The point was not to come to just any consensus, but to a "valid" one that implements a given function.  In the case of transactions, that means immutability of the past because that was the monetary principle to be implemented.  The idea was to implement a specific function, and consensus was the means, not the goal.  This is why the block chain needs to remain verifiable from the genesis block onward, with a specific monetary principle implemented.  In the case of a smart contract, that means "unstoppable code".

The idea was not to have a kind of "community that comes to consensus, just ANY consensus", but rather to have that that consensus came down to an immutable past and a given monetary principle.  Otherwise, you can just vote on a spread sheet and no block chain has to be maintained containing the past, only to maintain the vote.  People's holdings are then decided every weekend by voting (independent of any transactions you might have done).

The immutability and the monetary principle could be maintained as a consensus between sufficiently disparate and greedy entities that could not collude.  That was the brilliant invention of Satoshi.  Of course, from the moment that they collude, they can do anything, but that was recognized, and is nothing else but a 51% attack.  ETH is nothing else but the result of a 51% attack on ETC.

Consensus had to be understood in the same way as "price" is in a free market.  Consensus by collusion is called a cartel and destroys the free market function.  A 51% attack is nothing else but a majority cartel forming, and coming to another market price by collusion.  That is ETH.

Amen.

Moreover, "rolling back because of theft through a fork" is impossible, because there will always be theft.  Bitcoin has known more than 50 spectacular thefts (exchanges, big wallet owners, ....) and many much more small thefts.  So if you fork EVERY TIME, then you fork your coin to oblivion, and if you don't, it means that not all users are equal for the "law", and only buddies and important people will get forked out of theft, which is morally even more fiat-like.

On top of that, "theft" in the bitcoin world is rather simple: it is stealing a currency.  "theft" in the ethereum world, "abuse of contract", is a much murkier water.  Who is going to be the judge ?

So what ETH did is impossible to maintain as a principle.  And if it is impossible to maintain as a principle, then that means that there are privileged and non privileged: those who will be bailed out by a fork, and the normal crowd.

ETH has lost all moral and legal foundations by forking, even if it was to "restore funds from theft", simply because that principle cannot be maintained.

And if now they claim that this was only once, then what do we have to think ?  That, in their dreams, by the time ethereum takes over bitcoin and has a market cap of say, $50 billion, with contracts running on it in the 5 billion dollars, when people loose now, due to a bug, 4 billion dollars, what are they going to do ?  They bailed out a meager 60 millions back in the old days.  What are they going to do when 4 billion is lost ?  "sorry guys, we said that it was the last time" ?

No, ETH has lost all grounds to know whether you'll get a bail out or not, and OF COURSE there will be a lot of theft and contracts doing funny things on it, unless ETH won't have contracts on it any more.

No, the scam is that they kept their ETH customers' ETC at split time.  Whether they trade it later or not is a business decision.  But keeping their customers' ETC is theft.

It is very very funny to see that all those crying that ETC is a "thief's coin" don't mind people being ripped off 1/8 of their ownership :-)

He's a thief regarding moral standards.  In the same way that the state is a thief when it collects taxes.
Whether he's a thief according to legal standards (which ones ?) is to be seen, and can only be pronounced by a court.
And in the system at hand, he's no thief at all, because he acted legally (the code).

So I agree with you to call him a moral thief, like the state is a thief.


Because in going to court, Vitalik was going to get much more from the whip than the thief whose identity is unknown.

Analogy: If you are the owner of a money laundering service, is going to court because they stole from you an option ?

One can even add: in as much as a human court would recognize the DAO as a moral entity (doubtful), and a human court would recognize the intend of the contract (the written text of how the DAO is supposed to behave on the DAO website) because this is probably what investors took for granted, and in as much as the court would hence assume (against the idea of "contract is law") that the code is SUPPOSED to implement this intend, in that case, the Slock.it guys / ethereum foundation are responsible for this implementation and all the consequences of "bugs". 

Now, in as much as the court could recognize that all complex software systems deviate from "intend" and hence contain "bugs", nevertheless, the slock.it guys/ethereum foundation must do everything they can to avoid losses due to bugs.

The problem was that this exact bug/exploit was made known to them, even by academics, and *they neglected it*.

