just one simple question we need to ask ourselves: EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal.
Is restoring contract at 0x863DF6BFa4469f3ead0bE8f9F2AAE51c91A907b4 considered an improvement to Ethereum?
I’ll support this proposal if people supports restoring the proofofweakhands(0xa7ca36f7273d4d38fc2aec5a454c497f86728a7a) contract that I’ve invested. 866 eth was hacked. I had sleepless nights over it.
Recovering Proof of Weak hands would require taking ETH from someone who currently is in control of it and giving it to someone who is currently not in control of it. This is significantly different IMO than taking ETH that is currently not controlled by anyone and restoring access to the actor who should have access to it.
I am of the tentative (would love to be argued out of it) opinion that a fork that appropriately divides one large community with divided ethos into two smaller communities with consistent ethe is a good thing.
I attribute the decline of the US largely to the fact that there are two (more in reality) vastly different groups of people fighting for control of the governance process. I suspect both groups would be far happier if they just split up, but they are falling into the same trap that the Ethereum community is falling into (IMO), that it is better to stay “united” in the toxic relationship rather than split apart and lead healthy separate lives.
Recovering Proof of Weak hands would require taking ETH from someone who currently is in control of it and giving it to someone who is currently not in control of it. This is significantly different IMO than taking ETH that is currently not controlled by anyone and restoring access to the actor who should have access to it.
Eth is not a real unit of ownership, it’s just an abstract denomination of it. The real unit is a fraction of ownership of the total supply. Ethers in contracts aren’t locked, they’re gone. These particular entries in the state db no longer signify a share in the total supply, due to a bug they were reduced to meaningless numbers. The only possible difference is in whose property is getting redistributed.
From the redistribution perspective the dao fork was a radically different thing from this proposal, because it redistributed shares from the thief only.
I am of the tentative (would love to be argued out of it) opinion that a fork that appropriately divides one large community with divided ethos into two smaller communities with consistent ethe is a good thing.
I agree. A DPoS fork would be way more scalable instantly, so there may be a niche in the market for it.
There’s no point for Casper etc. with mutability, because all problems inherent in DPoS can be edited away as they come - just zero balances of ‘misbehaving’ parties, problem solved, for some definition of solved.
No reason for sharding either, servers in a datacenters are way easier to scale.
Not that extreme.
A centralized system has one entity that makes decision, a decentralized system requires unanimous agreement. Everything else lies on a spectrum.
As unanimous agreement is impossible to achieve for large enough systems, decentralization requires immutability, as no change can realistically achieve a unanimous approval.
Right now Ethereum is in the early stage in which control over the protocol is de facto centralized for the sake of technical progress, most importantly because of a promise of necessary future development and partially because of the difficulty bomb, which kills the ‘do nothing’ option explicitly. That’s fine as long as it’s temporary, with the end goal of a self-sustaining truly decentralized system, in which arbitrary changes are simply impossible to achieve.
For that to ever be possible, immutability must be defended by social means while the platform grows more and more decentralized.
I want to propose an analogy between frozen funds and one other hypothetical type of the accident.
First, disclosure: I have lost in the frozen wallet a lot of funds. Total sum of all my salary in the years to come before my death will not give me even a half of it. I will survive without these funds because I was spending only what I can lose. But still I think it is worth while to keep the keys of the accounts which can manage this lost funds, and not through them away.
Now an analogy from some hypothetical sport, like racing. I signed off the waiver, which explicitly said that I take my own responsibility whatever will happen in the race. And, in the middle of the course, a small group of the participants including me got trapped. In the surface races like that of ultra-running, usually it is not a matter of death and life. And in the case of the frozen by multi-sig wallet accident, I hope, also nobody lost his life.
But if we look at the potential creative energy trapped in these funds, - they are now as if dead. Even more dead than the fossils which make up the fuels: energy of the once living plants and species now moves our turbines.
So, it is more similar to the, say, underwater race. Or to the miners trapped deep under the surface.
I understand nobody is obligated to help. Even more, - if they decide to help, they face more competition, more supply of Ethereum can lead to lower price. And the bigger problem – split if 2 parts of the community will split, which, although definitely will not destroy the Ethereum but will make an unneeded blow.
I will try to support Ethereum no matter what the decision will be taken about these frozen funds. If I will get them revived for me, I will try my best to use them for good.
