
The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence - ETH_Classic
https://ethereumclassic.github.io/assets/ETC_Declaration_of_Independence.pdf
======
niftich
Fair critique about theatrics aside, I appreciate the write-up of their
grievances, their rationale, and their goals. For those who aren't active in
the blogosphere or discussion boards, this document serves as single, concrete
manifestation of the things the ETC folks have been saying as of late.

------
geofft
Well, okay. But this isn't an answer to the fundamental dilemma of the DAO
hack: either Ethereum should have forked, admitting that smart contracts
aren't really a good idea, or it shouldn't have forked, admitting that smart
contracts aren't really a good idea. This manifesto just argues that the
second option is right, but that doesn't change the conclusion.

Specifically, I have seen a lot of buggy software. I don't think I've ever
seen any truly bug-free software. I expect, therefore, that if I put money
into a smart contract, that contract is going to have a bug in it somewhere.
What happens when the bug is discovered and exploited? If you say "Some humans
will decide that's not what was meant," that's wonderful--but I already have a
financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud
and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I have a decent set of
expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's very well-supported. If
you say "No, the contract is the contract" (as these people do), fantastic:
you have a compellingly different product, not just a bunch of complicated
math on top of a system that's as squishy as my current financial system. But
why at all should I believe that it's different _for the better_? Now I have
an expectation that a bug will exist, and be exploited, and it will be
_correct_ for the bug to be exploited. If the goal is correctness, that's
great. But if the goal is getting me to use the system, why would I want that?

Or, as Matt Levine put it in his writeup of the DAO hack
([https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-17/blockchain-
company-s-smart-contracts-were-dumb)):

"Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the
humans, something has gone wrong."

~~~
jfoutz
> but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable
> judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It's not perfect, but I
> have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it's
> very well-supported.

Totally independent of Ethereum, this style of argument is kinda weak. We
really should be trying to build something better, either by improving the
existing system or building a parallel system that will slowly replace what's
there. Good enough is the enemy of great.

Unfortunately, building better stuff winds up requiring building a bunch of
stupid stuff that doesn't work out.

It's smart to avoid being an early adopter, unless you have some unique
interest in whatever the topic might be, photography, self driving cars, or
Ethereum.

Back to Ethereum, yeah, i agree smart contracts aren't a good idea. They may
be a good idea in the future, but today they're a mess. I think, in general,
some sort of blockchain transaction history is a great idea; it should be
adopted somehow. I can't say exactly what that might look like though.

~~~
RandomBK
>Totally independent of Ethereum, this style of argument is kinda weak. We
really should be trying to build something better, either by improving the
existing system or building a parallel system that will slowly replace what's
there. Good enough is the enemy of great.

While I agree that this style of rethoric is often overused, GP does raise an
important question. Now that Ethereum has forked, there is a great deal of
uncertainty regarding the real benefits of the system, and about whether the
benefit is worth the risk of switching.

The Ethereum project has always marketed the value of the system by
emphasizing the predictable, deterministic, and impartial nature of the
blockchain. Now that it has failed this first trial by fire, it is up to the
project to present a new value proposition for why it is an improvement over
the traditional legal system. We as the public must ask questions to analyze
and critique this value proposition.

~~~
jfoutz
>GP does raise an important question. Now that Ethereum has forked, there is a
great deal of uncertainty regarding the real benefits of the system, and about
whether the benefit is worth the risk of switching.

Oh, absolutely. We should always talk about what was good, what was bad, and
what was irrelevant.

I feel the "what we have now is ok" argument is dismissive. It actively
prevents us considering the good, bad or irrelevant perspective.

After rereading everything, perhaps i was harsh. The OP presented things in
comparison to the current system, which is the right thing to do. I think the
emphasis on "the current system works" distracted me.

