RE: The price to performance index: EOS, Ethereum, Tezos, Tauchain
An unethical chain will simply become less popular than an ethical chain which proves any chain exists to support a community and not for it's own sake.
I really appreciate your insight but I think it's unnecessarily to spoil it with your personal opinions. Categorizations like "ethical" or "unethical" are very subjective in the blockchain space. And we all know that when something is more popular it does not necessarily imply that it is more ethical.
The confusion of those terms is especially evident when you say this:
You cannot reverse history, but you can create two histories and ignore the fake history.
In case of Ethereum, the more popular chain is actually "fake history", which contradicts your judgment about it being the ethical chain.
I never denied that ethics are subjective. My point is the majority of people set the ethical guidelines of any community. It's true that people are free to choose a fringe chain but it will be a fringe chain and support the people who have friends ethics. The majority chain will be the one which supports the ethics that the majority of people have.
In the case of Ethereum the real chain is the chain with the most community support. If the chain history wasn't the one considered the most real then the people would prefer the other chain. It appears the developers, majority of smart contracts, majority of money, have chosen the reality they want, and have selected the history which they deem to be the real one by their social consensus. The social consensus includes economic, developer, and user consensus, which ultimately determines which set of transactions are legitimate and which are illegitimate.
My point is it's people who interpret the meaning of transactions and who give a blockchain meaning. It's people who give a smart contract meaning. A smart contract exists for people, not the other way around. The history exists for people and if people agree that one chain is more right, or more meaningful, they'll choose it, and that is my point. My point is you cannot remove human subjectivity from interpretation. And my point is also that when the fork happened, it isn't the code which determines which chain is most real or which is reality, it's the community.
The reason our opinions differ is that it is central to my belief and I suppose to the majority of others supporting Ethereum Core (ETH) rather than Ethereum Classic, is a difference in purpose. If we see the blockchain has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, value, except to support the users, developers, and community as a whole, then at any time the people have veto power, or if we frame it like the US Constitution then the people have the capability at any time to over throw dictatorship even if it's a flawed algorithm, a broken smart contract, a rogue AI, etc. Does this mean these people are violating the Constitution because they overthrow the dictator? I would say no, it means they interpret the the words in a way which is different from the dictator, and or the dictator isn't respecting more fundamental rights which the Constitution was set up to protect in the first place. If a smart contract is the dictator it doesn't change anything in my opinion if the ecosystem, ledger, and the history it contains, exists to support the people who interpret it.
Your point is valid, we just disagree.
Thank you for this detailed response.
It's clear we have a disagreement at a very fundamental level. I would never say that "ethics are subjective" and are defined by whatever the majority decides at a given moment. I guess your mindset represents the essence of post-modernism: there are no absolute values, everyone is free to interpret the world the way they want (every interpretation is of equal value) and ethics comprises of whatever interpenetration prevails at a given time.
For me, the essence of ethics is the fact that they are absolute and they transcend everything else (including science and the will of the majority).
And to be clear, my stance does not imply that things like US Constitution should be immutable. Quite the contrary, they should define a way to amend themselves. My point is, they should not be allowed to change its rules retroactively. This is a meta-rule which is kind of sacred and was clearly violated in case of the DAO incident.
What's more, the Ethereum webpage still mentions "unstoppable contracts", while according to your interpenetration (which I guess is shared by the entire Ethereum community) it is not the case.
If they clearly declared something like this: "We aim to make contracts unstoppable but reserve the right to override a contract which most us perceive as unacceptable" - then I would be OK with it. I'd never use their platform, but still I'd respect this pragmatic approach. As it is, the whole thing is either based on a lie (as no contract is actually meant to be unstoppable) or it violates one of the primary principles of our civilization: lex retro non agit.
I make a distinction between public and private morality. Public morality is only determinable by opinion polls and is the "current moral sentiment of the crowd". Private morality is what an individual might know or feel is right. In the end public morality is what communities shape and members of the community are influenced by in laws, social consensus, etc, we have public morality which shapes that.
The developers of a technology have to ask themselves "what do my stakeholders think is ethical?" and make their design decisions based on what they think others think is right and wrong. This is because the tool, or the platform, isn't private but is public, and it's no different in my opinion from when a corporation goes public and then must change it's product in order to not upset the shareholders. My point is like with companies, the stakeholders determine what the consensus ethics of a platform is.