So in as much as the court does everything that is needed to even be able to recognize the hacker as a thief, the slock.it guys and/or the ethereum foundation will have to answer for abusive neglect with as a consequence, the losses.  And these losses will not be estimated in "ethereum" but in dollar.  Given that, due to the hack, ETH lost about half of its value in dollar, I think that our boys will pay for the rest of their lives, EVEN if the hacker gets in jail for theft.

No, of course not.  If you buy ETH NOW, you only get ETH.  This double thing only concerned people who had ETH balances on these exchanges at the time of the fork.  THOSE were entitled to have an equal ETC amount (and only the amount they had at the time of the fork).  Simply because anybody holding ETH on chain at the time of the fork ALSO would have had both after the fork.  So in as much "holding a wallet on an exchange" is the same as "holding the coins on chain", the exchanges ought to do so.  If they don't, like BTC-e, then they are keeping their customers' ETC for themselves.

You can see ETH before the split as shares in a company XYZ, which split in two companies at the split: XY and Z.
A share from before the split automatically becomes both a share of XY and a share of Z.   So any bookmaker that was holding XYZ for you at that time, is holding both XY and Z for you after that time.  If he only gives you XY, that means that he's off with the Z in his pocket.
But any share XY AFTER the split is only a share of XY.


Don't worry, it is only pre-fork ETH.

There are no "exploits", and funny people call a normal property of forked chains "a replay attack" but it is normal, and has no malice, but if you don't understand it, you can send your ETH when you only wanted to send ETC and vice versa.   A valid pre-ETH address (not one with the DAO or the hacker, but all others) is valid on both the post-ETH and the ETC chain (simply because it is the same chain before split !).  If you sign a transaction on such an address, of course, you sign it *on both chains*, so you move your pre-ETH *at the same time* in the post-ETH chain and the ETC chain.  If you want to avoid that, you have to mix your transaction with coins post-split, so that the transaction is invalid on one of the chains (and you first have to hold some post-coin dust to be able to do so).  With ethereum, moreover, Vitalik designed a special contract to have the same effect.

This effect will happen less and less, as more and more coins will get mixed with newly mined coins and will hence not be valid on the other chain.

Well, if there's a scam, then it is BTC-E that is scamming their cheering customers in the name of fairness :-)

Because, whatever you think of ETC, it is about a 1/8 market share of the former ETH.  It is like company XYZ is now split in company XY (ETH) and in company Z (ETC).  Even if you think that company Z is a total failure, former XYZ shareholders are entitled to their share in Z which has market value.  If a broker was holding your former XYZ shares, and he only gives you XY shares after, then he's putting the Z part in his pocket (whether you think that Z will fail or not, RIGHT NOW it has market value), and he's scamming you as a former XYZ holder.

That's more or less what BTC-E is doing with their customers, in the name of "not scamming them".  

Well, without a profit motive, and only with (so-called) generous, (so-said) altruistic, collaborative people, the block chain concept wouldn't work, and would be totally exposed to one rotten apple.

But the profit motive has to induce sufficient antagonism, or it won't work either.  What we saw with ETH was that there was a profit motive all right (that would in principle make it work) but there was too much collusion and collaboration between the entities, which made the fork possible.  Too many greedy people with important roles (say, devs) had a common goal: getting bailed out.  They all looked in the same direction, even though they were greedy.  That was the reason for the failure of the block chain immutability.

That said, the thing resolved in an amazing way: those that colluded, have now their own, bailed out, block chain, and the very small minority of non-colluders have their own, original copy running.  


Well, I think it doesn't really matter: the dream of ethereum is dead in any case.  There won't, for a very very long time, be complex monsters like the DAO running on ETH and/or ETC.   Little Ponzi games like this one:

http://themerkle.com/ponzi-scheme-meets-smart-contracts-with-ethereum-piggybank/

and

https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/6439/etheramid-multi-level-social-invitation-game-no-ponzi

and, who knows, maybe smart bicycle locks are now the realistic ambitions of ETH and or ETC.

And yes, you can use ETH, because for small game, there won't be bail out forks and the chain will be reliable too.



No, ETH failed to solve the Byzantine Generals problem because of too much collusion of interests.  ETC has succeeded in keeping this solution, even though only a minority of former ETH users think so.  It is a bet of which the outcome is uncertain, but I'd think that the ETC people are potentially in a better position than the ETH people.

