Ethereum reality check

On July 20, Ethereum community had their first big reality check. They implemented the decision – the hard fork – they rolled back the transactions in order to return the stolen funds to the original owners. They declare it a triumph, but some respectable people qualify it as a failure. So, what is it?

The arguments are raging. Reading them, I swing in my opinion from one extreme to another.

Here is what people are saying:

(pro) The community of independent participants voted (87%) for the fork. That is democracy at its best.
(con) The participation was only 5.5%.

(pro) A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study – usually below 0.01%.
(con) In sociological studies, the authors are watching and are required to prove that the selection is representative.

(pro) Those, who did not vote did not care.
(con) Those who cared voted for returning the money they had lost, not for the better long-term solution.

(pro) The voting mechanism is not as important as the ability to correct the wrong.
(con) That was like, “we made mistake, now we rewrite the history.”

(pro) Sure, that’s the beauty of it. Would not we want to replay some moments of human history when a bad decision was made?

(con) The declared goal of the decentralization was to guarantee that nobody could change the records to their advantage.

(pro) It still holds, except in the catastrophic situations, when all the rules are overruled.
(con) Who decides?

There are many other arguments pro and con. It is instructive to observe how an idealistic system clashes with the hard and unforgiving reality.

Will it survive and get better?

Or should we just learn another lesson about a complex system susceptible to Murphy’s Law?

Client: Is this stock going to appreciate?

Financial adviser: Only time will tell.