The hard fork was inevitable and it exposed the most glaring problem with the whole thing - there's no use case for a ledger that's supposedly decentralized and immutable but is in fact subject to the decisions of a particular group, however "super awesome and competent" who have significant vested interests in the speculative value of the currency. I'm not even talking about the DoS hard fork which you can explain away as fixing a core ethereum bug. The fork that unilaterally decided to nix the ethereum of the hacker who exploited a flaw in theDAO's smart contracts, the action that was taken purely to roll back the losses of those who had their hands in the speculative ethereum cookie jar, makes ethereum as an implementation of a great concept impossible to take seriously. If code isn't law, then what is besides the whims of the ethereum community? Any sane individual would much rather take such a contract dispute to a U.S. court where at least one has an idea as to who is pulling the strings. Labeling such concerns as "dumb stuff" is simply a knee-jerk reaction to criticism that endangers your own stake in ethereum's success.

> No it wasn't a centralized bailout.

> Yes, there were SOME shady things that went down, but all very minor. It was a very confusing time for all.

> Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one. Congratulations. Let me direct you to Ethereum Classic. You can't complain about a hard fork when you have a community that upholds the original version. Go complain there. The rest of us are moving forward and helping develop a technology that will ultimately be fully decentralized and uncensorable. In the meantime, our community respects our centralized development team that is super awesome and competent and are committed to changing the world.

What's to prevent a similar situation in the future and why should anyone believe that to hold?

> Best analogy I can come up with is Elon Musk trying to develop automated driving cars, and a few people tragically get killed along the way due to it. That doesnt mean automated driving cars are bad, or that development of the technology should cease.

In your analogy the company set up by Musk would get sued and possibly shut down. It wouldn't stop the concept itself from being developed or promoted by others and doesn't speak to the concept itself. I'm not saying Ethereum should have "given up" but sacrificing the core point of transactions not being able to be backed out is pretty damning.

Ask yourself if this was a centralized hard fork ordered by up high, or as users we chose to opt in to this change. Clearly we opted in, because Ethereum Classic exists for those who so wish. Therefore, the Ethereum Foundation did not "force" me to do anything that I didn't agree to.

Yes in my example Musk might have gotten sued (although really? is he at risk of that right now? I doubt it.), but a mistake early on in development should not hinder the advancement of the technology.

If you are going to say smart contracts are useful, but we should abandon the Ethereum blockchain, then BY ALL MEANS please go to Ethereum Classic. You'll be welcome there with open arms. But the main Ethereum community clearly prioritizes pragmatism, as do the majority of the world. We're not idealists. We're actually trying to put out a meaningful technology to help people. So you can throw Musk in jail or let him get back to work on saving lives.

The analogy to the legal system is that mob rule supersedes (digital) contract law and property rights.

If people want to go down that path they're free to do so but I'm not a fan.

> Yes in my example Musk might have gotten sued (although really? is he at risk of that right now? I doubt it.), but a mistake early on in development should not hinder the advancement of the technology.

> If you are going to say smart contracts are useful, but we should abandon the Ethereum blockchain, then BY ALL MEANS please go to Ethereum Classic. You'll be welcome there with open arms. But the main Ethereum community clearly prioritizes pragmatism, as do the majority of the world. We're not idealists. We're actually trying to put out a meaningful technology to help people.

Eating the loss doesn't stop you from developing better software. Heck, I'd say that it's a pretty good way to prevent things in the future by giving people a real incentive to prevent bugs in the first place. If it's socially acceptable to roll back the clock because somebody wrote a dumb smart contract then it's a sign that writing dumb smart contracts is socially acceptable.

> So you can throw Musk in jail or let him get back to work on saving lives.

That's a false dichotomy. In the analogy Musk doesn't go to jail unless he willfully released something that he knew could kill people or otherwise programmed the cars to drive on the sidewalk.

In ETH's case they could have absorbed the loss, hardened the systems, and moved on. Honestly it would have added a lot more credibility to the whole endeavor by showing that they were willing to put their (ETH) money where their mouths are.

Imagine if you and I wrote a contract, and in the contract, there is a typo which says that I will pay you $5 gazillion for an iPhone, then that doesn't mean that the courts must enforce it. Clearly, it doesn't follow the 'intent' of the parties.

