
Ethereum hard fork successful with mining majority - onestone
http://fork.ethstats.net/
======
alexbock
Looking in from the outside as someone with no involvement with Ethereum, I
really don't understand how the people behind it can justify using their
privileged position as developers and community leaders to try to undo this.
They spent a lot of time talking about how "the code is the contract"... until
they stood to be negatively impacted on a personal level by allowing the
literal meaning of the code to stand. I'm not sure how anyone could have any
confidence in this system after that.

~~~
dnautics
_Disclaimer: I don 't really have much of a stake in ethereum, although I made
some money off of it during the craziness last month (I cashed out when early
warnings about the DAO hit hn, and bough back in when it was at the bottom,
and cashed out again)_

> I'm not sure how anyone could have any confidence in this system after that.

I think the situation is the opposite. After the DAO there were broad calls
criticising the lack of leadership, criticism about decentralized/consensus
decisionmaking, and comparisons with the broader economy and how the Fed can
orchestrate a bailout (and why that's better - in the eyes of the critics). In
a way, through consensus with this hard fork the Ethereum stakeholders squared
the circle - orchestrating a bailout with majority assent (and if anyone
didn't like it they were free to leave). I'm not going to pass judgement on
whether or not that is a good precedent to set (or whether a turing complete
blockchain - or the EVM implementation in particular - is a good idea in the
long-term), but if anything the decisiveness of action should give _more_
confidence in the short-term.

~~~
zenogais
So the interesting thing here is the "majority assent" phrase. All the polls I
saw included < 15% of Ethereum stakeholders / hashing power. Some included <
5%, but were taking by many (who already had a chosen outcome in mind) as
definitive proof of community preference.

Really this shows that a small group of people plus a core team already
leaning in one direction are probably enough to fork the network.

~~~
dnautics
that's fine. Those figures just say that many people are ok with whatever.
Ultimately: If you don't like it, then you can leave. And if you aren't paying
attention, then, well, you obviously don't care enough about that asset.

~~~
zenogais
There we go, just wanted you to backpeddle on this "majority" thing.

~~~
PeterisP
As the parent poster said, there _was_ a majority consent. Much more than 50%
considered that this was okay, they also "joined the fork", so the things that
these <15% did were done with majority not objecting.

And also it's quite plausible that if the same number of people, the same
people would implement a technically identical hard fork with the same process
but with a different "socioeconomic" result and justification, _then_ they
wouldn't have gotten the same majority consent that they did in this case.

------
markkat
I am surprised how so many seem to think this is a bad thing. Ethereum is very
nascent, and this was how the community wanted to fix this issue. It was not
just about returning DTH, it was about the implications of the allocation of
the DTH in the hands of one individual when Ethereum moves to PoS.

Obviously the HF isn't ideal, but not forking was potentially much worse. This
settles the issue, and allows people to get back to work.

Hard forks will become less viable as a solution the larger the network gets,
and as more interests are involved. However, blockchains are consensus
mechanisms. Anyone can propose a hard fork update at any time.

Here is something to consider: as more than 80% of Bitcoin's hash power is in
the hands of a few Chinese companies, the CCP could very realistically enforce
a Bitcoin hard fork.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
"Anyone can proposed a hard fork update at any time."

So there is no difference between me and the core developers?

~~~
markkat
Of course there is. However, as Bitcoin Classic may illustrate, it is possible
to leave the core developers working on a defunct chain.

Core developers represent a double-edged sword. They are critical for getting
the network adopted, and for adapting the network to new demands, but they can
also be a risk due to their influence. By all accounts, the Ethereum core
developers have been open and responsive. Not all Ethereum devs wanted this
fork. I do think they could be faulted for not strongly advising Slock.it to
cap The DAO. That may be one reason why they were amenable to a refund
solution.

You definitely should consider the core devs when investing time and money in
a blockchain. They have an inertia that influences the system.

