[moralestapia]

I went through that as it was happening.

Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity.

Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.

[vvillena]

In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork.

Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism that gives legitimacy to the rest of the blockchain. The original Bitcoin paper explains this perfectly, so I won't replicate it here.

[rcxdude]

> In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork.

No, it means nothing unless users use, buy, and sell the coin. The miners' are subservient to them, assuming the miners are trying to make money. Miners do not decide or approve which set of consensus rules people decide to use, though they can, at a potentially quite significant loss, disrupt the functioning of the network somewhat.

[incrudible]

> Miners do not decide or approve which set of consensus rules people decide to use, though they can, at a potentially quite significant loss, disrupt the functioning of the network somewhat.

Miners are users. If they don't mine the blocks, the system literally doesn't work. Suppose that a large majority of miners refuses to upgrade for some reason. One part of the users can upgrade and wait for new blocks for a long time, while the users that don't upgrade can actually use the system as if nothing happened. Who is going to throw in the towel first? Maybe it's the miners, maybe it's the ETH holders, you can't know.

[CryptoPunk]

No, other users can easily institute a new lower difficulty in the upgrade to counteract the drop in POW from the defection of miners.

The subservience of miners to users at large in the determination of the market leading fork is best exemplified in the scenario of users switching to a PoS chain. In this case the miners have no power to sabotage the upgraded chain.

[incrudible]

> No, other users can easily institute a new lower difficulty in the upgrade to counteract the drop in POW from the defection of miners.

Sure, you can alternatively anticipate that your fork will not get miner support and give it low difficulty, leaving it vulnerable to spam instead.

It doesn't change the fact that this fork now only has a tiny share of the hashrate, no better than some random altcoin. Why should it be considered the "real" chain? Because it has Vitalik Buterin's face on it? Maybe that works for Ethereum, but it wouldn't work for Bitcoin.

> The subservience of miners to users at large in the determination of the market leading fork is best exemplified in the scenario of users switching to a PoS chain.

...which hasn't happened yet. Of course, if your users don't care about hashrate or PoW, you can transition the software to anything. Maybe that's true for Ethereum. That doesn't make miners subservient. Either they're highly influential (PoW) or they're not part of the picture at all (PoS). There's no scenario in which you can force miners to adopt some change.

[CryptoPunk]

>>There's no scenario in which you can force miners to adopt some change.

Your point was that miners' cooperation is required to successfully upgrade:

>>One part of the users can upgrade and wait for new blocks for a long time, while the users that don't upgrade can actually use the system as if nothing happened

My point is that an upgrade can be implemented without any cooperation from miners. A change to PoS would be the exemplar of that.

[didericis]

I don't see how switching consensus from a proof of work system to proof of stake system "is entirely within the scope of a PoW system". If the majority of the network decides to do that, I understand why that makes it valid, and this is intentionally hyperbolic/don't think proof of stake is properly viewed like this, but to me that reads like "voting in a dictatorship is entirely within the scope of a democratic system". Technically it might be true, but the moment you make that valid democratic decision a decision like that can't happen the same way again.

[programmarchy]

Creating a fork is not a fraud. That was and is always a possibility, people were free to disagree, and Ethereum Classic represents that disagreement. If you went through that, then you would have ETH and ETC, and a choice of what to use, develop, mine, etc.

[moralestapia]

If I had created the DAO and I was the one going to lose 50 million, no fork would have happened, and Buterin (and you probably) would have told me, from their high horses, "though luck pal, you see, that's the beauty of smart contracts, they're final and no one should be able to do anything about it".

If you preach a set of principles and then backtrack on them when it's convenient for you, you're a hypocrite and have no integrity. If you do this on purpose, to deceive people, and there's money involved then you arrived at the definition of fraud, +- some extra words.

[npip99]

That's because the $50M were owned by a large percentage of the users of Ethereum, not a single person. It represented 15% of the total ETH in circulation, back when the currency was in a very nascent state and the flagship product that ETH provided that BTC didn't, was the DAO. When the DAO break happened ETH lost 60% of its value, so not only did 15% of people have their money stolen, but everyone across the board lost 60% of their ETH value. There was simply immense demand for people to get their money back, so people much preferred the fork that kept their money than the fork where the robber stole their money.

Simple as that, it's decentralized, that's the whole point, you fundamentally can't tell people which fork to believe, people use whatever fork they want. And the people mostly wanted the fork with their money in the DAO preserved. People who wanted the unaltered chain stayed there, no big deal.

[tornato7]

Exactly. Ethereum users and miners legitimized the patched chain and that's what continued forward.

A hacker minted free Bitcoin in 2010 and the chain forked to remove that transaction. But nobody's talking about that being a scam. How is the Dao hack any different?

[short]

When a pretty well known main ethereum developer lost $ 250 million due to a smart-contract bug, nothing was reverted

https://news.bitcoin.com/parity-calls-for-ethereum-hard-fork...

[boublepop]

If you had been the creator there would still be absolutely nothing you could do to prevent a fork. You could throw a hissyfit and scream all you want on Twitter, but the fork would still happen.

[short]

can you be more specific? on blockchains, differences of opinion are always solved with forks - and users follow the chain they agree with which makes it the most valuable chain.

[sktrdie]

Didn’t he just donate a billion to India?

[yaa_minu]

He donated a billion dollar worth of an illiquid shitcoin[0] sent to him by the scammers who created.

0. https://shibatoken.com/

[tornato7]

Plus millions of dollars worth of ETH

[boruto]

That's a very simplistic way of putting it.