You think it is a bad thing that this has happened; I think it is a good thing. Now everyone is aware that the 51% can take control of the chain; you can't pretend any more that the code is the final arbiter, because it isn't. Black and white is a myth; it's a human construct that is made from mathematics and many shades of grey.
Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else.
What you would actually need to do this right is put real thought and effort into how to have an effective, impartial and ethical governing body managing a digital currency. Giving the primary stakeholders carte blanche to make these decisions is basically recreating a virtual version of "company scrip".
In this case the various arguments were put forward by various people; this included rants, well researched documents, but most importantly code. In the end most people submitted to the code that was put out there by the main group. But still this submission is a choice.
The main group survives by this submission, but it isn't their choice; this is government by consent. You may not consent to it, but plenty others have.
So if you don't like it I suggest you follow Alan Kay's advice; "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." If you want to influence the situation go write better code; of course you need good ideas for that code, but you still need to ship code! Otherwise the cost of submission is too high for most people and they won't follow you.
Maybe when you're into BDSM. You're right that authority comes from submission, but people submit to power. A gun, a hostage, a 51% voting majority.
I don't think I quite agree with this, but I agree with something similar I suppose : Power comes from submission. (sorta)
I believe that one can be under an authority which one does not choose to submit to. (relating more to how people should act than how they do act, compared to power)
But, perhaps this is just using words differently without necessarily much disagreement about the actual things.
By your comment I am reminded of a dialogue "How to quit smoking" on self-control, which argues that self-control is more due to obedience than it is to "willpower". This dialogue seems to make sense to me. (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/13)
Regarding your last paragraph: I don't know that I know how that last bit is applicable. In order to not have the fork happen, the difference would be people not running the fork code, or alternatively running some slightly different code that handles the fact that some people are running the fork but is otherwise basically unchanged. This code already exists. As such, I'm not sure what you are really saying by this paragraph, other than, basically "suck it up"?
People behind ETH had a stake in TheDAO and they chose to protect their _dollars_ rather than the platform.
They were obviously denied. It's my understanding they know what account holds most of there coins too.
There have been numerous other small hacks on eth users as well.
Unfortunately, this hardfork did nothing for those people.
The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be."
If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly indelible manner. "nope, they lost tens of millions and they ate it because the contract is the code, so we won't help you either."
Instead, what the nerds did was say "hey, you know the one interesting part of Ethereum? yeah, forget it... because we decided that we value our short-term wealth over the creation of that system."
And that's fine. It's fine that they decided they don't give a shit about contracts as code. It's fine that they took their ball and went home. But Ethereum is now dead. Not today mind you, but in the long run.
Only a complete and total lunatic will ever trust Ethereum again, because there will be more forks in the future. The precedent is set. They won't all remain "clear cut".
So the interesting question is: who's next? It's not ethereum anymore. But it's still an interesting problem space. And maybe there's a team that is actually interested in it.
Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here.
Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.
The core team has backed off from "the code is the construct" philosophy, both implicitly by executing this fork, and explicitly in other publications.
It's a black mark on the trust record for Ethereum, but hard lessons learned are the best ways to grow.
Folks that look at this as a black and white "Ethereum can no longer be trusted" are ironically applying strict dogma in the other direction.
I am not making any calls about the value of Ethereum. Just that evolving philosophy and software systems is a very good and necessary thing.
This argument seems fallacious and off-the-point in this context.
Isn't the goal of a contract to precisely bypass the 51% control thing (a distributed consensus rule, needed for mining), by defining its own explicit rules?
> Democracy; it sucks, but it sucks less than everything else
More profoundly, isn't the essence of such systems to go beyond democracy, and allow for new governance paradigms?