------
empath75
To me, I think this represents a failure of the currency. Either the code is
the final word on the contract or not. This process seems to give a cartel of
people the power to revoke transactions on a whim. Who would commit to
building anything in an environment like that?

~~~
TheRealPomax
That description fits current banking systems just as much.

~~~
DannyBee
Except, uh, no. Almost everywhere, there is a ton of legal (and other)
recourse, as well as a theoretically neutral arbiter who will listen to you
and make a decision. There is some due process. You can argue about the
neutrality, the laws, whatever. There's something, and it's recourse for
plenty of people/etc.

Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they
can steal your money, and you have no recourse.

~~~
matthewbauer
> Here, if all your neighbors get together and want to steal your money, they
> can steal your money, and you have no recourse

And this was always possible even before the hard fork. The difference now is
that there is an actual precedent for it and apparently at least 51% of
Ethereum stakeholders are okay with doing that sort of thing. Anyone actually
holding a significant amount of Ethereum should seriously question the
original claims that the Ethereum team made on its value.

------
onetwotree
There's an interesting parallel between the arguments being made here and the
argument that Schnier made against government controlled backdoors.

Even if we suppose that only reasonable warrants would be granted for the use
of such a backdoor, the backdoor is software, and does exactly what it's
programmed to do - as anyone whose written software knows, this is sometimes
not the same as what it's supposed to do. This means that bad guys can readily
exploit any backdoor. A human would reject such accesses as obviously
unwarranted, but a computer doing exactly what it's programmed to do won't.

Similarly, in Ethereum, a contract does exactly what it's programmed to do,
not what it's meant to do. When malicious actors exploit this for personal
gain, our reaction is that we should to "fix" the currency to be in line with
our human judgement about what it ought or ought not be used for.

In both cases, you can't have your cake and eat it.

With backdoors, you can either have a simple, automatic means of investigating
suspects, or you can have human judgement as to whether or not such searches
have value that exceeds the value of an individual's right to privacy.

In Ethereum, you can either have autonomous and decentralized contracts, or
you can have contracts that are subject to human judgement and values.

I'm still very much in "Micheal Jackson eats popcorn" mode with respect to
Ethereum, but at this point it seems like it's trying to accomplish two things
that are fundamentally incompatible.

------
seibelj
Someone probably has another exploit queued up, so they can immediately create
the need for another fork. Ethereum contracts have a giant target on them for
security researchers who want to earn money.

~~~
mikeash
_If_ (huge if, I know) people learn from what just happened, there at least
won't be another $100 million target to exploit. The NewDAO should see much
less investment until it's actually proven. Of course, it may well not happen
that way.

~~~
ohnomrbill
The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed
likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding
one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal
a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing
using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each
time an individual gets their savings wiped out, or accept that there is risk
of death by 1000 cuts when investing in ETH. Others may see things differently
of course.

~~~
mikeash
It's all going to come down to risk/reward. How much work does it take to find
a bug in a contract, and how much money do you get out of it? It's possible
that any given contract is likely to have bugs, but that it takes so long to
find them that it's not worth the effort. That assumes that different
contracts have different bugs, which may not actually be the case. And of
course it could be the other way around, where bugs are easy and plentiful and
the whole thing collapses. It'll be interesting to see how it actually ends
up.

------
ikken
I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not
important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it
_can_.

I have no confidence that Bitcoin or any other currency doesn't fork in the
future, because it _is_ possible at any moment. The fact that the fork has
happened or not changes nothing - it always stays as a possibility.

