The Market is not wrong, Vitalik Buterin is.

[iamnotback]

I still don't believe people believe the thief is right.

Correct and the thief is Vitalik.

The DAO beneficiary followed the rules of the contract exactly. He did not break any rules.

You thieves want to break the rules because you decided AFTER THE FACT that you didn't like the rules you had agreed to.

[toknormal]

Yes if someone steals from you that person who stole from you is a thief whether or not you report it to the authorities.

But stealing the authenticity of an asset from its thousands of holders does not a crime remedy.

Shame the ETH devs hadn't studied history.

[bbc.reporter]

What the young man is unable to comprehend is that an immutable, non-reversable blockchain is more valuable than fixing a $60 million loss for people who actually deserved it due to negligence and an inability to put forth proper security protocols while having a fiduciary responsibility to ensure the funds safety.

Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns come to mind.

I am sure to Vitalik, $60 million is a lot of money and he wants 'to do the right thing.'  What he has done however is unwittingly and unknowingly removed himself from the helm of Ethereum.  Ethereum simply can't be trusted any longer as its community may reverse transactions that "have been executed by Muslims, or French people or maybe blacks," especially if the 51% consensus is a gathering of 19-32 year old white males?  Where does it end?

It ends with Ethereum Classic.  Kudos to the visionaries who understand that the betterment of the many lies in an immutable blockchain which stands the chance to make trillions.

Subsidizing idiocy is not a valuable proposition.

My opinion in all this is that Vitalik has set a precedent in that transaction history in blockchains can be changed or rolled back. Now every platform will think this is ok if the Ethereum fork becomes a success. They only way to negate this is for the original Ethereum classic to live on and let the competition between them kill the fork. I am confident the original will win.

[Piston Honda]

nice op heh.

and WBB / 1EX is the one on the true right path.

all will be seen in time (not to long either)

their new tech chain that NOBODY HAS EVEN DEVELOPED is coming and will blow minds.

[WolfofBitcoin]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1504662.msg15717392#msg15717392

The absolute nonsense is those that won't accept the failure and the "guarantee" that was made.

(read those terms very closely - and then read them again please)

I could not care less about ETH or The DAO. I will never defend a thief. If your hate for ETH will make you throw your principles in the bin, then that's up to you.

He is a thief and he is waiting to enjoy the spoils of his crime. Keep defending him. Maybe he will toss you a few.

The story of Joe Ritchie comes to my mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ritchie

Joe figured out that Black-Scholes was incomplete and he 'completed it', he syphoned off over a billion dollars in the 80's through algorithmic computer [TI SR52] trading.  Was he a thief?  The hacker of DAO took advantage of an incomplete, unthought-out, dreamy hack of a promise.  I cheerlead him and applaud his efforts.

These children playing around with smart contracts, currencies or in Ethereum's case on their website, offering the ability to form one's own Central Bank is absurd.  Years and years and years integrating dozens of people and dozens of disciplines can possibly make for a smart contract, not a child in a basement who does not understand the consequences or repercussions.

Do you have any idea of the standard operating procedures, security checks, audits, and governance that is employed when a single line of code is changed at a Bank?  Nothing could be further from the truth for the DAO project or Ethereum for that matter.

The 'hacker' like Joe Ritchie will hopefully be able to use those spoils to help keep this technology honest and do some wonderful things.  Vitalik is the criminal in this circumstance, literally counterfeiting the Blockchain of Ethereum for his own personal beliefs undermining the very core principal that makes Bitcoin the only network with which you could have any reasonable expectation of security and validity.  Immutable.

I thank Ethereum for what it did for myself and my family.  I purchased it on the very first day of its pre-sale at 2000ETH for 1 Bitcoin, I was in Toronto, I was at Decentral.  I bought alot of Bitcoins worth for the equivalent of 25 cents.  I sold every last one of the them between $12 and $13 the first time it spiked.  I am happy.  I am satisfied and as far as I am concerned (I'm only a single opinion) Ethereum is over and it has taught us all lessons, similar to World Coin, Aurora and all the others that have come and gone.  As there is no way to know the effects of these instruments unless they are tinkered with in real-time, each one has provided priceless knowledge that will keep making these instruments better and better.

