Immutability and other Myths of cryptocurrency Part 1.
I have been involved in the crypto scene since 2011. What little I code are scripts to run some light mining with gpus. I have been the victim of some scams over the years but nothing I wasn't willing to lose. I have some IT experience both Unix support and Windows. Overall I would say that I am crypto agnostic and believe in people supporting whatever crypto they like. I hold ETH, BTC, ETC and formerly Dao tokens. Enough about me onto the myths.
1.) Immutability.
There has been an ongoing discussion between ETH and ETC about immutability. I support both cryptos but lets face it neither is immutable. With either crypto a 51% or greater of the miners could do things far worse than what happened with the dao hard fork. The ETC community is clearly embracing "immutability" and it is a worthwhile goal but a false one. I believe what should be stated is they value mutability approaching zero but will never reach it. Why? Two categories of reasons. First, the issues of attacks on a relatively under secured network. While that is changing and hash power is rising, an attack is certainly a possibility much greater than with ETH or BTC. Secondly, there will never be perfect consensus in changing ETC in the future. We have learned this from BTC. You will never make 100% of people happy and when the time comes to upgrade the software with another hard fork there will always be dissent. BTC is the least mutable crypto out there with respect to both categories combined. IMO ETH is currently less mutable than ETC and that may change over time. The goal of immutability is however more embraced by the ETC community than the ETH community.
2.) Vitalik can be coerced by the govt. and the govt will go right to him and the rest of the developers when they want to engage in their nefarious statist activities.
Vitalik and the devs could certainly be approached by a government and be coerced into submitting malicious code that would harm the community. This as unlikely as it may be isn't realistically going to happen. Why? Vitalik doesn't decide what code runs on the network, the nodes and miners decide what forks happen and will be decided as the official chain. Who in their right mind is going to choose code that wouldn't work in their best interest? Long before it would get a chance to be implemented someone would catch on and many would not adopt the code. Another ETC ver2 would be created and people would support that.
Upcoming:
The Dao was a bailout or a roll back.
I think that clinging to the immutability ideology is going to doom ETC from the start. All block chains fork. Many have forked to undo and even reverse vulnerabilities. If ETC is to survive, it will probably have to fork as well sooner or later. To not consider this possibility is to ignore that blockchains exist in a larger economy that must interface with the human world.
In addition to inflexibility, ETC also suffers from having no clear development roadmap or dev team. If the plan is to mirror commits to ETH as best it can, then there will come a day when merging these commits won't be compatible with immutability. At that point, it will become obvious that ETC is either a coin that merely makes a statement or a stunt to make someone some quick BTC.
there are two approaches to forking: one is where you have as close to 100% consensus as possible, and a bad one.
ETC in this scenario was too emotional. I mean look at Mt.Gox, Look at Bitfinex. So are these guys saying that if the platform is hacked then it will live on? Justice needed to be done. Solidity code had ambiguities and hidden implications that was not previously known esp when it came to the recursive function. A significant portion of the Ether was at risk and this threatened the platform long term. Additionally, the fork happened with the community consensus. Consensus among developers, miners and the exchanges. Poloneix wanted to play this game for profits. The end game of both platforms are the same. ETC does not come to the table with more superior unique value proposition than ETH. Hopefully the divided community will merge around another hardfork when casper is implemented. What had to happen, already happened. Now we just need to take a deep breathe and move forward.
Nefarious statist activities definitely occur frequently.
Complete immutability is of course impossible, the majority of miners can fork and sometimes it is even desirable that they do.
I think the problem with the ETH fork is that there was no real reason to fork. The protocol didn't have any vulnerabilities, it didn't need patching. The majority of the users/miners had no stake in the DAO, so they didn't have any reason to fork. It was simply a rich and influental minority trumping the majority interest and getting their way mostly through politics.
but the implication of the solidity code was previously unknown. The recursive function ! The entire community benefited from this knowledge, so why punish the DAO? Additionally, how will justice ever be served, or are we saying this is un-necessary in the blockchain world? We're not there yet. It will take lot's of development experience before we can let the code decide for us what is right and what is wrong.
Because that's what they signed up for. It was clearly stated in the terms and it was built on top a very new and untested platform.
And we'll never get there. It's impossible. We can't write bug free code, and there will always be people to take advantage of the mistakes we make. Serving justice this way is fine with me. The problem is, in this case, only a small minority had interest in getting justice, yet they managed to pull enough political influence to see it through. Had it been my $5 stolen, I would have never seen justice.
A system where justice is dependent on political influence already exists, so there's simply no need for a new one.
Thank you @psamuelson for an explanation on Immutability with Crypos. I'm new to crypto currencies so am looking to learn more. :)
Thanks for the post, finally I`m not feeling alone having the same opinion on the whole ETH hard fork. upvoted
Keep up the great work @psamuelson
Upvoted
What if the government gave him the order to create some complicated upgrade which had the "unintended consequence" (properly obfuscated in the code) of doing what the government wanted? Few, if any, would detect it.
Good question. I believe the code being open source would reduce the probability of this happening. If this could be pulled off then it could be done with ANY crypto not just ETH. BTC would be at risk also. I believe that if the government wanted to alter the game they would have the money and resources to 51% attack instead.
This could happen in the ETC land as well. I'm not leaving Vitalik, the brain behind Ethereum. To leave the road that he's travelling on is foolish. It takes wit, dedication and passion to develop such complex platform as Ethereum.
You're right that nothing is immutable in the sense that an asteroid could hit the earth tomorrow and "mutate" all life on earth into nothing, zilch.
The point is that proof-of-work based blockchains are by an order of magnitude and, more importantly, provably more immutable than other, especially centralized systems.
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