The next huge problem for ethereum looms large
From crisis to crisis
For the last two months, ethereum has gone from crisis to crisis to crisis. First the DAO hack, then the failed soft fork, then the hard fork that resulted in two versions of ethereum.
In each step, greed, conflicts of interests, rushed software development and/or a failure to fully think through consequences of actions have been the factors that resulted in a the attempted solution to a previous crisis actually becoming the causes of the next crisis.
The next crisis - again a lack of forethought
Ethereum has built into it what is called a mining difficulty bomb. This is a hard coded increase in mining difficulty that will eventually make it too difficult to mine a block. Why was this intentionally included? It was included to necessitate a move to Proof of Stake mining from Proof of Work. It was assumed that the solution would be to hard fork to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work.
But what if you want instead to fork to make Proof of Work continue to be viable? That's easy, just remove the difficulty bomb from the code. It's very simple - it's only a part of a line of code.
What do you think miners want to do? Hard fork to put them out of business through Proof of Stake, or hard fork to eliminate the difficulty bomb? The choice is obvious. Ethereum will either abandon Proof of Stake as a whole or fork again into two ethereums. And by the way, this is true for both ETH and ETC, so we may have both of those chains forking in two directions.
There is a pattern here. It is the lack of forethought of consequences of game theory by the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation. They talk a big game about game theory, but if they have shown anything so far, it is that they are not good at modelling incentives and actions. You can't really blame them for not understanding human behaviour well, being that they are young, inexperienced and egomaniacs, but the community continually will have to put up with the consequences of this nevertheless.
>What do you think miners want to do? Hard fork to put them out of business through Proof of Stake, or hard fork to eliminate the difficulty bomb?
Anyone mining should be smart enough to know this would happen eventually and planned accordingly.
If I had to wager, I'd say that the miners who are working on ETH are just going to switch to mining other currencies once the PoS switch happens.
The equipment used for mining ETH are not ASICs and are just basic GPUs. Most people likely invested very little to mine JUST for ETH and even if they did, they'll likely be able to sell off or make use of their existing equipment.
Regardless of what happens, ETH is still an incredibly revolutionary product that will very likely change the world.
Anyone mining should now be smart enough to know that forking ethereum and continuing to mine on that fork is easy. Doing work for ether makes sense. Proof of Stake rewards the pre-mined coin holders, who own around 5/6ths of all the coins now and will be assured that they continue to hold that proportion for doing no work. I doubt there will be much sympathy when one weeds out the mindless worshippers of Vitalik Buterin. There's another hard fork coming, and there's yet another split coming.
Afaik a hard fork requires more than just miners. You could have 90% of the miners but if you don't have exchanges and users on the fork chain then you're out of luck. I didn't even know a difficulty bomb was built into Ethereum. All your post did was impress me with how forward thinking the developers are.
You talk as if the Ethereum Foundation is riding through travelled roads, when this is the wild wild west; uncharted territory. Blockchain tech / Ethereum is new and revolutionary, of course they're gonna have some bumps in the road and not get everything right.
To suggest they don't understand human behavior due to being "young, inexperienced, and egomaniacs" is quite the statement, considering no one on this planet has complete and 100% accurate knowledge on human behavior in order to perfectly model incentives in action.
I am simply saying that they act without thinking things through. I'm not expecting 100% accurate knowledge of anything in particular. I am however very critical of: Creating a DAO in a hasty and sloppy manner, misleading people repeatedly about its security, discarding the principle of "code is law" without thinking through the implications there, rushing a soft fork without doing any security analysis (luckily an outsider pointed out its fatal flaw), rushing a hard fork under the most pretentious facade of consensus imaginable, presuming that less than 10% of holders voting in favour of the fork would be perceived as consensus and would get everyone else to fold their tents and go home, and, especially in this article, assuming that they will dictate what the solution is going to be to the difficulty bomb - a solution that rewards large stakeholders like the developers with rewards for doing no work.
Im pro-HF but I gotta say... ^ is making a lot of sense.
afaik the dao is seprate from eth correct? Its just another company that created and did it on their own. They fucked that up not the Eth devs as much as I understood it. Now I fully agree with the fork and think it should have happened. We would be in a much worse position if eth did not fork. How would it be viewed by the general public? They would say wow a hacker stole 12 or 7% of all ether which could have been prevent and they let it happen. Nobody from the general public in my opinion would invest in the currency then. But I know they completely ignored their own rules stating that whatever the code says its the law with the dao contract, and there are good agurments against mine, but I feel that forking was the right decision and was all for it.
You bring up all valid points. To play devils advocate:
The Ethereum Foundation didn't create theDAO, though I agree they were too involved.
I'd say "code is law" is still in effect. Sure, this was broken with the HF, but going forward, I doubt we'll have the same opportunity to play this card again. I see the HF as really only being possible at this point in time where specific variables aligned to make it a reality. A precedent might have technically been set, but since future attacks will have completely different variables, I don't think that argument holds any weight.
I agree that the forks were rushed, but there was a valid time limit in place, being the ETA until the attacker could withdraw the siphoned DAO tokens for ETH. Given that time limit, I think they did a great job. Concerning the lack of consensus, I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect a majority of holders to vote. I don't know of a case where a blockchain was able to get a majority of holders to vote on anything. This is a governance issue that has yet to be solved. I guess the real vote is happening now on the free markets with ETC vs. ETH.
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