Blockchain Governance and Immutability... EOS and VeChain

Proposals and Immutability...

Blockchain is sometimes viewed as an immutable database that can store information without it ever being changed... but in reality, this isn't true!

Blockchains are only immutable and censorship-resistant if the miners, stakers, node hodlers, etc... say they are. If they really want to change the information stored on the blockchain they can! Of course, there are some blockchains easier to change than others, the more decentralized the blockchain is the more censorship proof and immutable the blockchain is. Let me give you two examples...

If on EOS, for example, the 21 Block Producers decided to reorganize the blockchain they would easily do it as long as they reached that consensus, and on EOS to reach that consensus it isn't that hard, it only requires 15 out of the 21 Block Producers, 15 people to agree to something... of course, these 21 Block Producers are voted in by the community, so in a sense, all the stake hodlers have a say in the governance of the blockchain, but still, the fact remains that any bad actor that has access to these 15 people can change the whole structure of the blockchain.

With Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's different... since both of these are, at least at the moment, Proof of work, the token hodlers don't have a say in the future of the blockchain, only the miners have a say in the future and consensus of the blockchain. If 51% of the miners decided to change something on Bitcoin, reorganizing the blockchain, they could do it theoretically, of course, that would go against the whole principle of what Bitcoin is supposed to be and the price would crash, the miners would lose in the end due to the price crashing. And this 51% attack at the moment would require thousands of nodes to reach that consensus, which is something really hard. However, this already happened before, on Ethereum...

When Ethereum first appeared, the number of miners wasn't that big and so, when the DAOhack happened, the miners which weren't that many at the time, were influenced by Vitalik and decided to act and hard fork the blockchain in order to reverse the transactions and get the investor's funds back, this is what originated Ethereum Classic, Ethereum Classic is the Ethereum without the reversed transactions.

Reversing transactions goes against "code is law", something that many inside the crypto community agree with... If the smart contract was hacked it is only because the code allowed it, and so the funds belong to the hacker. To this day Ethereum still gets a bad reputation because of the hard-fork that split the community in two, a hard fork that, depending on the viewer, either returned the funds to the investors or stole the funds from someone.

But why am I talking about this today? Well, two things are making me want to talk about this:

Let's start with EOS:

There is a proposal right now happening on EOS to return the funds of someone that was supposedly hacked. The person asking for it shows a lot of proof that he is indeed the rightful owner of the account where the funds were... someone with a "good-heart" would look at the proposal and say "Ohh dear, poor person, he was hacked by the big bad hacker and now his funds got stolen, let me agree with this proposal"... but there is a detail that people aren't thinking about, what if the funds were sold on OTC and this proposal is only trying to get the funds back from the guy that bought them on OTC!

This is the problem with such proposals, how can we be certain that it was indeed a hack? Should we trust the person that made the proposal? There is no way of knowing! This wasn't a big wallet, the funds weren't from someone "influential" inside the community, there is no way of knowing or trusting the person... Returning the funds in this situation is not something that I agree with, there isn't enough data to go ahead with this, how can an investor feel safe in buying EOS if by proposal all the investor's funds can be stolen... but this is just my opinion, it seems that not many share my opinion, the proposal is in the green and is probably going to go ahead.

The second situation is VeChain:

The VeChain Foundation announced months ago that they were going to do a buyback worth 25 Million dollars, the wallet was public, the announcement came from the team... after 6 Million dollars the wallet was hacked, the funds got stolen and the hacker was tracked on the official block explorer and all the wallets are right now blacklisted by the nodes temporarily, in short, the hacked funds aren't movable. But now the question is, should the blacklist continue or not? This is going to be voted on by the token hodlers.

The proposal isn't for the funds to be returned like the EOS proposal that I mentioned, the proposal is for the tokens to be burned, the foundation doesn't want the funds back, it was their mistake and they are "manning up" to the mistake, they just don't want the hacker to keep the funds.

The mistake wasn't like the DAOhack, where the smart contract had a problem, the mistake was that the computer where the wallet was created had a trojan virus. Something that, in my opinion, is stupid as hell and, even though I am an investor in VeChain, I must say that I'm really disappointed!

Regardless of this, no one will be benefited by this burn, maybe the reduced supply makes VeChain scarcer, which is a good thing for all token hodlers, the only person that gets something changed is the hacker, where he loses all the hacked funds.

I'm for this proposal, there is enough information to know that the tokens were hacked, the wallet belonged to the buyback and the foundation isn't getting them back...

Of course, if either of these proposals is approved a lot of doors will open, and I'm not sure if these are doors that any of the communities will want open...

In the case of EOS, the fact that someone with a simple proposal was able to change funds from one wallet to another enables thieves to use the proposal system to steal funds with the consensus of the community. And means the whole blockchain is easily changeable and thus not decentralized or immutable according to many.

On VeChain allowing the nodes to blacklist these addresses and not accept transactions from them makes one wonder if they can do this exact same thing to any of the hodlers... and says a lot about the decentralization and immutability of the blockchain... Ethereum still gets a bad reputation because of the hard fork they did, and a lot of time has passed! Do these communities really want this "skeleton in the closet"... Is this a good thing for investors and the companies already using both blockchains? Only time will tell, but both communities need to think about what accepting the proposals might do for or against the adoption...

Images Free Source - 1, 2,3,4,5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 - Tradingview snapshots too.

Question of the day: How would you vote if you were part of these communities?Why? And does this type of governance makes you more or less likely to invest in these projects?

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