Vitalik got indirectly pwned by the infamous DAO smart contract hack, but had the social clout to pause/rollback the supposedly decentralised/immutable Blockchain.

Maybe not the best example of cryptographic security.

This is not an accurate summary of what happened with TheDAO. Source: I publicized the attack vector for TheDAO here on HN.

> ... but had the social clout to pause/rollback the supposedly decentralised/immutable Blockchain

Vitalik (and all DAO ETH hodlers) luckboxed in that the ETHs locked in the DAO, although "stolen", couldn't be withdrawn by the attacker before a few weeks.

There has been zero pause and zero rollback. Most people don't understand that: by chance the stolen funds were inaccessible to the attacker for a few weeks.

What Vitalik did is he forked (soft fork) the ETH blockchain to modify the rules. That soft fork happened before the cooldown period expired, so the attacker never got to access his funds.

Some members of the community said "adding new rules is against the spirit of decentralization, so we keep using the old chain". The old chain was named "Ethereum classic" while the forked chain kept the name "Ethereum".

But there's been no rollback.

Vitalik didn't rollback the chain. The entire community agreed that it was the correct thing to do and did it. Thats how consensus mechanisims work. This was easier then because the community was tiny. It would be impossible now.

The proof of this is that some people didn't agree with undoing that transaction. They stayed on the old chain, which is now worthless.

This is such a boring and widely known story now, but it has to come up literally any time someone wants to play crypto tribalisim.

I was going to write a more indirect response by way of analogy, but it got too unwieldy. TL;DR: I was predisposed to taking the position you are advocating for, but this argument is incredibly weak while demonstrating the problem, to the point it made me wonder about my own priors. Shape-shifts from "this was totally fine and normal" to "but totally couldn't do it today" to "and guess what the ppl who didn't want to rollback went to 0" to "boring story" to "crypto tribalism", whatever that has to do with anything in this context.

That's what it means to have two chains. One chain undid the transaction. One did not. Do I really need to explain this? Both things happened because there are 2 chains. Only one of them is worth something but they both exist.

I think you got too spun up by the evil They you usually hear talking about this: whatever you're saying here sounds obvious.

The reason why people got confused with your comment is because ex. you purport it was fine, it can never happen again, and everyone who didn't agree went to 0.

Lot of tensions between those things.

We also understand how one person could have those views and even steelman it into something intellectually consistent. But then the post seems really off because it's sort of a rushed, poor, justification for why you believe something, coupled to bemoaning some sort of unrelated group none of us are privy to.

how would anything ever be immutable if people can reassign the symbol/pointer/name?

the DAO hack happened, immutably, no one disputes it. the hashes and blocks and transactions are well-known. so there was a "schism", that explicitly validates the fact that without this large-scale cooperation, without the redefinition of what Ethereum is, it would be still be what is on that other branch. these both provide evidence for the immutably and decentralization.

The version of Ethereum after the hack became known as Ethereum Classic. The Ethereum foundation decided to go with a fork of the chain prior to the hack, and pretty much all the devs and the community followed. The value of Ethereum is entirely derived from what people are willing to pay for it, and community is a big part of that. The version of Ethereum which underwent the attack didn't cease to exist, and people can still use it; it's just called "Ethereum classic" now, whereas people who want to use the version of the chain that didn't suffer from the hack can use that version (generally understood to be "Ethereum".

The fact that there are far fewer users of Ethereum Classic (and the market cap is significantly lower) is a testament to how much people care about the community which chose to follow a different history of the Ethereum network.

Small nitpick. In both chains the attack happened.

But in one chain the whole community decided to disown the attacker by injecting hard coded transactions that would send the Ethers back to their original owners.

It wasn't a rollback in much the same way that UPDATEing a row in an MVCC database doesn't actually overwrite that row, it just creates a new version of it that becomes the version that people tend to care about from that point on.

> Vitalik got indirectly pwned

How exactly was Vitalik "indirectly pwned"?

Personal assets in The DAO

Is this basically saying he sent all the ETH out of his "account" (presumably to another one that was pre-generated & pre-shared half the private key with his family), so that it just had the Shiba tokens left in it?

Then he didn't have to worry about the Shiba related transactions affecting his ETH?

Unfortunately I couldn't find a better writeup, although I remember it.

The basic problem was that they transferred into his "cold wallet" https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/hot-wallet-vs-c...

