Re:Ethereum Proof of Stake FAQ
by CryptoPunk on Saturday August 19, 2017 @09:10PM
(#15056466)
Agreeing to use social consensus to enforce the protocol doesn't give a green light to using it to change the protocol. As the DAO and the BCH hard fork showed, having an objective proof of work consensus protocol doesn't protect the blockchain from a social consensus to change the protocol.
That being said, depending social consensus to determine what happened could make it more likely that a faction will use it to determine what should have happened. I personally don't think it will make it very likely, given the inertia of the original chain, but we'll see.
Not taking away from your comment because what you describe could have happened but the DAO hard-fork didn't alter history.
Yes it did. In the unaltered version of events the attacker got away with what would be worth almost a billion dollars today.
It didn't alter history. No transactions were reverted. It changed the rules by moving ETH from the attacker-owned contract address to a new contract address from which DAO investors could withdraw their funds. You might say that's semantics but in this technical context it's important, had the HF suggested altering history it would have gained less support IMO.
This of course resulted in two factions, one that disagreed with the change and one that agreed with the change.
If you are using Etherum and your client complains that there are two valid histories and then asks you to use social consensus to pick the 'true' history, do you feel confident in the platform? Especially if you know that you have thousands of millions of dollars that you wanted to put into the system.