https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed7i2QimzXI
Ethereum has had many discussions over its lifetime on how to proceed with its development, but one of the biggest ones has always been the recovery of lost or stuck funds. This discussion has heated up recently as the result of EIP 867 (introduction of ERPs) and EIP 999 (restore contract code of Parity WalletLibrary contract which was destroyed), but the discussion has been mostly limited to the Ethereum community.
However, I think the discussion of these two EIPs has ramifications far beyond just Ethereum. The debate over these EIPs includes topics such as:
1) Decentralization
2) Immutability
3) Changes at the protocol level vs the application level
4) Cryptoasset governance
These factors are critical for ALL public blockchains. The general community, both in social media and on Github / Ethereum Magicians, appear to be against any EIPs relating to recovery. The reasons often quoted include:
1) Sacrificing Immutability
2) Providing too much power / responsibility to EIP editors
3) Sets precedent which can lead to slippery slope (what do we allow to be recovered?)
4) Sets precedent of too big to fail
5) Bad code should have bad consequences
6) Changes shouldn't be made at protocol level
7) Many more - Check discussion links
The video includes details about what an EIP is, what these two particular EIPs are, and my overall opinion. Personally I am in favor of EIP 999 as I think it is undeniably an exception (due to both the amount and people involved), but am uncertain about EIP 867. EIP 867 will mostly benefit businesses who develop on top of Ethereum (in my opinion), which is excellent, but like many others, I am concerned of how it would turn out in practice.
What are your thoughts?
Links:
EIP Description: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1.md
EIP 867: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-867.md
EIP 999: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md
EIP 867 (Discussion): https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-867-standardized-ethereum-recovery-proposals-erps/139
EIP 999 (Discussion): https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-999-restore-contract-code-at-0x863df6bfa4/130
I loved the video, however I have found one wrong assumption: that "a lot of this rejection of this EIP is on the basis of principle as opposed ~ to what would actually happen". I do not think this is correct. Surely, many people just hate it based on the immutability principle, however after the DAO bailout, many have feared this exact moment; the time when EVERYONE asks for bailouts/recoveries/refunds. I saw a great post that illustrated this on r/ethereum titled "Why should the Parity Multisig Wallet be bailed out when all the other contract mistakes and Ether losses aren't? ". This is, in my view, the exact thing Vitalik and the part of ethereum community that backed the bailout said would not happen; that it would not set a precedent. That this was a one-time-only thing. If immutability is broken, the tech is no better than an excel sheet, where you can delete and undo anything just like you illustrated.
I think people are disturbed that not only the principle is bad, but that blockchains can and eventually will be editable. Censorable. Trust-ed, not trust-less. You are one of the smartest people that are in this space that I know of. Sure you do not day trade on leverage and make millions, but you are the man of critical thinking and deep research. Ask yourself: what will happen, when a financial crime is commited on the blockchain, masive amount of money disappears, there is a class-action against the ethereum foundation or literally anyone on the dev team, and the judge orders them to edit the chain and return the money, under the threat of inprisonment? They cannot say "no". There is already a "sleeping giant" like this with Nano development team, there are class-actions being prepared (maybe even filed, but I am not famiiar with this case) after the BitGrail hack. The defendants will stand before court, point the finger at Nano devs, and say "they stole our money, because they did not fork the chain". But Nano is immutable, and Ethereum may soon not be.
Hi. I find this topic really interesting. I was sceptic about Ethereum for a long time, I still am but it's good sign that they include the community in this discussion and don't just do whatever they feel like.
I have a question about something else. Today I've read this post on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8g768p/eos_dont_believe_the_hype/
It explains how no current currency can be decentralized, secure and infinitely scalable at the same time. It also talked about the consensus form of EOS being very centralized because not a lot of people have enough computing power to maintain such a node. Also the ones who will run such a node will have an incentive to bribe other users that own a lot of EOS to vote for them again in return for a few percents of the node owners earnings.
Then I thought about my NEO. I like(d) NEO and was really happy when I got it last december. It seemed pretty similar and I dug up the stuff that I've read about it a few months ago and it acutally is quite similar if not the same. Only with NEO there is also the chinese government with their fingers in the game.
So I thought about selling it because I don't want to be invested in a project with no intrinsic value. If the nodes shut down, the whole thing is gone.
On the other hand there are so many people working on this project, the community stands behind it very strongly, there are a lot of upcoming ICOs and as I already mentioned the chinese government is backing the project which can actually be seen as a security too. Because if the chinese government is involved they certainly won't let it fail.
I'm in conflict because on one hand this sounds like the opposit of what crypto is about but on the other hand it most certainly won't fail.
I just wanted to get my thoughts out and hear your oppinion if you have time to answer. Thanks.
@bz1 | May 1, 2018, 8:56 p.m. | Votes: 3 | [
VOTE ]
I side with "code is law" and would disendorse both EIPs, but I believe innovative fund recovery schemes should be studied.
A sample situation I came up with
If your house got burned down, there's no way to beg the universe to un-burn the house. Most people have home insurance to deal with this problem.
The universe is totally "immutable", as in the valid state transition sense, but blockchains are actually governed by consensus, for example, the DAO fund recovery was authorized by protocol change.
Insurance schemes are proposed in discussions surrounding EIP 867 and EIP 999, and they are application or off-chain solutions.
Solving the problem with better smart contracts
I know immutability is important. I have heard every arguments for it, but I also know that lost funds is sometimes not the victim's fault and "all software have bugs" is something almost every software developer on Earth have accepted. This means, smart contracts themselves need to be amended to fix their security holes. However, echoing the immutability arguments, smart contracts (from 2-party gambling sessions and atomic swaps to complex ERC20 tokens) are contracts and are not meant to be broken, or else they are useless.
Some smart contracts solve this problem with migration schemes, either activated by the contract's owner or through a vote by participants.
On-chain fund recovery scheme
A solution I want to explore is fund recovery through block rewards (also mention in EIP 867 discussions). Every block reward has a % allocated to slowly pay off those who lost their money. The lost fund is paid off in months or in years, so that the right amount of consequences of bad decisions are suffered ($100 fine, not death penalty, for littering). Since hacking and lost funds are socially recognized, on-chain voting to allocate fund recovery seems to be a good idea. But there are details to iron out: What kind of majority is required? What about vote buying (Vitalik thinks every voting system suffers this), voter apathy, privacy of wallet owners, and using it for non-fund recovery situations?). Depending on the voting system, this scheme can also suffer "too big to fail" problem since major dApps are better at campaigning for votes.