~~~
geofft
You bring up a fair point. The only reason I feel the need to emphasize "the
current system works" is that so much cryptocurrency discourse seems to act as
if the current system is horrible beyond repair and literally anything would
be better than it. That's far from true, and it's definitely far from true
when you've reintroduced humans caring about fraud--just human programmers
writing soft-fork code (that didn't even work right, according to this
manifesto) as opposed to people who make a profession out of understanding
fraud.

There's a lot to be fixed about our current financial system. But I think both
Ethereum-with-fork and Ethereum-without-fork are demonstrably worse than the
status quo (which I think you also agree with). Ethereum is great as an
experiment, but now we have experimental results from the DAO hack, showing
something that clearly needs to be rethought. This manifesto seems to instead
be presenting Ethereum-without-fork as a good and complete option, and all of
its reasoning could have been written the day before the hack.

------
cjslep
I look forward to reading the response where the Ethereum (non Classic)
community writes their Constitution where they declare how to govern future
forking.

Ha ha only serious.

Edit: Seems people don't know HHOS: [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-
only-serious.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html)

~~~
jabgrabdthrow
The answer is that any time there's a proposed fork the one that changes less
rules is called "Classic" and the other picks the new name. If there's a truly
ambiguous split, one side tactically cedes the name, like "Classic" did with
"Ethereum".

Ideally the system would have splits as a first class feature and we could
have some kind of versioning system where the more splits a system had the
longer its "name" or effective address

------
jnpn
For those who havent been paying attention to the drama: this is a breakaway
blockchain for people who want to use ethereum but refuse to use a blockchain
in which a $50MM exploit was reversed. There's a lot of false information out
there, particularly about how/why the exploit was reversed. Don't take
anyone's word for it; ask for sources.

~~~
wyager
> a $50MM exploit

Calling it an exploit seems politically charged. There wasn't an exploit in
the Ethereum software itself, which behaved exactly as intended. Instead,
someone wrote a shitty, poorly-designed contract that had a loophole in it.
Someone took advantage of that loophole and make a bunch of money off of it.
To me, "exploit" has connotations of breaking the ethereum system somehow,
which was not the case.

Ethereum Classic seems to be sticking by the original stated purpose of
Ethereum (to have fully automated, non-repudiable contracts).

The other Ethereum seems to be instead stating that it's acceptable for the
judgement of the Ethereum devs to have ultimate control and veto power over
anything that happens on the Ethereum blockchain. In other words, Ethereum is
more of a fiduciary contract system than any sort of "objective" contract
platform.

To be clear, I have no vested interest either way. I have never been involved
with Ethereum.

~~~
jnpn
exploit: "a software tool designed to take advantage of a flaw in a computer
system"

The exploit was on a poorly written smart contract, not ethereum itself,
correct -- I never said otherwise.

>the judgement of the Ethereum devs to have ultimate control and veto power
over anything

This is the misinformation I'm talking about. The Ethereum devs had neither
control nor veto power. That's simply not how hard forking works.

It was made clear multiple times that the decision was up to the
community.[1][2] The decision was coordinated via a decentralized community
hashpower vote,[3][4] and executed via a majority hashpower commitment.[5]
Exchanges and the foundation carried on with the longest chain[6] as is
intended with nakamoto consensus.[7]

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4r9yud/the_curren...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4r9yud/the_current_hf_status/)
[2][https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ro2p9/options_in...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ro2p9/options_in_the_hard_fork_slockit_blog/d52oizp)
[3][https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tlb1y/hard_fork_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tlb1y/hard_fork_voting_and_node_adoption_results_day_2/)
[4][https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tffta/hard_fork_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tffta/hard_fork_voting_and_node_adoption_results/)
[5][https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tsl16/new_blog_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4tsl16/new_blog_post_from_ethereums_vitalik_buterin_hard/)
[6][https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2016.07.15-Ethereum-
Hard...](https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2016.07.15-Ethereum-Hard-Fork/)
[7][http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/](http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/)

~~~
wyager
The "vote" was opt-out of the hard fork, and most people are not involved
enough to opt out. Effectively, the devs just decided for everyone else.

~~~
AroundTheBlock_
That is incorrect. The Mist browser forces you to select a choice upon
startup. There was no default. Mist is the most popular client.