After all, most of the value of ETH came from the dream of megalo smart contracts.  A significant part of ETH was locked up in the DAO, which was the "engine" of the value rise.  The DAO holders were of course the first line winners of the dream, but the whole ETH holders went up with it.   But given that the DAO is dead, and probably most dreams of DAO like projects which were the driving force behind the ETH value, are dead now, rationally, the ETH must be strongly over valued.  So the ETC price may be much, much more in line with the value of a tiny smart contract ponzi game platform than the market cap of ETH, which has no much growth space any more.

That said, ETH is of course also a simple crypto currency, and there's no reason why ETH wouldn't thrive as a crypto currency.  Maybe institutional investors in normal crypto even find a value in the bail out precedent of ETH, and consider that Vitalik and the ETH people are reasonable people one can talk to if one has difficulties, and they will find a solution for you.

So in my opinion, ETH is, after the fall of the DAO, and all DAO-like dreams, now strongly over valued, but on the other hand, a bail-out crypto currency is maybe something institutional investors may find attractive.  In other words, what was lacking in crypto land was a rewindable block chain for important people, and there might very well be a huge institutional demand for that.  ETH has all its reasons of existence there, being the first such currency having shown that block chains don't have to be immutable, and transactions don't have to be irreversible - at least for important people, not for small players.  I'm sure that that proposition has a big market: a crypto that can bail out important people, but that keeps the small people play by the rules. 

The point is, you don't care !  Your contract can run on both.  Hey, you could even debug the DAO, and run it again on ETC :-)  It was open source ;-)

The "longest chain" argument only holds when we talk about equally valid block chains.  But after a hard fork, such is not the case.  Blocks on chain A are not valid on chain B, and vice versa.

You could just as well argue about a "longest chain argument" between, say, bitcoin and litecoin.

No, it is the other way around.  The profit motive is not a way to compromise the system, but it is the engine of the system.  The whole trick was to make a system of which a solution of the Byzantine General Problem EMERGES from mutually untrustworthy, but hopefully very greedy, entities.

The block chain solution is not perfect, but attempts at such a system, and the *condition* is that there is sufficient decentralization and animosity between players, very much like a free market, which solves the problem of allocating resources and solving problems of scarcity by putting A LOT of mutually hostile entities together.

ETH failed in that respect, because there was too much centralisation: one BIG failing contract, and miners/developers/shareholders all colluding around that contract. 

No, not really.  In order to be able to have property, one has to have a statute of a moral or physical person.  Now, the statute of moral person of DAO is highly doubtful, because it has nowhere been registered.  If the DAO coin holders are shareholders, then they are most probably liable for participation in an illegal for-profit company that didn't register.

And in as much as the DAO coin holders are simply COIN holders, well, they still have their DAO coins !!

Don't forget that no DAO tokens were stolen, and that the humans only possess DAO tokens.  The ether was possessed by the DAO, but that entity has not much legal leg to stand on, and is probably a totally illegal entity in any case.

In as much as the transaction of property WITHIN THE DAO can be given any statue, without referring to "the code is the law", I would like to see that !

I think that the day that the DAO token holders make themselves known, they stand more legal problems than anything else.

Moving propriety from a non-existing moral entity to another moral entity using software that has been declared the sole rule can only have 3 outcomes:
1) all that stuff is declared illegal (how are taxes collected on a for-profit moral entity )
2) the software is considered the rule and then the "thief" was stolen
3) the INTEND (the DAO website) is considered the intend, and then the slock-it guys are in DEEP DOODOO because they wrote the software that was supposed to secure the intend and are probably as well held responsible for organizing illegal financial activities, as being responsible for the losses incurred.

By the time the "thief" is legally declared a thief, so many lawyers have been paid and so many time has gone by that Vitalik is retired.  And remember, nobody is a thief unless a court has pronounced that verdict if you want to play by legal rules.

No wonder that Vitalik and the Slock.it boys panicked when they realised what they were up to.


For there to be theft, there has to be an owner in the first place.  Now, a securities firm that didn't register and whose' monetary actions with the money of share holders wasn't running according to all legal dispositions is probably a way way bigger problem than a doubtful transaction between non-existing and if existing, probably illegal, entities.


The point is that if you want to abide by the LEGAL system, forget about smart contracts, and forget about most crypto.  The ETC guys promote a true crypto system, meaning an anarchist system.  If you're not in anarchy, you have nothing to do in crypto, essentially.