More importantly it will allow legislators to begin to craft the frameworks for their proper oversight.

I for one do not believe this extremely intelligent person is a thief.

[WolfofBitcoin]

Here is a thought, and hopefully the intelligent young man is listening out there.

What if he were to distribute 50% of his Ethereum Classic holdings equally to all existing addresses as an offering to everyone who believe in the actual purpose of the technology thus reducing his ownership to 5%?  I think that that gesture is more valuable than Satoshi's quite frankly.  He would equally be rewarded as 10x 50% which is much more valuable than 1x 100%.  He even stands the chance to become the head of the organization.  I am dead serious.  There are no charges that can befall him for exploiting an error that was advertised to be complete, secure and tested.  Again remember the CFTC, SEC, CBOE, CBOT all told us that the Black Scholes models were complete as well.  They were wrong.

Ethereum Classic will spike and Ethereum will take a VERY hard dive, eventually Classic will win in the end as immutability is the single greatest value proposition of this technology.

Full disclosure I currently own even more Ethereum Classic below $1 than I purchased initially years ago, for the second round!  Thanks Vitalik and Mr. Ritchie II.

[dinofelis]

Visibly it is difficult to talk to the logically impaired.  I wanted to come to a logical Socratic reasoning, but there are some for whom logical reasoning and just repeating "he's a thief, he's a thief, he has stolen stuff" are indistinguishable.

I do agree that from a certain, human, point of view, one could call him a thief.  But the whole point is that in order to call someone a thief, there has to be a law that tells you what transactions are lawful/right/just and what transactions are illegal/wrong/unfair.  Human law is made up of different sets of rules, the most prominent is of course the law from state and court, but also unwritten moral laws.   All these laws need a form of human judgement because they are not deterministically precise, and in some border cases, different people judge differently, but in many "obvious" cases, most people judge the same.

Now the whole point is that if the DAO had been a paper contract, then by almost all accounts, what the guy had done, would have been theft.   THIS is probably why people call him a thief.  The reason are multiple: 1) the large majority of contract subscribers, even the authors, would never have considered that what he did was part of the INTEND of the contract  2) there would have been no REASON, no thinkable advantage to anyone, to allow for such a contract.

So, there's almost no doubt that *if the DAO would have been a paper contract*, the guy was a thief.  I perfectly agree upon that.

BUT.

The whole point of a smart contract is that ALL human rules, legal ones, moral ones, .... are to be REPLACED by one single, deterministic entity: the code.  If one thinks about it, that is EXTREMELY WEIRD.  This is why I was insisting on people not understanding the concept of smart contract, and not seeing the mind boggling implications of that concept: there's no legal law, there's no moral law and there's no INTEND any more.  The code is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.

Because it is the ONLY way of coming to a verdict mechanically, on a computer, without human judgement.  If you do not accept EVERY SINGLE strange bizarre immoral consequence of "the code is the law", then smart contracts have no meaning.  (as every contract has to come to a verdict, Turing complete smart contracts are an aberration BTW).

And in the frame of THOSE rules, the guy wasn't a thief.  He applied the strange, weird, immoral law perfectly and played by the rules.

Visibly, the ETH people were in fact not ready to accept the concept of smart contract, and to replace human, legal,moral law by the code, and nothing but the code.   Visibly, the pioneers of smart contracts weren't ready to accept the concept they were tauting.  Given the huge difference between human judgement, and "code judgement", one can understand that.  We see it here: the same action (by the guy) is judged theft without the slightest doubt if it had been under human law, and is perfectly legal under code law.  People don't, finally, accept "code law".

However, this makes smart contracts impossible, and hence, its platform (now ETH) useless apart from a trader's toy.