~~~
wyager
And for those who didn't open mist while the vote was taking place?

~~~
zeven7
Nothing happened for them... Mist is a client that lets you see your balances
and send ether or other tokens from one account to another. If you don't open
Mist, you don't send any coins on one chain or the other, and nothing happens
with your accounts.

------
avz
It is very refreshing to see people stand up for principles against narrow
self-interest of a political group or authority.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's principles either way. The principle of binding contracts vs. the
principle of agreements performing as intended.

~~~
jabgrabdthrow
What happens when V.B. has too many hard fork decisions to make, or even
delegate to his Foundation Lieutenants?

I bet you non-ironically have uttered "just this once" too

~~~
Dylan16807
"Just this once" would be the stupidest idea in the world, preserving neither
principle.

I don't even know who VB is. I only care about this from a technological
perspective. But presumably such a drastic action would not be happening
often, if you have to get most of the network to vote.

Was there something that gives a ruling council the ability to override
miners? If not I think you're being unreasonable in the way you're
criticizing.

~~~
pyskell
Due to the nature of mining on Ethereum (and most cryptocurrencies) you do not
need the consent of many.

Miners work in pools, and it's up to the pool operators to make decisions for
a hard fork. In the case of Ethereum it took about 4 or 5 mining pools to
reach majority (over 51% of network hashing power).

A great deal of miners simply leave their mining rigs running and didn't make
a decision either way. Miners largely do not care about any cryptocurrency.
They will, understandably, mine whatever is most profitable.

Miners also depend heavily on ping times and the total mining power of their
pools. With 15 second block times every millisecond counts to make sure you're
the first with the right block and get your reward. There was really no time
for anti-fork mining pools to get setup well and it takes months for a pool to
amass an attractive amount of miner hashing power.

Overall the vote was about 5% for the fork, 1% against, and 94% abstaining.
Ideally it would take a true 51% to change the network.

------
lowglow
I've pretty much lost all faith in Ethereum and its motives. The way this has
played out pretty much demonstrates that a good idea, no matter how beautiful,
while still subject to being ruled by people capable of corruption/greed/or
whatever you want to call it, can be tainted absolutely.

~~~
meowface
It's interesting because for so many years, Ethereum was hailed as this ultra-
resilient alternative to Bitcoin. Developed slowly and deliberately after
Bitcoin had already gotten traction, it was supposed to fill in where Bitcoin
couldn't.

Instead, it's proved to be far more chaotic and unreliable than Bitcoin at its
worst hours. Building currencies (or a "decentralized smart contract
platform") is hard.

~~~
ThatButerinCut
Really it was doing ok, they were warned about the bug and released it anyway.
Their problem is simple, you can't have people or persons in charge of the
blockchain, it's not their property. Same old same old in crypto, human greed
and egos ruin things everytime.

------
Uptrenda
I was curious what the respective chains hashrate is:

Ethereum classic: 650~ GH/s

Ethereum: 4400~ GH/s

The minority chain is honestly doing better than I expected. I wonder how long
it will last?

What about price:

Classic: $1.87 USD

Ethereum: $11.69 USD

That's fairly significant volume for both. It will be interesting to see where
this ends up.

~~~
jobigoud
Surprisingly, the volume of Ethereum Classic trades has been much higher than
the volume on the fork side since the fork.

~~~
onestone
Most of it has been from BTC-ETC markets, which shows that support for ETC
came mostly from outside the original Ethereum community.

~~~
pigeons
No, its because things are traded against bitcoin.

------
Animats
One amusing consequence of the "fork" is that it demonstrates that there are
few Etherium contracts outstanding that matter. Otherwise, the people on
opposite sides of the contract would be having big disputes over where their
contract ended up. Did anybody other than the DAO crowd actually use that
feature for anything big enough or long term enough to matter?