In other words the chance of Ethereum or Bitcoin hard-forking in the future
wouldn't change if the hard-fork didn't happen right now.

~~~
matthewbauer
> I think that many people miss the most important thing here: it is not
> important if a currency hard-forks or not - what is important is that it
> can.

Well, it's setting a precedent that will make the case easier in the future.
Bitcoin's hard forks have all seemed to be good faith attempts to fix issues
in the protocol. I don't think anyway on the Ethereum team is arguing this is
anything other than an extremely arbitrary fork. The fact that 51% of
stakeholders agreed to set this precedent should scare anyone from owning
Ethereum in the future.

------
JoachimSchipper
Note that this says more about the defaults in software than about any
Ethereum user's opinion.

(The miners may or may not be more informed, but note that Ethereum is only
valuable if users are willing to exchange things of value for Ethereum, i.e. a
hard fork requires changes in wallet software.)

~~~
onestone
Which are the users you are referring to? Because all kinds of _actual_ users
have shown that a clear majority is in favor of the hard fork:

\- ETH holders voted on [http://carbonvote.com/](http://carbonvote.com/) with
87% pro-fork. 5.5% of the total ETH supply participated in the vote.

\- ETH miners clearly voted pro-fork on the major pools, e.g.
[https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting](https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting). In
nearly all cases > 80% of the hash power was pro-fork.

\- ETH markets reacted positively when there were good pro-fork news, and
negatively when there were bad news (such as the DDoS vulnerability in the
proposed soft fork). Therefore the market sees more value in the post-HF
Ethereum.

Yes, there is a vocal group opposing the fork, but it mostly consists of
persons wishing to see Ethereum fail.

~~~
leshow
you consider 5.5% of the money supply a good participation rate?

In the voting on the pools, 80% of people didn't even vote.

Therefore it is simply the fact that the fork was the default choice (and is
the default in all the wallets), that is the deciding factor of this 'vote'

By the way, "> 80% of the hash power was pro-fork." is demonstrably false.
only 15% of the hashing power was pro fork, 85% of miners didnt vote at all.

~~~
onestone
Yes, I consider it an _excellent_ participation rate. A 5.5% sample size is
orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually
below 0.01%).

Passive users by definition agree to follow the active users' decision.

~~~
matthewbauer
I feel like "passive users" would agree with the status quo? They don't care
enough to vote for the fork, so they should have counted as voting against the
forks.

~~~
onestone
By that logic there should be no Brexit, as less than 50% of the eligible
voters voted for it.

~~~
EdHominem
Exactly right. But the same logic would apply to the Bentrance in the first
place, etc.

------
ianpurton
No no no no no.

It's too early to measure success. OK, there was a fork. Technical success if
you like.

But, at the moment most exchanges are closed to Ethereum trading on either the
old or new software.

When they open we will then have a better idea how this will play out.

------
zeveb
And just like that, the entire point of Ethereum vanished into the ether.

Contracts which contain an implicit item 'we can renegotiate this any time a
majority of miners wish' are contrary to what Ethereum was meant to be.

~~~
watty
What was it "meant to be"? I'm completely ignorant of the politics but my
assumption was that every cryptocoin post-bitcoin was a way for the
creators/developrs/owners to make money.

Did the creators make money? Success.

~~~
jude-
Straight from ethereum.org:

"Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications
that run exactly as programmed _without any possibility of downtime,
censorship, fraud or third party interference_."

Emphasis mine.

------
chejazi
What's happening: the block number of the hard fork is much bigger than the
block number of the non-fork. This means that most of the mining power is
being devoted to the hard fork chain since it is longer. The non-fork can't
keep up, so the fork is considered a success.

~~~
cloudjacker
Block height has nothing to do with it

~~~
chejazi
The longest chain always wins. Block height tells you which chain is longer.
Am I missing something?

