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RE: The Fundamental Underpinning of Blockchain Consensus
Yes, but from what I've read by most "Code is Law" advocates, it seems to be more of a philosophical belief that participants in a network should abide by the results of the code, and any retroactive change should not be allowed via a hardfork.
I guess the most notable case of this was the arguments for "Ethereum Classic", where a hacker exploited a weakness in the code to obtain funds from the DAO in an unexpected way. The majority community response was to hardfork and revert this exploit. But a vocal minority argued that this reversion was morally wrong because "Code is Law" and so we got two Ethereum forks.
I guess. But in the end, both communities picked the code and law they want.
Yes, they both had to abide by what I'm calling the true law of consensus, which will hold as long as we're allowed to choose what software we run on our computers.
But a philosophical difference did emerge between the two groups as to what types of changes are morally right. This just becomes another argument that can be used when users are choosing what rule changes they consider valid and willing to accept/operate under.
Sure there is a moral argument, but where does that ultimately end up? One group claims it is moral and the other group is not, and the other group claims the exact same thing.
Live and let live works for me. Neither is taking any sort of violent action against anyone.
Yes, I agree.
When I say that I consider "Code is Law" nonsense, it's mostly from my perspective that bugs in software are common, and rigidly obeying the results of a bug just seems like a terrible idea to me. Others are more than welcome to operate under such rules if they wish, however, and I consider this the greatest idea that has emerged from cryptocurrency networks: the ability to voluntarily associate and disassociate.
Of course, I don't mean that this idea of voluntary association hasn't existed before, but cryptocurrency has shined new light on methods for doing it and points to other possible uses for consensus-via-computer in the future.