Hahaha, very smart move from BTC-e.  With that statement, they can cash in on all the free ETC they have from their customers :-)
In that way, they don't need to justify to their customers their right to ETC.

In other words, they're stealing about 1/8 of the total value of their customers' ETH wallets...

Of course not.  Given the uncertain future, best is to hedge ETH with ETC.  Ideally, you should put equal value in both if you are totally unsure about which one will "win" (if any), which means that you should trade about 3/8 of your ETH holdings for ETC.  (assuming that the ETC price is about 1/8 of the ETH price).  In that case, you already had 1/8 of your value in ETC and 7/8 in ETH, and you're adding 3/8 to it (while losing 3/8 of ETH), so that you obtain 4/8 of your value in ETH and 4/8 of your value in ETC.

That would be the "maximum entropy" hedge, if you are totally ignorant about their future rise or fall in value.

In reality people seem to make another estimation (give it a higher chance that, say, ETH will double, rather than that ETC will double) and hence assign a different ratio to their wallets.  This is essentially what their market price ratio indicates.  There are probably people not hedging at all, and purely holding ETH (or purely holding ETC), but I guess most will hedge some.

You should have clicked on the link... it is not bitcoin forking...

As I said before, my main motivation for liking crypto is to prepare (in the long term) the Singularity, for machines to take over.  It is only in that frame that crypto DOES make a lot of sense.  In the mean time, it can also be used for total anarchy, which is also my liking.

Doing "normal" business on crypto, you have to be crazy.


That's essentially the idea, indeed.



Public acceptance should go with public desire for total anarchy and the abolishment of state and law.  I don't know how much demand there is for that.  Outside of that demand, the only reason for crypto to exist, is to scam people, which is also a worthy way of dealing with statist supporters :-)


I think it was hubris of the astronomical kind.  The very idea of building an entire venture capitalist firm as the very first smart contract on a new platform in a new language (Solidity) is so mindbogglingly out of scale with reality that they were in fact right: IF you want to screw up royally, you have to be so incredibly over your mileage that nobody will see it, and that big money will flow in.

Ok.


Here we diverge: "theft" is a concept that is in relationship to a specific law system.  A given action is theft or isn't, according to the given law system.  Now, according to the code=law system, it wasn't theft.

According to probably most human law systems, it was maybe theft.  I say "maybe", because if the code isn't the law, then "property of the DAO" is also not defined.

According to most moral laws, it is clearly theft.

But normally, society law doesn't apply in smart contracts (and in as much as they do apply, smart contracts are not possible).

This is BTW why I've often argued that another shortcoming of ethereum is its transparency.  A smart contract platform should implement, as much as it can, anonymity, by having TOR-type of servers, and cryptonight-type of anonymous transactions.
It is only when transactions and network activity is essentially rendered totally opaque that a smart contract really makes sense, because there's no way for human law to intervene.  It is only when human law is totally put out of work that a smart contract can really thrive.

If ETH would have been anonymous, btw, the hard fork wouldn't have been possible.

What happened probably is this.  Initially, Coinbase didn't want anything to do with ETC:

http://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-gdax-ether-classic/

Most probably, they didn't care about the ETC chain, nor about the inclusion of their transactions on that chain (which some funny people call "replay attack").   Once they were forced to consider their customers' pre-fork ETH balance in ETC, they were in deep doodoo because they had transferred all the corresponding ETC also to, for instance, customers withdrawing ETH.

Hint: if you are a coinbase customer, and you've done an ETH withdrawal recently, check if your address is also not valid on the ETC chain !  They may have sent you free ETC from other customers !

This, or Coinbase is a scammer, and has confiscated the ETC of their pre-fork ETH customers to sell it elsewhere.


Saying that they were "victim of replay attack" is ridiculous, as the so-called "replay attack" is a NORMAL PHENOMENON on a forked chain.

I agree with you, that was the whole scam of this thing, but they were trying to do something impossible.  This is why they should have just published the byte code of their contract.  They didn't even need a single security audit in that case.  Just a piece of random code can be a contract.  If you subscribe to it, you have to find out how it works.

Of course, in doing so, they would not have obtained 150 million !  The only contributors would have been those that would have reverse-engineered the byte code...

Or about its utility of having a split block chain where no minority suffers the dictate from the majority.