~~~
pyskell
DigixDAO has and decided to stay only on the ETH chain. It's still no where
near as large as The DAO though.

Ethereum is still new, and something large and valuable like a DAO should take
a long while to develop and test.

------
shoyer
I can't tell if the article is serious, knowingly over the top, or even an act
of an epic trolling.

In any case, it's an excellent demonstration of how techno-libertarian crypto-
currency advocates inhabit an entirely alternative reality.

~~~
wyager
> techno-libertarian crypto-currency advocates inhabit an entirely alternative
> reality.

I really don't understand how people keep parroting stuff like this. By any
metric, Bitcoin has been a resounding success and has completely discredited
any of its original detractors. Despite this, people still go around saying
"Haha, Bitcoin, what a silly idea. It will never work.". It already has
worked!

If anything, people like you (no personal insult intended, I'm simply
addressing your comment) seem to inhabit some alternate reality where Bitcoin
isn't tremendously valuable and there isn't a booming economy (with white,
black, and grey markets) build around Bitcoin.

~~~
mavhc
Currently approx 2.3 transactions per second

~~~
wyager
Last I heard it was around 7, but this is an uninteresting self-imposed
bandwidth limitation. It's not a fundamental issue with the system.

------
rumcajz
If it was Bitcoin I would say putting regulation in place made no sense. If
you wanted regulated currency you could use USD, EUR and so on.

As for ETH putting regulation in place makes more sense. What you get is
"regulated smart contracts" environment. "Fiat smart contracts" if you will.
The real question then turns into: How is the regulatory authority governed?
Is it a participatory democracy? A representative democracy? A dictatorship?

That's not to say that there's no need platform for unregulated smart
contracts as well.

~~~
mbrock
There's no indication that the Ethereum Foundation intends to treat the
platform as a regulated environment.

What the fork shows is that they were willing, at least once, to launch a big
effort to save one large faulty contract and its investors, in the still
relatively early history of the blockchain.

It seems ridiculous to think that Ethereum as a platform will have a serious
system of regulation. And that's part of why this kind of one-off special case
fork is so problematic.

~~~
ThatButerinCut
No indication? Lol, they act like it's OK to alter the blockchain whenever
they stand to lose. Regulation of eth is exactly what they are doing, and what
they said they wouldn't during the premine sale. Oh then they tried to steal
the coins and sell them but got caught lol! Nobody in their right mind will
trust eth again, especially with the actions of the people behind it. Oh and
here's some cause and effect for you, don't take my word for it, this is the
internet..[http://cointimes.tech/2016/08/13/ethereum-reputation-has-
bee...](http://cointimes.tech/2016/08/13/ethereum-reputation-has-been-damaged-
with-the-finance-and-banking-community/)

~~~
zeven7
> Nobody in their right mind will trust eth again, especially with the actions
> of the people behind it.

Let me offer some data points:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4vlk4j/consensys_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4vlk4j/consensys_digix_plutus_maker_augur_string/)

Projects confirmed on ETH: Ethereum Foundation, Digix, Maker, Colony, AKASHA,
ROULΞTH, Plutus, REIDAO, vDice, SingularDTV, Braveno, Etheropt, otlw,
Etherdelta, Swarm, Gnosis, Augur, Velocity, FreeMyVunk, RealityKeys, Golem,
EOL, ConsenSys, ICONOMI, EthSlurp, Decibel.LIVE, cPay, Rex, DinarDirham,
Embark, Dindle (Decentralised eBook Market), uPort

Projects confirmed on ETC: Stampery, Daemon Dark Market

------
yownie
I really wish they would both just go away.

~~~
ThatButerinCut
Seriously? Dude if you haven't made money on these two then your doing it
wrong. Mining trading even buying into the ico which I never do has been
extremely profitable. Plus the entertainment value has been spectacular