If one cannot accept "the code is the law", then there must be human judgement.  However, judgement by whom and on the basis of WHAT PAPER CONTRACT ?   And with what corrective action ?  Each time a hard fork ?   You can be sure that almost ALL somewhat involved smart contracts will, at a certain point, make decisions that might potentially be considered as not in agreement with some human judgement.    What is to be done in that case ?  Who will judge ?  A court ?  In what jurisdiction ?  What paper contract describes the INTEND on which the judge is to base his judgement ?  Or is the vote a majority vote of the ETH stake holders ?  Is that a reliable judgement ?  Are shareholders not going to vote for their advantage and not for human fairness or legality ?   Is this justice, or just "the mob voting for lynching or not" ?  If the code is not the law, and the legal system is not the law, and morality is not the law, but "the vote of the mob is the law", are you sure you're better off than with "the code is the law" ?
But EVEN if one can come to a form of human judgement against the code, is ETH going to hard fork each time that a smart contract code does something that someone judges not fair or legal ?  Is it going to hard fork every Saturday for all the funny things all the smart contracts did on it during the week ?  Or is it only going to hard fork for "important people" or Vitalik's buddies ?  Is there only a form of justice other than the code, for the rich and the powerful, but not for the normal small contract writer ?   

What's the value and sense of such a strange system, where the ultimate contract IS a paper contract describing intend ?  Why not stick to a paper contract and a normal court then ?  What's the use of this thing ?

The ONLY way of implementing smart contracts, is to accept "the code is the law" even if that law is weird, inhuman, looks unfair, and does totally unexpected things.  If you cannot accept that, you shouldn't be in smart contracts.  Because otherwise, you end up with a non functional system and even much less "legal basis" than with a paper contract, where "the majority vote of the mob" is making the unpredictable law, every day.

[bbc.reporter]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

[dinofelis]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

Why would that matter ?  We don't know who Satoshi is, but we can use bitcoin, can't we ?    There were at least 10 different opportunities to do funny things with the DAO, so if THIS guy wouldn't have done it, the next one would.  What that guy did was a normal aspect of complex smart contracts: they will not run as intended.  That's normal: written code deviates from intend.  People call that "bugs".  If the code is the law, then the bugs are the law too.  What the guy did was just illustrating an aspect of smart contracts, nothing more.

The whole question is this: can you accept that bugs are the law ?  This is what the guy illustrated (and again, if it wouldn't have been Joe, it would have been Jack).  If you cannot accept that bugs are the law, then you should get out of smart contracts and of ETH.  If you accept that bugs are the law, then you should move to ETC.  So in any case, ETH has no meaning any more.
Because there will be many more "bugs" in smart contracts.

[iamnotback]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

We know who he is. He told us on his website. It is MPeX. We revealed that during the attackexploit.

Here is a thought, and hopefully the intelligent young man is listening out there.

MPeX is not a young man.

If you don't know who MPeX is, then you are not fully knowledgeable about the history of Bitcoin.

[bbc.reporter]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

Why would that matter ?  We don't know who Satoshi is, but we can use bitcoin, can't we ?    There were at least 10 different opportunities to do funny things with the DAO, so if THIS guy wouldn't have done it, the next one would.  What that guy did was a normal aspect of complex smart contracts: they will not run as intended.  That's normal: written code deviates from intend.  People call that "bugs".  If the code is the law, then the bugs are the law too.  What the guy did was just illustrating an aspect of smart contracts, nothing more.

Yes it does. We should not take it lightly and forget about him. We do not want this hapenning over and over. We want to know who it is, how he did it and why. So in the future it can be prevented. I also think Vitalik would love to know. So yes again it will really matter to him.

[bbc.reporter]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

We know who he is. He told us on his website. It is MPeX. We revealed that during the attack.

Yes I read about it and his interview. But is it confirmed? I am not updated in the issue with him. The others I ask are in denial and say it isn't him. They say he just seeking publicity.

[iamnotback]

We can argue everyday about this but no one is asking the question of "who is the person who exploited the DAO contract? Where is he? What is his motive?"

These are very simple question and yet no one has come up with an answer or at least a theory. Since you are all here and aware of the situation please express what you think.

We know who he is. He told us on his website. It is MPeX. We revealed that during the attack.

Yes I read about it and his interview. But is it confirmed? I am not updated in the issue with him. The others I ask are in denial and say it isn't him. They say he just seeking publicity.

