The work on the Qeditas code is progressing, though slowly again. I hope to give a more detailed update soon. Given the Ethereum hard fork today, I decided to make a statement regarding conditions under which Qeditas should (and more importantly should not) hard fork.

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Today, July 20, 2016, the Ethereum community hard-forked in order to reverse the outcome of an ill-fated, buggy Ethereum program ("the DAO"). I play no role in the Ethereum community, but thought it would be an important opportunity to state, in advance, my position if something similar were to occur with Qeditas in the future.

It is quite likely that "buggy" propositions (and even "buggy" theories) will be published in the Qeditas block chain. For example, someone may formulate a conjecture they believe to be a formal version of The Riemann Hypothesis (or some other Millennium Problem). Under this belief, many people may contribute large bounties to encourage the resolution of the conjecture. Such bounties will encourage others to look more carefully at the conjecture, and someone may discover a flaw in the formulation. This flaw may mean that it is not a version of The Riemann Hypothesis, but instead is some other easily resolved conjecture. The person who discovers this can resolve the conjecture and claim the bounties.

This is, to be clear, part of the intended operation of the system. It is common for people to make mistakes when formalizing mathematics (just as programming mistakes are common). The only way these mistakes are found is by having intelligent people look very carefully at the formalization (or "code").

In such a case, it is conceivable that some of the people who contributed to the bounties would be disappointed, and might even suggest a hard fork to return the bounties to the contributors.

For my part, I would never support such an action in principle or in practice. If I were still actively developing Qeditas and such a hard fork were to occur, I would either support the original chain or abandon the project as a failure.

There are situations in which a hard fork might be needed. For example, if there were a bug in the consensus code or in the proof checker itself. Someone making use of the system as designed would never form a valid justification for a Qeditas hard fork.

Bill White
Qeditas Developer
July 20, 2016
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