Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by decorator 3047 days ago
If it's on Ethereum, it's not decentralised. Their state is mutable -- as per the DAO.
5 comments

I understand this, but good lord people need to stop bringing this up in every damn thread that mentions Ethereum. We all know about the DAO and what happened afterwards.
That's probably because people think decentralised apps should be decentralised.
What does having mutable state have to do with being decentralized?
Mutable history is the problem. What's written to the blockchain is supposed to be immutable forever and independently verifiable by everyone. If an entity can rewrite history (eg drop or revert transactions), it becomes a problem. This is what happened after the DAO hack and it resulted in the Ethereum classic fork.
Well, sort-of?

The chain still includes the transaction history of what happened with the DAO, but the hard fork added a special case unique state change which undoes most of the effects of the transactions that happened with the DAO.

So, the transactions still are recorded as having happened, but the state was edited?

Not that that necessarily is a particularly important distinction, but I think it is one that can reasonably be made.

The decentralized element should be more than just a software concern. Regardless of decentralized / mutable state if the control of the state of the chain (forks etc) is a centralized concern by a small group then we're just admitting the conceptual model is bullshit and this is literally just a very mediocre technical implementation of stuff we already have.

You can't just throw out or dismiss the historical failures of the model because it doesn't fit the ongoing narrative. The DAO was a glimpse at how easy the theory is corrupted, whether it started for the right reasons or not.

Break contract, be forever viewed as less trustworthy. The punishment fits the crime.
Only the names mutated:

Ethereum -> ETC.

New Coin -> Ethereum.

The market said New Coin a.k.a. Ethereum is worth more. But who cares about fiat, eh?

Just had a nasty though. Don't tell the tax office about this. They'll could tax you as income on the "New Coin" a.k.a. Ethereum you got for free, and you claim a capital loss on the drop in price of the old coin (Etherium Price - Classic Price). Yikes!
This may sound radical & all, but I think people may be investing in coins based on things which are other than 'rational'.

'I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men'.

If more professional investors get involved, that would likely change some.

You can he decentralized and mutable...
Precisely. The decision to fork was made via a decentralized process.
A blockchain?
> If it's on Ethereum, it's not decentralised.

You didn't mention it not being a blockchain. Words matter.

I think the fork was a mistake as well, but that doesn't make something centralized.

I hadn't realised that people didn't know what type of data structure Ethereum used.
whoosh
I think if you have a node running locally, metamask will work with ETC as well, so you could probably use this setup with Ethereum Classic if you wish.
I think most things can change chains. So I'm not condemning everything.
Yes, distributed but not decentralized.