Now, what if the other side truly signed the contract because they thought that their iPhone was being bought for 5 gazillion dollars, well this is why we don't "JUST" communicate via the contract. We communicate and perform negotiations via other human channels and the legal contract is a formalized expression of our communication.

Same thing goes with smart contracts. I don't intend to use Smart Contracts because the missing 11th commandment said: "Thou shalt obey the Legal/Smart Contracts to the word". I want to use Smart Contracts because they would be an extension of legal contracts taken to the decentralized + technology domain.

Literally, nobody put their money in the DAO because they thought that if a person puts in $1000 in the DAO then he should be able to take out $10 million if he is clever enough.

Lemme put it this way, had the hard fork not happened, but nearly 90% of the Ethereum holders quit Ethereum after that and joined say Lisk or some other smart contract platform, (which meant that the hacker's bounty would have been decimated, would you still say that 'mob rule has superceded the contract law and property rights'?

And who is deciding what that intent? Right now, the mob, so the parent is right :)

Your analogies to courts defeats the entire argument against that.

Courts were, in fact, set up as deciders of that thing called "law".

If code is law, so to speak, you don't need them. There is no intent.

Considering we can decide to abolish the constitution in America (or in any country) any time, does that mean we don't have a constitutional republic in America? Technically we can never say that we have a system X which is not Mob rule because the mob can always abolish it.

Literally speaking, there is no such thing as 'code is law' because in your definition there is no such thing as law, because anything which can be modified by the mob is not law and everything can be modified or abolished by the mob.

The former is not correct, so the latter is nonsense. The constitution has no provision for abolishing it, the same as it does not have a provision allowing secession.

There is actually even caselaw on this, and it's very clear that it is about a perpetual union.

"Technically we can never say that we have a system X which is not Mob rule because the mob can always abolish it." That is 100% not what has happened here. In the constitutional system, there is a process for amending the constitution. it is not mob rule, or anything close to it. it is possible for basically 100% of the people to be against or for a thing, and them be unable to make it happen directly. (even if they call a constitutional convention, they send representatives, not a mob, etc)

In the other other case, the rules are 100% made up by whoever has the largest mob, directly. That is mob rule.

That's basically true. I don't dispute that. That's basically how Bitcoin works as well. There's currently a coup attempt going on to overthrow Bitcoin Core. If the mob grows big enough they will succeed.

>Eating the loss doesn't stop you from developing better software. Heck, I'd say that it's a pretty good way to prevent things in the future by giving people a real incentive to prevent bugs in the first place. If it's socially acceptable to roll back the clock because somebody wrote a dumb smart contract then it's a sign that writing dumb smart contracts is socially acceptable.

Eat the loss or not eating the loss doesnt affect development. The development track is the same either way. One saves a sad sack of idiots from losing money and the other doesn't. It's not the development team's job to teach people basic life skills about risk. Users had a choice to be on the chain where they lost money or the one that they didn't. Shocker, they chose to recover their money. Has nothing to do with developing better software or not.

>That's a false dichotomy. In the analogy Musk doesn't go to jail unless he willfully released something that he knew could kill people or otherwise programmed the cars to drive on the sidewalk. In ETH's case they could have absorbed the loss, hardened the systems, and moved on. Honestly it would have added a lot more credibility to the whole endeavor by showing that they were willing to put their (ETH) money where their mouths are.

No one willfully released TheDAO code to suck. It just sucked by accident. Absorbing the loss would NOT have hardened the system. Everything would be exactly the same. It wouldn't have made Eth any more or less credible if we absorbed the loss. And if you are put off, that's fine. If you want to join a blockchain with perfect credibility, good luck. Bitcoin has forked ~3 times, and Ethereum Classic has forked 2 or 3 times now as well.

Maybe blockchain technology is too nascent, or it just isn't for you. But the takeaway here is that _we are all still striving and working hard to make this technology be meaningful for the world, so stop shitting on it just to get your rocks off_. Not you personally, but others clearly do.

There's a huge difference between a blockchain that just started out, effectively in its beta release and learning the ropes, doing a hard fork under extraordinary circumstances, and a mature blockchain doing a hard fork to reverse any old major Dapp hack.

