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A comment on A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum. Parent comment

Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by spuz on Friday July 21, 2017 @04:55AM (#14819035)
> Well, what's the point of having a smart contract if it's not the final authority?

I think this is a common misunderstanding of Ethereum and blockchains in general. The current Ethereum blockchain is authoritative only as long as a majority of it users consider it to be authoritative. The same applies to Bitcoin. No single person decided to fork Ethereum after the DAO was hacked, it was decided by a quorum of Ethereum users. The original fork still exists as Ethereum Classic and if you believe that the "contract is king" then you are still free to continue using that fork along with everyone else who shares that view.

You say "To me at least Ethereum was dead the moment they chose to fork" and that is probably the view of many Ethereum users. I'm certain many Ethereum holders chose to divest their positions and move their assets elsewhere. That is a big loss for the currency but obviously enough people still believe it to be worth something and so it survives.

Because of their distributed nature, cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users. They don't need to be perfect to survive, only to be slightly fitter than their competitors.

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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by empath75 on Friday July 21, 2017 @06:04AM (#14819254)
You are making the argument that if, say, you've made a bunch of ethereum through means that the majority of miners don't like, they can just fork the currency and take your coins from you, and that's totally fine.
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by spuz on Friday July 21, 2017 @06:39AM (#14819366)
I don't know enough about Ethereum to know whether or not that is technically possible, but I believe it's technically possible with Bitcoin. I think the common misconception of these technologies is that trust is eliminated. It's not, it's simply distributed - you have to trust that the majority miners will find it in their own interests not to steal money from your wallet. I am not saying one way or another whether this state of affairs is 'fine', just pointing out the reality.
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by SilasX on Friday July 21, 2017 @03:34PM (#14823243)
What do you mean? It's exactly what happened in the DAO hack/fork:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_w...

The code had implications that the writers didn't intend. Those implications involved attackers being able to take/steal a large amount of ETH under its terms. But those writers got the entire network to fork and give them back their money in direct contravention of the terms of the code/contract.

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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by Spivak on Friday July 21, 2017 @10:30AM (#14820789)
Other than the 'totally fine' part that accurately describes the situation with basically all cryptocurrentcies. How many coins you have is stored in a distributed ledger which can be arbitrarily modified with a majority of computing power.
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by edzc92 on Friday July 21, 2017 @05:41AM (#14819198)
You forgot when the people that run ethereum made the default vote choice as the hard fork. This is important.
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by erikpukinskis on Friday July 21, 2017 @04:10PM (#14823466)
I guess to be fair they should've had those clients go 50/50?
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by edzc92 on Saturday July 22, 2017 @07:02AM (#14826536)
Yes. People who don't explicitly vote should either be zero or add 1 to each side
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by SilasX on Friday July 21, 2017 @03:20PM (#14823137)
I'm not sure it was a "common understanding" that the network would make special exceptions for "the code is the contract, and nothing else" only when the most influential people wrote bad code.
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Re:A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what ... by erikpukinskis on Friday July 21, 2017 @04:09PM (#14823457)
> cryptocurrencies can be thought of more as living organisms fed by the collective computing power of their users

Mm, I like this image. It completes something for me...

The world is filling up with these autonomous information organisms, who eat computing power. They also need other care, to go for walks, etc. If we humans want to survive in the information age, we will need to take shelter in one, draw a salary from the care of it.

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