Re: <nettime> Ethereum: DAO - "The Attacker"

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Rob Myers wrote:

> On 23/07/16 02:41 AM, Jaromil wrote:
> 
> > - The REAL community of people behind Ethereum is now rejecting
> >   the bail-out, probably marking in history the first time in
> >   which there can be a bail-out rejection by grass-roots
> >   movements??  Ethereum Classic is announced
> >   https://ethereumclassic.github.io
> 
> "Classic" is a scam.

well, I dissent. Calling it a scam now presumes that the whole lot of
people making this happen are scammers. They are not: they are all
sincere supporters of an idea of neutrality (or an approximation of
it, or an utopia, fine, hold on the post-modern horses for a while)
some conscious some surprised by the manipulations going on within the
financial war apparatus (Qiao Lian and Wang Xiangsui docet)... believe
me the spooks got an armchair job with this one for a while now.

what its appropriate to say, perhaps, is that the whole cryptocurrency
thing a scam. we can have arguments about that, but ETC a scam? no.

> The hashing power has followed the fork, and even if you secure your
> transactions on the "Classic" chain against replay attacks -
>
> 
>     https://github.com/ethereumclassic/README/issues/3
> 
> it's an obvious pump & dump.

lets open up the frame a bit.

nothing prevents the whole lot of people into ETC now to have a proper
vote and re-bootstrap the whole thing on a "new starting nonce" as
they suggest in the thread. What used to be called a genesis block,
actually. This can be done at a certain point in time. IMHO it should
have been done already, but well there is still time to announce this
with some planning ahead.

technology is not nature.

> What's interesting sociologically and politically about the fork
> isn't that the losing side is a scam, it's that the event of the
> fork represents both a loss of innocence and an affirmation.
>
> The loss of innocence is around the idea, despite Bitcoin's early
> rollback of transactions resulting from bugs in its protocol, that
> cryptocurrency code cannot be changed to produce a different
> consensus on the state of the world as seen from the blockchain. Of
> course it can, you just change the code that everyone uses to create
> that consensus.  For varying lengths of strings of zeros required to
> find "just".
> 
> The affirmation is that cryptocurrency is about consensus, and that
> code is law. Consensus at the human level, to be sure. And the code
> may be changed. But this meta consensus always determined the
> consensus that results from blockchain mining. This is now a problem
> for cryptocurrency rather than a mystery...

this is a very interesting insight. I haven't read anyone so far
making such an analysis and.. eye opening, indeed. I'm not going too
far into this, busy writing about the very issue to cash in the
academia scene, but let me just say that I agree and that Free
Software is ot enough of a ethical standing ground anymore, if we go
out of law and licensing and step on the "higher grounds" of
governance.

So, well put. This is probably the point when this blockchain buzz can
get more mature. Or not, perhaps just fail. Yet the people involved
may have learned a good lesson.


OTOH from the Ethereum point of view, they have also reached some kind
of maturity by discovering that human decision has to be on top of
such machinery. But Ethereum was all the way about the contrary. They
denigrate the "inefficient beaurocrats" as much as neo-libs do all the
time, they extended their sovereign on a global span and people bought
into it because of that. But then instead, as soon as they needed,
they became worst than the beaurocrats they despise (and BTW they also
made a fraudolent vote, thanks Morlock for the link to Elaine's
amazing analysis).

The Ethereum people should have been more realistic, humble and
coherent saying "OK, that was an experiment, we start a new one with
different foundations" (private blockchain or whatever) and will be
steered with rollbacks if necessary (aka someone of us write dumb
code). But now, changing the rules of the game while its running? with
an obviously fraudolent process even? bad idea. Start a new one. Go on
Eris. whatevs. They hold on a brand, thats what they do, because they
are sales people, mostly. But let me tell you, even their developers
give a frill about sales. In short, this story is about sales people
taking over Ethereum.

So. My not-so-humble opinion on this, on which I've written
extensively in D-CENT, is that socially driven blockchains are very OK
and even advisable. But then it must be clear to everyone that they
are, so their boundaries will be clear and people can make a choice,
if to sign that social contract or the other. Which territory to step
on. What rules to accept or reject.

Declare the boundaries, refrain from conquering the world. Else trust
can't happen. It all boils down to the old problem, that some people
want to rule over all diversity: so they become Zelig, but unlike
Woody's one, which makes us laugh, they are in power and decide who
wins.


ciao


-- 
~.,_   Denis Roio aka Jaromil    http://Dyne.org think &do tank
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