If Ethereum does hard forks to reverse hacks of third party applications at a mature phase of its life, I think its chances of succeeding and becoming the main platform for global asset management will diminish significantly. On the contrary, if Ethereum stays true to its principles, and becomes reliably immutable, even in the face of major hacks, I believe there is very little that can stop it from becoming the defacto protocol for global commerce. So I think being overly pragmatic is actually dangerous. Idealism is what sets principles, and principles are what give a platform credibility.

Remember, a hack of a third party application, no matter how major, cannot seriously harm Ethereum. A contentious hard fork and a discrediting of its principles can.

Look, ETC is still there, and currently it's at its all time low. Clearly the market didn't care about the DAO situation.

In other words, if a company makes a decision X which you think is a bad decision, and nearly none of their customers oppose them for it, did they really make a bad decision?

If tomorrow another DAO debacle happens and another such thing happens, I for one expect Ethereum Foundation to take steps to safeguard the integrity of the network by thwarting the theft.

If after Mt Gox theft had bitcoin been forked to undo that theft, then I would have jumped on to the forked chain (again no promises, but in principle I'd have gone to the forked chain).

On the other hand I presume you'd have stayed on the non-forked chain.

In other words, there are two kinds of cryptocurrency investors. You and I belong to two different groups. If you like Ethereum but are worried about 'code is law' violation, then please go join ETC.

As an observer, yes, it definitely did.

It's the thing that has most turned me off of ETH.

Your team has always been a bit combative with regards to criticism, from my experience.

That said... I am actually more interested in using ethereum classic than I am ethereum, uh, central.

Yes, the website says "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" and we stopped one.

You literally sacrificed your principles. Now you're here trying to justify your own actions to yourself. This pointless noise you're making? You're trying to convince yourself, because you clearly know you're in the wrong. It's just as obvious from over here.

Let's say that Hard fork never happened, lets say if tomorrow due to a certain smart contract, 90% of the Ether holders sell off, and go join Lisk or some other Smart contract platform, would you say because 90% of the Ethereum supporters sold off their currency, therefore the smart contract has been 'stopped' and that they should remove "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" from their website?

Literally what happened (and there is no way of saying it otherwise irrespective of how you approach it). A group of developers forked Ethereum into their own blockchain, so all the investors evened up with currency in both the chains. Then people sold their 'original ethers' and moved to the new ethers.

The current price of original Ethers (known as Ethereum Classic) is 90% less than what it used to be.

> Ethereum sacrificed its principles to stop/censor a contract, and still keeps "unstoppable uncensorable contracts" on the website.

You do understand that Ethereum is not like Apple or some other organization. It's a technology and "IT" does not have a website. You're talking about Ethereum.org which is the website of Ethereum Foundation.

And maybe I shouldn't presume knowledge on other people's (like your) part, but in a decentralized technology like Bitcoin or Ethereum, thousands of miners (or in PoS system stakers) are the real entity here. Miners too merely follow the price. This is why initially when Hard Fork happened, a lot of miners went back to mining Ethereum Classic after momentarily jumping to the forked blockchain. Then when it was clear that the market/investors don't support the idea of letting a theft continue, they jumped back to Ethereum forked chain.

Clearly Ethereum Classic hasn't 'sacrificed' it's principles, they too have a foundation, and you're free to invest and use ETC.

If I can write a piece of code which can be used to steal your emails and bank accounts, then your emails and bank accounts are already 'exposed'. They don't 'become exposed' when I write the tool.

Ethereum blockchain didn't become something different fundamentally when this hard fork was implemented. If you consider hard fork as 'mutating the blockchain' (which I heavily disagree) then it didn't become mutable when the hard fork was implemented, rather it was mutable from the day the it was created.

And funny thing is, by that measure, literally there is no such thing as immutable blockchain. Bitcoin can be mutated in the same way Ethereum was.

"Our unregulated-free-market-dream-but-still-controlled-by-a-group-with-financial-interests-in-it cryptocurrency has two fundamentally incompatible versions, and may very well fork into a third at the whim of Ethereum's developers"

wew lad