~~~
jude-
The chain _with the most proof-of-work_ wins.

~~~
chejazi
Fair enough. For clarity:

The proof of work threshold for a block (aka the difficulty) was the same when
the fork started. The function that adjusts the difficulty (a function of
time-between-blocks) is the same across both forks. It would take considerable
time for the non-fork chain's difficulty to adjust to where it can make blocks
at pace with the fork chain again. And even if it did, the fork would
represent less work due to a lower difficulty.

------
int_19h
All this forking made me wonder about the legal aspects of cryptocurrencies.

Suppose we have guys D and C, and D owes C some amount in X-coin - complete
with a written contract.

Now, if X-coin is forked, and one of the forks has a blockchain recording a
transaction from D to C in that amount, but the other one does not, which one
is considered authoritative? If C sues D, because they are on the other fork,
and that fork doesn't have the debt settled, how would it go in court?

This gets especially interesting if the forks are roughly equal in size...

I guess it would all depend on the interpretation of the meaning of the term
"X-coin" in the contract, but that's just a different way of asking the same
question.

------
Lawtonfogle
Any chance the one who ran this exploit can sue for the money they were due?

If the code IS the contract, then by the contract they are owed this money,
no?

Or does this mean the code isn't the contract?

~~~
EdHominem
It's worth a try. They have ~$60 million to promise to shareholders in the
lawsuit.

They paid to participate in a code-based Nomic and were denied their prize
because they won too quickly.

~~~
zeven7
In order to start litigation, they would have to reveal their identity. Among
other things, this could bring them their own legal troubles.

I am surprised the attacker didn't try to bribe the miners, though.

------
zekevermillion
Whether you like this or not, goes to show that developers have to get their
hands dirty with mining. If you remain in your ivory tower, you will not
control the protocol after it gains any significant traction.

------
mrfusion
Would anyone be willing to explain the background on this? I'll admit I
haven't been following it.

~~~
ecopoesis
Ethereum is a post-Bitcoin blockchain. One of the major differences with
Bitcoin is that Ethereum is designed to be Turing complete: the blockchain can
be used to run any arbitrary code.

The ability to run arbitrary code was built to allow for the creation of smart
contracts. The basic idea with a smart contract is that the contract's code
(running on the blockchain) enforces all the rules of the contract itself. No
need for courts or external parties to handle disputes: the code just does the
right thing.

A company called Slock.it created a smart contract called the DAO (distributed
autonomous organization). The DAO was a venture capital smart contract. Anyone
could submit proposals, owners of the DAO would vote on them, and if
successful, fund them, taking some ownership of the proposed venture in hope
of a payoff.

The DAO got people excited, and $160 million worth of Ethereum was invested in
it. However, the DAO had bugs, and someone exploited one of those bugs to move
a large portion of the DAO's Ethereum into another contract that the DAO
owners couldn't control. This crashed the ETH exchange rate.

The "hack" split the Ethereum community: some felt that nothing should be
done, the DAO contract ran correctly, just not in a way that was anticipated.
Others felt that the DAO funds should be recovered and returned, and suggested
a soft-fork followed by a hard-fork to make this happen. Both the Ethereum
Foundation and Slock.it supported the fork option.

Eventually the soft-fork was released. The soft-fork stayed on the same
blockchain (hence the soft) as previous versions, it just blocked transactions
related to the "hacked" contract so the former-DAO funds couldn't be moved.
However, once again bugs were found, making folks running the soft-fork
vulnerable to DOS attacks. I don't know if it ever reached consensus.

A short while later, the hard-fork version of Ethereum was released. As the
name implies, this version splits the blockchain into two, one continuing the
existing blockchain and another that moves the DAOs ETH into a new contract
that's going to be distributed to the former DAO owners. The forked blockchain
also put ~$5 million in the hands of a curator to distribute as they see fit.

The hard-fork went live today, and it looks like the majority of miners have
switched to it, which means the hard-fork has become the new Ethereum
blockchain.

~~~
mrfusion
Wow that could almost be a movie! Thanks for the great explanation.

------
arisAlexis
It's simply not immutable and decentralized anymore. Just another distributed
computatiom technology (and rather slow for that)

------
desireco42
Title should read: "Millions saved by Ethereum hard fork..." :)

------
dariusgodre
Here's an interesting thought: should everyone involved be charged with
conspiracy to commit grand larceny?

