The best commentary so far about The DAO crisis, by Curtis Yarvin.
Some great quotes:
What's the right lesson for the decentralization community to learn from the collapse of the DAO?
Perhaps the simplest lesson is that even decentralized networks need governments, and have governments. Every network is a state. Every state has a government.
From a governance perspective, the line of lawlessness isn't the line between soft and hard forks. It's any fork which makes an exception for a specific address. Ethereum has already done this by freezing the DAO contract. At this point, it might as well be hanged for an ox, and go through with the full rollback.
Within the ethos of Ethereum (we are obviously not qualified to comment on "real" law), a rollback is a lawless act. This does not make it a wrongful act. It simply cannot be judged as an act of law. Rather, it is an act of war.
But does Ethereum really want to be at war? And if Ethereum is at war -- and this certainly isn't the only pirate in the sea -- how does it become decentralized? If Ethereum is at war, where there is no law, how can it achieve its goal of creating a world where code is law?
But we really shouldn't panic. It is actually possible to go from wartime government to peacetime government, from absolute martial law to absolute rule of law. It is just nontrivial. It's a political engineering problem that can't be ignored. If it has to be solved, it should be solved properly.
At present, it seems that Ethereum's leadership has chosen war. Certainly, neither choice is obviously imprudent. Ethereum is a winner and probably has a bright future either way. But who chooses war needs a plan to win that war, and return to peace.
A rollback creates a scary precedent. It's a sort of military coup. Just as the miners have the power to rule any blockchain, the military has the power to rule any country. Do they want it? The first coup makes the next coup much easier. Same with the first rollback.
In retrospect, the great mistake here was that Ethereum didn't know it needed a government, and did its best to pretend it didn't have one. After a rollback, Ethereum doesn't just have a government. It has a military dictatorship.
The "just this once" fork takes us back to decentralization theater, where Ethereum pretends not to have a government. But now, this pretense is even more threadbare. The next hack, which will certainly happen, will produce yet another coup -- or at least a food fight over whether to have a coup. This is the path to a "digital banana republic," where the tattered illusion of law barely conceals the real law of nature.
What's the alternative? An actual constitution. Perhaps the first smart contract that Ethereum needs is not the DAO, not even well-engineered, high-quality smart contracts like Augur and Maker, but just its own equivalent of 1789. If Ethereum needs a government, it must govern itself. It certainly has all the technical tools it needs!
Read the whole thing from Urbit blog: The DAO as a lesson in decentralized governance
This is also a good way to look at what happened to Bitshares. Some groups declared war against the system, but the system couldn't fight back. It is still in a vague state where it is unable to decide the direction where is should be going. If Bitshares wants to start growing again, it needs to acknowledge that it is in a state of war and defend itself from the attackers.
Thank you for this - it was a delicious read.
Conclusions like these^ make me admire how much wisdom there is in BitShares DPOS. It still needs some tweaks but the fundamental concept is very solid.
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This is the crucial point. Instinctively I felt something like this but I was unable to put it into sensible words. And Curtis Yarvin came up with the words. Such a relief. I'm so grateful.
Hard-fork proponents say: "Since miners have the power to do a hard-fork, everything is fine when they do it". I felt it was wrong but couldn't really argue with that. Fortunately Curtis Yarvin spotted the crux of the matter: indeed, the miners have the power to hard-fork but it does not mean they have the right to do it. By doing so they break the very fundamental consensus. It's a military coup. These things happen but still they are lawless:
Here is another perfect comparison:
And another brilliant observation:
Even a government composed of a single person is not a bad thing, as long as this person has no reason to execute his power. In blockchain terms, having very few block producers is OK, as long as their incentives are perfectly aligned with the network incentives. This way block producers do have enormous power but never actually use it.
This is absoluty illuminating for me.
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Could you provide some details/links for newbies about this BitShares@War?
What groups declared war against the system?
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alt / baozi: wants to stop all development.
bitcrab: persuaded Yunbi to start voting with the stake that belongs to their customers.
laomao / Yunbi: wants to stop all development.
dacs: set up a worker to drain development fund for anybody who sets dacs as a proxy.
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That was a good read, with some interesting metaphors. It seems like Ethereum price is not crashing anymore, but I wonder where it is heading as a crypto-utility. It's fortunate that these things have monetary value so that they get stress tested by black-hats before they are adopted into any critical systems where an attack could cause unprecedented damage.
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