So you’re saying all core devs own 0 ETH?
I mean organizationally. Your “Moral Hazard” angle is false. You can have infinity value invested in a financial system and it will still be your social duty to fix an obvious failure in that system if it is in your reach to do so. The amount of stake they have in the Ethereum MMO has no bearing in the decision.
I’m still hearing about how contentious it was and how fragmented the community appeared to be as a result. That is not an unmitigated success. If you visit the Ethereum subreddit the consensus there is than an overwhelming majority of commentors are rejecting any selective arbitrary funds restoration such as EIP-999.
Funds were returned to people to the extent possible. Angry market fundamentalists are not valid mitigation to millions of dollars worth of funds returned to their owners due to an obvious, unintentional software fault.
Except that its often bundled with a major feature update. Even if there is a flag to toggle EIP-999, what’s the default going to be? Who gets to pick that default?
You are talking about software development. Software developers get to decide what the software they develop is. People who adopt and deploy software in systems they own decide who the providers of that software will be. There’s absolutely nothing wrong in the Ethereum developers deciding to bundle whatever they want into the software they develop, and there’s nothing forcing anyone from adopting their version of what their work is supposed to look like. You can try to frame this as an “Oppressive Regime” as much as you want, it still is no such thing.
(…) You have not addressed the core issue: exceptions made for one that are not made for all in an economic system is a very quick way to devalue that system. It also brings a host of legal liabilities that as an international community we should be cognizant of.
I have addressed technically and very explicitly why all these concerns are false, but you are wrapped inside a bubble of circular, Market Fundamentalist logic and just cannot see it.
The phrase I intended to use is regime uncertainty. It’s not a scare-word, its a technical term that describes a specific issue: ad-hoc, unpredictable rules and regulations scare off investors that must plan ahead and wait for their investment to pay off. It is why unstable governments lead to multinational corporations pulling out from entire countries. You need to approximate that cost per your own criteria.
A virtual world simulation like Ethereum is not a real-world “government,” no matter how popular the “Governance” buzzword is today in blockchain MMOs. Your comparison is inadequate. If you don’t like a version of a virtual Internet world, you can just fork it. Symbolic space is absolutely infinite, friction-less and painless. The “real” political world of Governments, Corporations and Investors – “legal” entities, in a physical space where humans e.g. jail other humans for symbolic misalignment – is different from the world of a voluntary MMO with “governance,” “investors” and “DAOs” where nobody has a gun to oppress anyone else.
I have commented in a previous Parity EIP that they should just fork off Ethereum if the Ethereum network is not going to act sooner rather than later. It would be better if a new Ethereum was started, with a social contract similar to that of EOS, where the social formation of the network is explicit in providing social story support (e.g. the “EOS Constitution”) as a rhetorical vaccine against Market Fundamentalism and all that “immutability” nonsense.
I care less about the Ethereum network brand (which is all this is about, really) than making sure victims of a virtual economic tragedy (with real human consequences) that society can perceive and act to revert are remedied by that society. It is more important that there IS a blockchain where the bug is corrected, to signal that society and basic human empathy still exist, than that that blockchain where that prioritized wrong can be righted carry the “Ethereum” brand. However, there is no valid reason whatsoever for the current Ethereum network to not be that network… other than Market Fundamentalism.
Your morality is not universal. If we talk in terms of morality then you must also achieve a consensus because everyone will have their own version of what is morally right.
That is a feature, not a bug. I am “politically” (socially, in the Polis) acting according to my own will and my own sense of what is right. You are doing the same. What will happen is what the society of developers and “miners” will choose to do.
I am not making a fundamentally technical argument because this is not a fundamentally technical discussion. That’s what I mean by “morality.” My duty ends here, out of my empathy for those who have had their dreams slashed and emotional experience on this planet crushed due to abrupt loss of social valuation in the form of vast sums of this virtual counter we call “money.” The only reason I am arguing here is because I can feel their loss. I don’t really care if you can see it or if you understand or not.
That abstract set of people is every member of the Ethereum network. Increasing the supply of ETH 1% will reduce the price of ETH 1-10%. The lost ETH is somewhere around 1% of the total supply of Ethereum. If every member on average lost 10% of their confidence in Ethereum from a selective restoration hardfork that they didn’t sign up for then no, the loss in network value is far greater than the funds recovered.
It would be just reverting the deflation from the loss.
If the Ethereum developers and miners do not address this issue, I will lose 100% of my “confidence” in Ethereum. Because to me this is not about econometric simulation. This is about people.
But if we’re going to be into econometric hypotheses, let’s remember we are talking about cryptocurrencies. The thing that crashes 80% in a week, and we are discussing confidence in restoring 1% of the supply back into movable status.
I myself will walk away if this kind of EIP-999 is adopted in its current form
Social groups like “blockchains” need their own principles and reasons-to-be; there’s no such thing as “neutral” markets. Some people will always leave. I will leave if the Parity bug is not addressed… and nobody cares.
I never said that.
Yes you did not. You implied. I have just unrolled the implications for you, and instead of reflecting upon those you chose to ignore them and respond with an irrelevant list of obvious things we can do to help reduce the odds that bugs happen, even though you can’t bring the odds to zero, which is the only way I see you could invalidate my argument through that line of reasoning.
A moral hazard is a term and not its own form of morality. Excerpt from the wiki page: “A party makes a decision about how much risk to take, while another party bears the costs if things go badly, and the party isolated from risk behaves differently from how it would if it were fully exposed to the risk.” That is the too-big-to-fail mentality that pissed off many people and helped incentivize the adoption Bitcoin.
We are not reasoning at the same level. Moral Hazard is a model, and it is a model that I am arguing doesn’t apply to the situation. Pasting the explanation of the model from the page you linked does not move anything forward.
A previous reply from someone else has already addressed “Too Big To Fail” so I will skip that.
The economic problem isn’t modifying immutable state. It’s modifying it unpredictably according to political or social pressures on a very small set of people. That leads to regime uncertainty because you aren’t sure the rules of the game will be the same 5 years down the road.
That’s real life and a feature, not a bug.
If you really want to argue on the basis of morality and not the future of Ethereum then here’s my question: why are you concerned only with the morality of restoring funds for some number of users but completely ignoring the effect it will have on every other user of Ethereum in existence?
I have literally done nothing else but to argue this case.
If everyone else loses 10% of their ETH holdings’ value, is that not a moral issue?
That’s hypothetical vis the real loss of Parity Multisig wallet users, and no, I am not, as an individual moral agent, concerned about this in a cryptocurrency in 2018, the same way I am not concerned if a thief loses what they have stolen or if Ethereum crashes 80% tomorrow (again).
Or will “do the right thing” only be selectively enforced applied for possibly unknown benefactors?
Reality demands we select (prioritize) our actions. (I am not sure what this objection is.)
My gut tells me you have some not-insignificant amount of funds lost in a wallet that would be saved by EIP-999.
Your gut is wrong. I would not touch a multisig wallet with a 10-foot pole. I am an old software engineer with a sharp intuition for smelling code jockeying. I can see dangerous crap from ten miles away. I would never use something that’s outside the mainstream usage path (i.e. single-sig wallets).
Now regardless of whether all this speculation is true or not it’s a reasonable enough thing for a bystander to ponder.
I am not even a little bit surprised by this, since you have projected a Moral Hazard argument in the developers of Ethereum.