He didn't want to have the signal be that he was happy holding SHIBA and was uncomfortable with that much power & control over SHIBA. So he wanted to be able to transfer his SHIBA out to a hot wallet and then burn most of it and donate the rest, given the amount of money involved he took extra steps like buying a new computer to generate the new keys, airgapping it from the internet while it held the cold wallet keys etc

I recommend to everyone to take their 12 words, write em 3 times on a piece of paper, cut it into 9 pieces and hide them in places only you’d know

So nobody will be able to recover them if you are hit by a bus or develop dementia?

This problem is harder if you want to pass on your crypto after you can't use them anymore.

That's exactly right

If you want to enable recovery, you should give ownership of things to smart contracts, which enable things like succession rules and a heatbeat checkin etc.

Public/private keys are not designed to solve that kind of governance problem.

or just use a more user friendly and accessible currency and banking system

Target stores were early adopters of every-shopper profiling. Target has cameras on the purchase area, and have been known to refuse cash.

I've heard about Target's tracking from reputable sources, but never of them refusing to take cash, do you have a reputable source for that?

I saw a few places stop accepting cash during covid days but most have started accepting it again. The one place that I frequent that still doesn’t is the haircut store in my town. There are not a lot of options so it’s card or go somewhere that charges almost double.

What's weird to me is that you guys frame it as a bad thing. For me as a European it's the opposite, I'm in trouble if someone doesn't take card. Nobody carries cash any more.

I think pretty much all stores still accept cash, but most people here just never withdraw any. It's pretty much just old people and people buing illegal stuff

What you deem illegal may not be the next day. Being able to do illegal things is actually healthy for a society. Otherwise we already have the technology to stop all crimes world wide. We could force every person to wear a body cam at all times and failure to do so results in life in prison. Done crime solved. But that would not be good no one wants that. But if we did stop every crime imagine how the world would be. Imagine 60 years ago we could stop all crime. Any homosexual would be found and persecuted. Anyone who became a whistleblower would be found a jailed. There are just so many reasons why being able to break the law is fundamental for a society to progress and thrive.

So this is why cash IS a good thing. Sex workers want to do their thing and Johns want to not be instantly called out for using sex workers. The people who long ago realized magic mushrooms work to cure depression want to be be able to get it without being jailed. Now, here in Canada, sex work is protected and magic mushrooms will not get you thrown in jail.

So even though you may deem things illegal, I ask you think of a greater good that cash allows as everything being digital reveals a lot of information that not all people are comfortable their government knowing. Be it homosexuals, depressed people trying illicit treatments, or extremely lonely discarded individuals reaching out to sex workers verses suicide.

Lastly according to a quick google search and a few spots I looked at, most only showing 2022 as latest information, most point of sale transactions in Europe are made with cash not card [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/786680/share-of-cash-tra...

Just for the record I don't condemn victimless crimes. I'm fine with willing sex workers and I'm fine with drugs. As far as I'm concerned, alcohol is worse than most illegal drugs, and most of the harm from most illegal drugs comes from their illegal status not the drugs themselves. If it was up to me I'd legalize everything. You want to buy heroin just take a mandatory safety class explaining safe use, then go buy it at the pharmacy. People can get it either way, might as well get clean and taxed stuff. I realize that's probably not entirely realistic but that's my opinion anyway. Especially for lighter stuff, heroin and meth might be the exceptions but again, anyone can buy it whenever so honestly I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do it at a pharmacy.

And in northern Europe, pretty much nobody uses cash. In the rest of Europe, at least the places I've been, pretty much every store accepts card and often other digital payment methods.

I don't doubt your statistics, just stating my experience. I just think it's strange that people prefer cash for legitimate purchases. I definitely want cash to stay around, but these days we can use crypto for illegal stuff anyway do it's not really a big deal.

Cash is superior to crypto for anonymity and most people have it, know how to use it and accept it. Bitcoin and the majority of other coins will leave a permanent trail which can be easily associated to the person due to KYC policies and onchain analysis firms. Sure there are privacy coins like Monero but they aren't trivial to acquire without KYC and to find someone that accepts it. So I'm happy that people still use cash despite not doing anything illegal (or immoral) and mostly making payments with card and instant payments.

Was this refusal of a normal cash transaction, or something silly (unreasonably large transaction/transaction all in one cent coins/transaction which would raise money laundering alarms etc)? Like, if you try to pay 10,000 dollars in cash, or, say, buy a stack of prepaid debit cards with cash, most places are going to be sceptical of that.

a small shopping trip with ordinary items totaling less than thirty dollars, actually. Many places of various kinds in California are not accepting cash today - San Francisco passed local law to require accepting cash as one result.