Ethereum has twice hard forked the blockchain to revert the results of "code is law", clearly saying that code is only law when a quorum of powerful individuals accept the outcome. Code isn't law, "code is law" is a slogan with as much veracity as slogans usually have.
This is a very good point. It was pointed out quite a while ago that talk about 'decentralised' systems can hide the technical features of those systems and the mode of governance like a 'veil'. 'Decentralisation', aside from being a technical word for certain aspects of a technology, can also hide centralised structures, whether maintained by a small number stakeholders controlling a majority of nodes, or governance driven by major organisations people depend on for that decentralisation.
Miners choose where it's profitable to mine, which will always be the more active blockchain. It's called voting with your feet, and clearly Ethereum miners followed the quorum of powerful individuals. What matters your massive holdings of ETC when there's no buyers?
Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years.
You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others.
I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals influenced that decision.
I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?
ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people.
Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable.
We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably.
It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain.
I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.
Thanks for the detail. BTW, "quorum of powerful individuals" (QOPI) means the core ETH people who decided to execute the hard forks. I think you're demonstrating my point for me. It's not that QOPI led you all by the nose or that you acceded to a vote; it's that the core ETH people decided to hard fork and you made a pretty rational business decision to stick with ETH and not ETC in part because, as you put it, "nobody trusts the chain".
It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.
Thanks for asking. My business model has always been larger than just mining ETH. I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. Mining (aka: being paid to validate anonymous transactions) is just one use case. You see all these articles about how a dApp went down because AWS was down? I'd like to help solve that issue. It isn't just about renting out servers or virtual machines. It is about providing compute in a way that nobody realizes where it is even hosted. True "cloud" in my eyes.
Thanks for the answer it’s very interesting to see how the infrastructure spin off of mining could lead to more conventionally useful hosting. So in some sense you intend to be multi-region without the eye watering data transfer costs?
That's not totally crazy, it's just the decentralization is at a different layer. Like Solid pods provide decentralized ownership over personal data but it's probably easier for people to use a provider for them than host their own server.
For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before.
Code isn’t law, code is better than law. I wondered what I would have done 300 years agi before computers, and realized I’d probably be an architect or one of those lawmaker guys who wrote the Constitution. I mean think about it … you’re setting initial conditions, trying to think of edge cases, putting in Byzantine Consensus (checks and balances between branches of government, mutually distrusting parties checking election results etc.), but making it an Upgradeable smart contracts (process to do amendments etc.)
Now CODE can do a lot more. In our applications for instance, you can:
1) Know the average amount spent on food or clothing by a citizen of a city
2) Vote on how much of food, clothing etc to simply subsidize by issuing more currency and airdropping it to the people (universal basic income)
3) Take a dot product between 1 and 2, and issue the universal basic income or stipend etc. and redistribute the wealth in the community according to the
And best of all — it is entirely voluntary, thanks to smart contracts. No one has to accept your currency by fiat. But if they do, they’re helping to end food insecurity in your community. Just like that. No representative democracy and out of touch elites. Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Via a smart contract and decision making.
And that is just ONE of the many applications that are possible. Intercoin has produced 10-15 applications that can all work together like LEGOs. Now we will be giving them to communities. Here are some more possibilities:
All of 1/2/3 could be or gamed or hacked if not EXTREME measures are taken. As proven repeatedly by the hundreds millions in dollars in smart contract hacks and losses that have happened and continue to happen.
People can’t trust the code to do what they want, because when you read it you might mistake a 0 or a O. You trust someone else or machine to audit the code tell you the code will do what you want.
US court systems take into account the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Its a feature not a bug.
You're right, you can do all that--until vested interests revert your blockchain because the current blockchain status quo isn't to their liking, at which point your belief that code is better than law is a lie, because it still comes down to powerful individuals deciding what benefits them instead of letting "deterministic" outcomes stand.
It's not that people are laughing at it now; it's that it's already been proven to be a fraud, where the promise of an immutable blockchain is a grift to part suckers from their money.
"gas fees" are an abberation, the "world computer" is a glorified mainframe where you rent time.
Smart contract can be done in completely different ways, with no bottlenecks. If you notice point 2 of https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf .. I can send you the details if you're interested. I spent years speaking with the best teams around the world working on things beyond blockchain.
Can we actually restate this as a 51% attack on Ethereum. But by the community itself, with powerful (yet not code-level enforcing) influence of Ethereum Foundation and rich people who has invested in The DAO (and lost money on the hack)?
So what? Ethereum classic has two+ orders of magnitude less activity. The hard forks are where Ethereum is today. It's not just the maintainers deciding what's law, instead of code; the coin community actually wants it that way.
> YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS
Ah yes. Because everyone is an expert in verifying programs written in esoteric programming languages. Oh. It's written by you? Well, of course I can trust what you've written
> It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing.
That's not how it works. But I'm sure you'd be defending paper ballots for voting forever as well. You're used to whatever works now, and I'd say that's like Luddites (except the Luddites were actually reacting to the economics of industrialization, meaning the machines were actually replacing the human labor).
Look around you, in the last 100 years we got the ability to print and copy our own documents, to send emails and to write on forums, to use VOIP encrypted end to end, all without the permission of the government. It's based on open protocols that route around friction. Is it so far fetched that autonomous networks technology can also help obviate the need to trust intermediaries like we trusted the Post Office, the Newspaper Printers, Ma Bell and so forth? Really?