I do not think there is any absolute truth or at least I don't know of any. Science doesn't work on absolute values. It's more you chip away at difficult problems over time by being wrong, failing, and learning from failed attempts until eventually a picture begins to emerge based on that. In a sense, science isn't about absolutes, it's just about being continuously less wrong over time. Absolute truth might not be achievable, but you can approximate by simply being continuously closer to it by ruling out what isn't true. In other words iterative improvement just like in engineering is the process which I think is more important than any rigid adherence to absolutes, whether this be moral absolutism, or if we are talking about software, algorithms, etc, the software is never finished and can always be improved, the algorithms are almost never optimal and most are just the best found fit solution.
So we agree on the Constitution. My point is immutable as you are using it does not mean human beings have to adhere to anything immutable. The blockchain is immutable in the sense that when we agree on that version of reality it's set in stone, recorded for all time, on the blockchain. But then if there is a fork then we can agree to ignore the old chain as a means of correcting our own mistakes, as I see the blockchain only as a means to an end. The chain itself may be immutable but there is no rule we can only have a single immutable chain, when we can have many competing chains (competing versions of reality) which the market selects, or the community chooses.
So Ethereum Core has it's chain and that chain is immutable. Ethereum Classic has a chain and that chain is immutable. The fork simply turned one chain into two, but the only thing which changed was the interpretation on the human side. If we are saying we cannot ever fork because that would break immutability then Bitcoin broke that a long time ago because it has forked many times, had bugs, and I suppose if we think of it like that then the purity of the chain was adulterated too. But I don't view it like that because I don't think the purity of the chain has any meaning without a community behind it.
Honestly you have a point here. Very naive marketing, and this way of thinking is actually typical in this space. A lot of very naive catch phrases, buzzwords, and even some toxic memes are floating around. I do not endorse these memes. But for people who believe in that they can use Ethereum Classic. It is for that reason why we had the fork and why they have their own chain, but I agree it should be removed from the website because it's false marketing but what else is new? Lots of crypto projects make false promises in the marketing, like come on, world computer? Ethereum is not that, and it's not a super computer, and it's not exactly secure. Unstoppable contracts, okay so if the contract is destroying all life on earth it's unstoppable because Ethereum says we cannot shut it off? No, it's only unstoppable if a community exists willing to continue to mine it whether for economic reasons or others, it's only unstoppable if developers are willing to support the chain it's own, if it's an AI it's only able to be unstoppable if people keep feeding it resources. I'm saying that I endorse the "kill switch" idea as a safety precaution and in the case of The DAO no such safety mechanism was designed, it was threatening the health of the community and the project, not just economic, not just ethical, but legally as well. In the marketing I would hope they learn not to make naive promises which cannot be kept without leading to dystopia and unstoppable contracts is the sort of promise which would lead to that if we are talking about smart contracts completely as code without any arbitration or fail safe or human fail safe.
To be clear, I do not have a strong opinion about the "code is the law" rule. Maybe it's not such a good idea and maybe the "kill switch" that you mention is worth considering.
What I do have a strong opinion about is this: when you publicly announce that "code is the law" (which is effectively what the phrase "unstoppable contracts" means and what was reiterated in the DAO terms & conditions) than you need to stick to this rule, no matter what, even if it means a huge financial loss and going against the will of the majority of your community or even destruction of the entire platform. In other words, take full responsibility for your words, as this is one of the fundamental (and absolute) meta-rules, on which our civilization stands.
You seem to acknowledge my point but still you dismiss it as just naive (or I would say, manipulative) marketing which should not be treated seriously. For me, it's much more than that and maybe this is actually the core of our disagreement.
As for your other arguments, it's obvious that we need to distinguish between forks which fix mistakes (so that existing rules are imposed) and forks which change the rules retroactively. There is a huge difference between those two.
And finally:
I think you actually believe there are absolute truths, as otherwise your life would be unbearable. They are deep inside you, accumulated by millions of years of evolution, just inaccessible on the rational layer. Or so intrinsic that you don't even notice them.
As for science, I fully agree, it doesn't work on absolute values. That's why it's extremely efficient in building stuff and completely useless in telling you how to live. And I guess the latter is much more important than the former.