He claimed it. And he is the one capable. And he is the one with the motive, since he hates shitcoins (but he doesn't waste his time destroying them unless they proclaim to challenge Bitcoin).

He is the guy who told the SEC to fuck off in a public letter after they demanded information from him.

He destroyed Vitalik for an ideological reason. He didn't need the money.

[dinofelis]

Yes it does. We should not take it lightly and forget about him. We do not want this hapenning over and over. We want to know who it is, how he did it and why. So in the future it can be prevented. I also think Vitalik would love to know. So yes again it will really matter to him.

Of course it will happen again, over and over.  It is in the nature of the concept of smart contract.  He's just the pioneer. 

What you are essentially saying, is that future smart contracts will have code that coincides with intend in all possible border cases.  In other words, future smart contracts will not contain bugs or exploits.  Now that's good news: you know how to write complex code that matches perfectly with intend (doesn't contain bugs) right off from the start.  I think that many software companies will hire you !

[keystroke]

The whole point of a smart contract is that ALL human rules, legal ones, moral ones, .... are to be REPLACED by one single, deterministic entity: the code.  If one thinks about it, that is EXTREMELY WEIRD.  This is why I was insisting on people not understanding the concept of smart contract, and not seeing the mind boggling implications of that concept: there's no legal law, there's no moral law and there's no INTEND any more.  The code is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.

Here, here. They undermined the entire idea of their system by doing this rollback. ETH is all hype.

[dinofelis]

He claimed it. And he is the one capable. And he is the one with the motive, since he hates shitcoins (but he doesn't waste his time destroying them unless they proclaim to challenge Bitcoin).

Eh, you don't need a strong motive, do you ?  If I would have been capable, I would have done that too, just for the fun of it.  Crypto is there to be challenged and to be played with, right ?  If I would know how to screw up the bitcoin block chain, I wouldn't hesitate to do so.  Crypto being a system that has to function in a trustless and hostile environment, there's nothing even morally wrong with challenging it.  I would assume that there are many, many people out there with the same sense of making fun as I do, and who are way way more capable, so I wouldn't look for a motive.  It is normal.  It is a fun game.

[iamnotback]

He claimed it. And he is the one capable. And he is the one with the motive, since he hates shitcoins (but he doesn't waste his time destroying them unless they proclaim to challenge Bitcoin).

Eh, you don't need a strong motive, do you ?  If I would have been capable, I would have done that too, just for the fun of it.  Crypto is there to be challenged and to be played with, right ?  If I would know how to screw up the bitcoin block chain, I wouldn't hesitate to do so.  Crypto being a system that has to function in a trustless and hostile environment, there's nothing even morally wrong with challenging it.  I would assume that there are many, many people out there with the same sense of making fun as I do, and who are way way more capable, so I wouldn't look for a motive.  It is normal.  It is a fun game.

Of the people with the balls to stand up to the potential legal risks and the resources to do it well, he is one of the few with the motive, given he promised to destroy any fork of Bitcoin which didn't agree with his principles. Ethereum was touting to challenge Bitcoin. He put his foot down. Vitalik was squished under his big toe.

[Munti]

Visibly it is difficult to talk to the logically impaired.  I wanted to come to a logical Socratic reasoning, but there are some for whom logical reasoning and just repeating "he's a thief, he's a thief, he has stolen stuff" are indistinguishable.

I do agree that from a certain, human, point of view, one could call him a thief.  But the whole point is that in order to call someone a thief, there has to be a law that tells you what transactions are lawful/right/just and what transactions are illegal/wrong/unfair.  Human law is made up of different sets of rules, the most prominent is of course the law from state and court, but also unwritten moral laws.   All these laws need a form of human judgement because they are not deterministically precise, and in some border cases, different people judge differently, but in many "obvious" cases, most people judge the same.

Now the whole point is that if the DAO had been a paper contract, then by almost all accounts, what the guy had done, would have been theft.   THIS is probably why people call him a thief.  The reason are multiple: 1) the large majority of contract subscribers, even the authors, would never have considered that what he did was part of the INTEND of the contract  2) there would have been no REASON, no thinkable advantage to anyone, to allow for such a contract.

