[SilasX]

Great analogy! The only thing I would add is that, if your arbitrage trade takes away too much money from an account belong the core devs (which would be like, the regulators responsible for the computer), they would retroactively undo that transaction in the computer's logic (force a hard fork).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819268

[3np]

That's an unfair representation of what actually unfolded.

[SilasX]

Unfair enough that you can articulate why?

[askmike]

> (which would be like, the regulators responsible for the computer)

no one is responsible, that's the whole point. The thing runs by itself and game theory keeps it afloat - not a group of people. Else it's just like a company.

That said, the protocol isn't finished and you have people involved in maintaining and upgrading the protocol. Which is in no way forced down upon everyone: once they have an update everyone is free to choose to run it or not.

These people have influence (you could argue too much) about the future of the protocol.

> if your arbitrage trade takes away too much money from an account belong the core devs

This is not why these decisions were made at all, because some core dev instested in the DAO.

[SilasX]

Bottom line: The core ETH team used their political influence to escape the consequences of "Code is Law", the very same criticism they made of existing legal systems -- that outside parties can come along and void the plain meaning of contracts and laws. That is the height of hypocrisy.

[3np]

To expand:

The decision-making and communities of Ethereum (this goes both for the clients, the blockchain, the foundation and the larger community) looks completely different today compared to 2015. There has been a lot of lessons learnt, debate and churn since.

If they same thing happened today, it'd play out completely differently.

See the Parity Multisig hack, for one.

Finally, it's a stretch to call the dao hack "arbitrage trade".

[SilasX]

>Finally, it's a stretch to call the dao hack "arbitrage trade".

It is absolutely not. It is exactly the same from the value judgments of the ETH project, specifically "Code is Law". The DAO specifically went as far as endorsing that the software execution takes precedence over the reading of the English functionality spec.

The ETH system, but the core values of ETH, should do exactly what your arb contract specifies, and exactly what the DAO contracts specify, even and especially if that's not what the writer originally intended. To selectively reneg on that principle would be wrong for the same reason as doing it on an arb contract.

[3np]

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/arbitrage

> the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same securities, commodities, or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices.

What’s being bought and sold? Who’s the counterparty?

I’m not arguing right and wrong, just that you can’t call any permissionless extraction of value from a contract “arbitrage trade”.

And again, incorrectly assuming that 1) it somehow sets a precedent 2) the people making the decision then are the same that would be making it today 3) the overlapping people would make the same decision today as then 4) the EF and core devs have a strong authority on these matters

There’s always ETC if you want to stay on the timeline where the DAO hack executed as specified without being overridden. No one forced anyone to fork.