–
Sergey
While you could argue that parity multisig’s contract eth was frozen while proof of weak hands contract was hacked, both contracts shared the same result - The developers made a mistake in the code and investors want their eth back.
so do we have a stand that restoring contracts with frozen funds are OK while restoring hacked contracts are NOT OK.
If we want to allow parity to restore their contract, we need to allow all frozen contracts to restore since ethereum started. Then we also need to allow anyone with frozen funds to restore their contract automatically in the future as well. There needs to be new op codes for this. This is just being fair.
This EIP would be seen as a discrimination if its just doing for the sake of parity.
Do we want that?
Yes the rabble is boisterous and possibly I’ll informed… Ignore them at your own risk.
Furthering your US analogy, could such groups ever find a ‘happier’ separate existence given that they are codependent? History tells us otherwise. Perhaps a hard fork would not follow the norm?
I’m a strong advocate of EIP 867, which proposes to do that. It allows anyone willing to put in the effort to provide a rigorous proof (or hire someone to author it for them) to get funds recovered IF they can prove to a reasonable human that the funds are clearly theirs and that they are inaccessible due to human error. The multisig deletion would fall into this class, as would many other accidental fund losses that people have suffered over the years. TheDAO recovery would not qualify since it took funds currently under control by one user and gave them to others.
I think that the two groups can govern independently, while still engaging in mutually beneficial trade. I think the same is true for blockchains, it is possible to have two blockchains that cater to two different groups of people and as long as there is opportunity for free trade between them then they can co-exist.
An immutable chain (ETC) and a mutable chain (ETH) may serve different demographics, which have different risk profiles, and people can freely move from one to the other (e.g., via exchange). I’m personally not a big believer in “one chain to rule them all”, I think multiple chains can coexist and solve different problems and target different users.
Not that extreme.
Yes that extreme. In reality, the Ethereum Foundation can choose to develop any software they like, and as long as they control the network brand called “Ethereum,” they have both de jure and de facto control of which blockchain gets to be called “Ethereum.” The same way “Bitcoin Cash” can have 99% of the market cap and hash-power of Bitcoin, but still the Bitcoin Core group socially (if not legally) controls what network gets to be called “Bitcoin.”
Fixing the Parity Multisig bug costs zero in deployment and is fully “non-contentious,” as forks (or any form of expansion in the symbolic space) are always “non-contentious” by technical definition, since they do not impede the continuation of the previous blockchain.
The only point of “contention” is Market Fundamentalists getting angry at the idea that the Ethereum Foundation may choose to christen the Parity Multisig Fix as “Ethereum,” using their social and legal branding powers. This is like people complaining that they got banned from Internet forums with cries of “Oppression!”, when in fact the Internet is completely abundant of space where you can go instead. You can be censored in symbolic space, but you cannot be oppressed, since you cannot be squeezed into a corner like in purely physical, or physical-symbolic systems (and this is a quick model to try to show a moral angle; please don’t be literal about it and force me to expand this into five pages).
Market Fundamentalism is a bane for the social adoption of crypto. When the DAO fix was in, Bitcoin Maximalists were spilling poison in online bitcoin rags about how the Eth Foundation was having “phyrric hopes” of not being legally persecuted. I.e. they can have fantasies of volunteer developers being jailed for reverting symbolic thefts in an MMO. These people are insane and the Parity Multisig bug and the DAO hack are gifts in disguise, which allow us to identify them and drive them away from the social Ethereum network.
Right now Ethereum is in the early stage in which control over the protocol is de facto centralized
No. Protocols are not controlled, since they are just math objects and our present society is free enough that anyone can create their own math objects and post them on Github.
The Ethereum brand will always(*) be legally and socially centralized to whatever the Ethereum Foundation decides is the Ethereum network, and the majority of exchanges will always socially agree with what the Ethereum Foundation decides. Even if they completely cease doing any actual software development and just endorse other people’s implementations.
The Ethereum Brand is a social object, and that is what “controls” what miners and exchanges do. But that’s how basic leadership and naming works in our society. All those parties are free to ignore the Ethereum foundation and do their own thing.
(*) unless they give it up, of course.
It costs $xxx million in value being redistributed from the current holders of ether, permanent harm to the reputation of Ethereum and a strong leap towards a central governance model where a special minority get to choose which transactions are valid and which are not.