So, there's almost no doubt that *if the DAO would have been a paper contract*, the guy was a thief.  I perfectly agree upon that.

BUT.

The whole point of a smart contract is that ALL human rules, legal ones, moral ones, .... are to be REPLACED by one single, deterministic entity: the code.  If one thinks about it, that is EXTREMELY WEIRD.  This is why I was insisting on people not understanding the concept of smart contract, and not seeing the mind boggling implications of that concept: there's no legal law, there's no moral law and there's no INTEND any more.  The code is the law, the whole law, and nothing else is the law.

Because it is the ONLY way of coming to a verdict mechanically, on a computer, without human judgement.  If you do not accept EVERY SINGLE strange bizarre immoral consequence of "the code is the law", then smart contracts have no meaning.  (as every contract has to come to a verdict, Turing complete smart contracts are an aberration BTW).

And in the frame of THOSE rules, the guy wasn't a thief.  He applied the strange, weird, immoral law perfectly and played by the rules.

Visibly, the ETH people were in fact not ready to accept the concept of smart contract, and to replace human, legal,moral law by the code, and nothing but the code.   Visibly, the pioneers of smart contracts weren't ready to accept the concept they were tauting.  Given the huge difference between human judgement, and "code judgement", one can understand that.  We see it here: the same action (by the guy) is judged theft without the slightest doubt if it had been under human law, and is perfectly legal under code law.  People don't, finally, accept "code law".

However, this makes smart contracts impossible, and hence, its platform (now ETH) useless apart from a trader's toy.

If one cannot accept "the code is the law", then there must be human judgement.  However, judgement by whom and on the basis of WHAT PAPER CONTRACT ?   And with what corrective action ?  Each time a hard fork ?   You can be sure that almost ALL somewhat involved smart contracts will, at a certain point, make decisions that might potentially be considered as not in agreement with some human judgement.    What is to be done in that case ?  Who will judge ?  A court ?  In what jurisdiction ?  What paper contract describes the INTEND on which the judge is to base his judgement ?  Or is the vote a majority vote of the ETH stake holders ?  Is that a reliable judgement ?  Are shareholders not going to vote for their advantage and not for human fairness or legality ?   Is this justice, or just "the mob voting for lynching or not" ?  If the code is not the law, and the legal system is not the law, and morality is not the law, but "the vote of the mob is the law", are you sure you're better off than with "the code is the law" ?
But EVEN if one can come to a form of human judgement against the code, is ETH going to hard fork each time that a smart contract code does something that someone judges not fair or legal ?  Is it going to hard fork every Saturday for all the funny things all the smart contracts did on it during the week ?  Or is it only going to hard fork for "important people" or Vitalik's buddies ?  Is there only a form of justice other than the code, for the rich and the powerful, but not for the normal small contract writer ?   

What's the value and sense of such a strange system, where the ultimate contract IS a paper contract describing intend ?  Why not stick to a paper contract and a normal court then ?  What's the use of this thing ?

The ONLY way of implementing smart contracts, is to accept "the code is the law" even if that law is weird, inhuman, looks unfair, and does totally unexpected things.  If you cannot accept that, you shouldn't be in smart contracts.  Because otherwise, you end up with a non functional system and even much less "legal basis" than with a paper contract, where "the majority vote of the mob" is making the unpredictable law, every day.

I Agree.
And as I see it this can only lead to one conclusion. Eth and other coins with "global" smart contracts will fail. Smart contracts can not be used in a system that can overrule the contract by forks or any other way. This does not mean that smart contracts are not useful though. We use smart contracts in BitBay for our double deposit escrow, and they work like a charm. In one of the next releases we will add the option to write your own smart contracts in phyton. That will create a potential for badly written contracts with unintended outcomes of course. But it will not create a DAO scenario for the simple reason that the contracts are only between two parties. I have been pushing for an expansion of our multisig from 2/2 to n/m to combine with the contracts to open up a much wider use range. I'm reconsidering that now. For now I think smart contracts should only be used for agrements between two parties. Thank you Eth for the lesson.

