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by monodeldiablo 3406 days ago
> So yes, it's possible your transactions will get reversed, but only if you've done something so horrendous that you've pissed off a large majority of the entire community

A large economic majority of the community, you mean. Which gets to the heart of my largest misgiving about these networks: They are so transparently libertarian in striving to embody the Golden Rule ("He who has the gold makes the rules"). If a big actor makes a mistake that benefits 1,000 small actors, the little guys still get fucked.

If the US operated like this, Bill Gates would have ~500,000 more votes than the average American. You could argue that wealthy actors already exert outsize influence on our meatspace contract system, but I'd argue it's to a much lesser extent, and anyway, I don't see Ethereum offering much of an alternative. They don't even pretend to try to strike a balance between individual and community justice.

Economic majority is a copout, and it looks an awful lot like feudalism. As a little guy, I'm hesitant to hitch my wagon to that particular star.

1 comments

That's basically because we don't have a good solution for Sybil attacks, other than weighting votes by account balances. There are various people trying to fix that by adding real-world identities to the blockchain; the most prominent on Ethereum is uPort: https://www.uport.me/