Quote from: Chris001 on August 15, 2014, 06:58:46 PM

Quote from: jokumat on August 15, 2014, 06:50:55 PM

Quote from: Nautica on August 15, 2014, 06:06:55 PM

That actually confirms the decentralised nature of it. Nobody in particular can choose to roll back, that has to be reached through a democratic decision built through a decentralised consensus. It's the very definition of decentralisation. What you are talking about is Laissez-Faire politics, where you just don't care about stopping the thief.

Quote from: Este Nuno on August 15, 2014, 06:06:57 PM

I don't necessarily support rollbacks. But as we've gone over many times in this thread, a group of miners/forgers deciding on what chain to continue on is clearly decentralised. Just because you don't like an idea doesn't mean you can just apply an erroneous label to it.

well in your understanding
centralized=decision of one person or maybe a few of persons
decentralized= decision of many people, majority wins

in my understanding
decentralized= individual decision of each and every person about their own property within the limit of given rules (code)
centralized= anybody (be it one person or many persons) can make arbitrary decisions about anybody else's property

the whole purpose of Bitcoin or any other decent crypto as a technical solution is to guarantee that nobody can make arbitrary decisions about anybody else's property. This is why I am ready to call them decentralized solutions. Everybody has to follow the same rules. Majority of hashing power is used as a best way to prevent attacks, best incentive to stick to the code. But in your undestanding one specific majority can make arbitrary decisions.

whatever the result of the vote, I have serious misgivings about cryptocurrencies - just an existence of such a vote is bad

This is a very great explanation, he did a much better job explaining why I've wanted to punch my computer reading these "decentralized" posts for the last few hours.

Great post. So do you now understand everyone?

Chris, I like your posts and agree that rollback should never happen or even be up for any sort of voting or even have slight possibility of happening.
Ideally hard forks should be impossible as well as any software updates to core library and protocol.

However, the main obstacle here is that programmers are not capable to implement anything without bugs to be able to irreversibly close the gate of software updates that they usually use to correct own mistakes. If that gate was closed it would make it impossible to rollback or do anything else that majority of forgers may decide to do.

Currently all cryptos have that gate open and majority of forgers trust and depend upon software updates from dev team, which makes dev team one central power that can decide the future and change the past. Of course, forgers have final say of what they run on their servers, but what if dev makes a bug on purpose that nobody notices and then publishes new version with hard fork that would nullify balances of all accounts that end with digit 0 or have less than 7 digits. Forgers will have no choice, but to obey and update because otherwise bug will do something worse...
What if majority of forgers at some point happen to be US citizens and US govt obligated them to do software update prepared by NSA with hard fork banning all accounts that they deem to belong to Chinese.

Democracy/decentralization was only chosen as the only known way to mitigate that obstacle (by keeping the gate open while allowing only consensus to decide what goes through).
Both democracy and decentralization are not ideal and actually are bad given that majority of voters are retards or clueless making votes based on distorted information distributed by centralized media channels.
Example: Adolph Hitler was democratically elected. Some may argue that his removal through time machine localized rollback would make it worse by allowing Stalin to conquer the world, but I doubt that German voters thought about opposition to Stalin when they voted for Adolph Hitler. Another theory could be that Adolph Hitler was good at the time of election, but transformed his positions due to threat from Stalin, but I will let historians to counter that argument and consequently prove that democracy sucks.

One significant difference that I see between government supported democracy and crypto decentralization is that in democracy one human has one vote, but in crypto decentralization one coin has one vote. Crypto decentralization helps to somewhat mitigate disadvantage of democracy where retards have to much voting power just because retards usually don't have as many coins as smart people. But it does not solve problem of clueless vote of smart people based on information that they learn. And while power is distributed, information channel that they trust may be centralized, which makes the whole thing centralized.
Example: US voters had real chances to elect someone who is not republican or democrat, but failed to do so mostly because of centralized mass media channel controlled by republicans&democrats.
Another example: let US voters to vote for bombing and occupation of major foreign oil regions to save US govt from default, repay all US debt and keep gas prices below 40 cents/gallon - what do you think the vote result will be ?

My point is - democracy or decentralization are not goals, but only available at the moment faulty tools.
The goal is to have a system with never changing set of rules like The Constitution.

We have to invent reliable set of mathematical rules, build crypto system without bugs that enforces these rules and make it impossible to ever change that system.
That should be the goal of all best hackers in the world. If they can't produce system without bugs then they are not as good as they seem.

Example of closing the main gate was when George Washington relinquished his power to The Constitution and The People.
But he was afraid of mistakes/bugs too, so he left many smaller gates open to change it by The People.

So around 1913 some of these gates could not hold pressure of change from powerful financial elite and were broken letting flood of evil to come to US land.
After that most of gates that were so well established before, were broken by The People who were practically forced to do so by accumulated evil through main leak of 1913.

Gold confiscation was one of those broken rules and is similar to the rollback. The People decided that those who have gold did not obtain it properly or otherwise did not deserve to keep it, so ugly rollback was implemented in form of confiscation.

Since we have chicken and egg problem with dev and crypto currency, it must be solved same way as George Washington did. Dev at some point must relinquish his power by closing software update gate in such a way that it can never be opened again even by himself or with any less than 100% consensus. Only 100% consensus can change it by shutting down all servers and destroying the whole network.