[dinofelis]

And as I see it this can only lead to one conclusion. Eth and other coins with "global" smart contracts will fail. Smart contracts can not be used in a system that can overrule the contract by forks or any other way.

This is the important lesson indeed, and this was the true lie of the ETH/DAO promotors: they explicitly said that this was not a thinkable scenario, while it is, of course, because of the consensus nature of a block chain.  That said, and that is why, if there is one immoral and dishonest party in this whole affair, it is the ETH foundation, because it was THEIR initiative to call for a hard fork.  Of course, they needed suffiicient weight from miners to be able to pull the trick, but if they had stated, from the start, that the essence of smart contracts, and the value proposition of a smart contract platform such as ETH, is exactly that the code is the law, including unintended behaviour, there wouldn't, most probably, NOT have been a hard fork, even if the potential desire for it existed.

So, as you say, the potential for the code being overruled by a hard fork is an inherent flaw of the whole system of smart contracts, but on top of that, the very founders of a smart contract platform pushed for that potential to become reality, and as such betrayed all their claims concerning "unstoppable" and "immutable" and "the code is the law" themselves.

For now I think smart contracts should only be used for agrements between two parties. Thank you Eth for the lesson.

I think the issue is not so much the number of participants, but rather the weight of the value of a contract with respect to the value of the whole chain.  The fundamental flaw in the DAO was that it was "too big to fail" and the main / sole ETH project.  In other words, in the same way as having all the mining power in the hands of a few, having a large chunk of the chain value in one single contract is a centralization problem that will lead to corruption of the rules.  If there would have been 20 000 little DAO on ETH, a fork to save one of them would never even have occurred in the minds of anybody.

I think your two-party smart contract will suffer even more from that if you consider that the code has to be the judge.  Each party can fork off and do as he pleases.  In fact, your two-party smart contract is probably just a cryptographic way to sign and date actions on both sides, *with the idea of going to court if one of the parties thinks that the contract was broken and got screwed*.  But that's not a smart contract, that's a secure logbook. The only thing you're probably doing is introducing non-repudiation signatures on actions, so that you can use this as proof in court.  I think that's a useful way to use cryptography, but I wouldn't call it a smart contract.

But I fully agree with you: thank you, eth, for having screwed up so royally and to have shown the limits of smart contracts, namely people messing with history and hard forking over it, before people taking contracts seriously, lost money.  Now, only gamblers lost money, and even got it back, which is not dramatic.  So, thank you again for showing the uselessness of ETH before it did real damage.

[dinofelis]

In fact, the ETH fork showed us one thing, as Munti explained: "the code is the law" only works to the extend that the mob accepts it, and the mob can always overrule it.  So maybe one should simply accept that fact, and build it in the code.  I don't know if it is possible with Ethereum, but one could consider that there can be a majority vote of stake holders to undo any transaction on the block chain while remaining on the chain.
There could be a new kind of "transaction", with a multisig representing sufficient stake *from before a specific transaction*, that undoes this transaction in some kind of way.

In bitcoin equivalent speak, there could be block chain entries that "revoke" former transaction hashes, so that their UTXO are not considered valid, and their inputs are not considered consuming former UTXO.  It would be sufficient that such a revoking block chain entry accumulates signatures representing sufficient UTXO from before said transaction for it to be recognized as valid.

As such, the new rule would be: "the code is the law, but any stake above X is above the law and can undo anything in the past".

Instead of a multi sig of accumulated stake, one could also introduce a few hard coded "god signatures" of specific people (say, Vitalik and his dog) or entities being "god" and above all law, and when they sign any such revocation entry on the block chain, then said transaction is revoked.   Or this could be a multi-god signature, where, say, 5 out of the 7 gods have to sign such a revocation order.  We could assign the keys to, say, people like the president of the USA, the governor of the FED, Putin, and the secretary of the communist party in China, the king of Saudi Arabia and Vitalik. 

What do you think ?

It would avoid hard forking, the rules would be clear, and there would be a way to overrule the code in a less messy way than with a hard fork.