence over it, which in turn will quickly result in the same imbalance in power which was trying to be avoided.
In this system, no transaction is actually final, because it can always be rollbacked because the reversal of a law can traverse time and space. The only gaurantee is once you've got it converted to cash (exited the network) because the network may simply enter a parallel universe where the law never existed (and unlike a hostile government invading another, with all the repurcussions of it, this is a manuever taken by the existing government, and likely it remains the government in the new universe).
This isn't a law then, its simply a communally accepted rule; if the ratchet turns, and community decides slavery is no longer acceptable, then it'll be applied retroactively and you'll be rendered an illegal actor for operating legally at the time of operation, despite operating legally now (no longer dealing in slaves).
In other words, the code isn't the law, which is exactly what I said.
So I'm not sure that it's really all that distinct from legislative majorities in traditional legal system (and clearly less of a genuine majority than in legislative systems where the public retains, whether or not it chooses to frequently exercise them, powers of initiative and referendum.)
It's a pillar of modern democracies that the effects of some law, can only be applied to future events not to past ones.
What ETH did, was create new laws and then proceed to apply them to previous actions. Very untrustworthy indeed.
In the ETH case, you are creating a law to REVERT a previous deal. Democracies don't do that.
So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community, and in that case you'll likely still have your valid transaction on a working chain, it's just that a lot of people will have gone elsewhere.
A large economic majority of the community, you mean. Which gets to the heart of my largest misgiving about these networks: They are so transparently libertarian in striving to embody the Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If a big actor makes a mistake that benefits 1,000 small actors, the little guys still get fucked.
If the US operated like this, Bill Gates would have ~500,000 more votes than the average American. You could argue that wealthy actors already exert outsize influence on our meatspace contract system, but I'd argue it's to a much lesser extent, and anyway, I don't see Ethereum offering much of an alternative. They don't even pretend to try to strike a balance between individual and community justice.
Economic majority is a copout, and it looks an awful lot like feudalism. As a little guy, I'm hesitant to hitch my wagon to that particular star.
The whole pitch of ethereum was that it was supposed to be an objective platform, free of human bias, to execute contracts. "The code is the law", they said.
Of course, that was a big fat lie; someone made a shitty contract with a loophole in it. When someone took advantage of that loophole, the devs said "uh, just kidding" and reversed the whole thing.
If I wanted a contract system where humans were able to void contracts, I would use the traditional legal contract system. Ethereum no longer has any advantage.