For those that want a quasi-centralised system where transactions can be undone, they should opt-in to a solution on the Ethereum application layer; these decisions shouldn’t be made at the protocol level. It’s clear from the volume of debate in this EIP-867 and EIP-999, the split sentiment on reddit and the results of the EIP-999 coinvote that many people are not interested in a system like this.
It is a contentious fork.
For those that want a quasi-centralised system where transactions can be undone,
The system is not physically nor socially centralized in any meaningful fashion. The only centralized asset is the brand and the social respect that the Ethereum development body enjoy. You have not read my post.
It is a contentious fork.
For a generic, meaningless definition of “contention” (i.e. “noisy angry people”).
Unfortunately, if the client developers don’t express preference, the exchanges will by deciding which one gets the token ETH. Personally, I would prefer developers deciding defaults over exchanges deciding defaults.
It is unfortunate that Bitcoin long ago set the precedence that when a hard forking protocol upgrade occurs one branch gets to keep the ticker symbol and the other doesn’t. It would have been better IMO if at every fork the original ticker symbol was end of lifed and two new ticker symbols spring into existence, with no preference as to which is “correct”.
This has historically been Bitcoin’s policy, if a change doesn’t have 90% support or something crazy then it isn’t included. IMO, this has resulted in Bitcoin effectively stopping development because their community is of the size that they can’t get 90% support on anything, even things that are pure technical upgrades (like adding new opcodes).
I can see the argument for treating things like recoveries differently, but I think no-contest recoveries are generally good and there will always be someone who didn’t lose money who doesn’t want to support someone else getting their money back (accessible supply goes up with every recovery).
Personally, of all of the options available (Exchanges choose, client devs choose, default to no-change), I prefer to let the client developers choose (where “choose” here means pick the default). If I ever get to the point where I feel like the client developers are not making good choices in general, or are making choices that are outright terrible (like introducing some form of government KYC into the system) then I’ll fork. Until then, I’ll likely go along with changes proposed by the client devs even if I don’t wholeheartedly agree with them (like I did with TheDAO).
Seems we are presented with a binary choice? Recover the funds or not; to fork or not to fork? In these two scenarios the lost funds are either worth 0, or some less than current value due to the damage caused by a fork.
Do the lost funds truly need to be recovered 1:1? Could partial recovery be considered? A predetermined value might be preferable to an unknown post fork value. Partial recovery would retain some incentive for thorough testing.
I suggest reading @alexvandesande’s write-up of an alternative solution to lost ether.
Basically, what’s described is a “recovery contract” concept where beneficiaries of lost ether are distributed an ERC20 token at a 1:1 ratio. The recovery tokens can be redeemed pro rata for some amount ETH, with the potential source being from donations, EIP1015 (basically a tax on PoS) and possibly insurance.
What value does this provide over full recovery? If we go through the effort of recovering, why not do the whole thing?
This assumes the fork would be damaging (net). I’m not convinced of that. It is possible that knowing that Ethereum is willing to do no-contest fund recovery could incentivize further interest in the platform due to a risk reduction compared to a fully immutable system. There are of course arguments on the other side that it will damage confidence, but at the moment it is all speculation.
I have seen this proposed a few times, and it has never been clear to me why anyone would ever want those tokens. They have no potential future value for network fees, nor do they have any future utility. Also, why would anyone voluntarily give away their ETH (donate) to such a thing with no guarantee that everyone will donate equally?
It’s not my idea, so I’m not a good authority on this topic. However I can think of two reasons why somebody might donate to a recovery fund:
Whether these donations would be significant – I don’t know. Of course, it wouldn’t get close to the original sum lost.
It’s not my proposal, but I prefer it over an involuntary contribution from all to the affected parties. Your questions are probably better directed at @alexvandesande or someone else backing it.
@alexvandesande addresses this question in his post. His proposal involves building an insurance marketplace where those tokens collect fees in the future.
If I’m following the argument correctly, it starts off with the assertion that the client dev teams (besides Parity) will not include recovery in a hard fork. That means the arguments it makes are not relevant to whether or not client dev teams should include recovery in a hard fork, which is what mast of the discussion is about.
As far as the token thing, it needs funding to be worth anything and each of the proposed funding items have problems: