I think it's just the wrong forum, and fundamentally incompatible with "popularity". In crypto-anarchist mythos, hackers interact via deterministic, mechanical intermediary. It's darwinian. It's expected that participants shall beware, and inept ones will be injured.
It may not be for you, and it may not be for society writ large, but it is an excellent and very important idea. Removing human judgement is exactly the point. Whether this thrills or horrifies you is, I think, a personality trait.
> Removing human judgement is exactly the point. Whether this thrills or horrifies you is, I think, a personality trait.
I attach neither horror nor thrill to that idea, I find it laughable. We all have our abstract ideals, and these abstract ideals eventually meet the reality of human interaction. There is no possibility of removing human judgement, as long as humans are in control of the machines. Humans may temporarily agree to go with whatever the machines say, but that is only a temporary status, as whoever controls the machines has ultimate control.
I'm still a little lost. What value does ETH provide if we cede to human emotions and social power structures at the end of the day? We don't need to invent a cryptocracy to realize a world where people who own 51% of the power can acceptably or at least "fairly" screw over the the dissenting lot with 49%... that is just old school power. It has been around for ages.
In theory, ETH proposed a playing field where law is specified using a language that everyone agrees upon, and where applications of said law are recorded on a decentralized public ledge and even executed using the compute power of the underlying network. The system was valuable precisely because it provided a cryptographically robust way to circumvent humanity for the purpose of recording law with authority and confidence.
But all we've learned from this experiment is that when someone messes up, or not, and it impacts a lot of people (in these cases negatively), they will appeal to the people who own the power and request execution of an "authorized" (not by the original rules but by virtue of ownership of power) out-of-band attack against the system. In other words, they'll collude to perform an illegal move in order to counter the undersireable outcome. In essence, it's a network coup.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is kinda cool too. And if ETH or blockchains or whatever is the zeitgeist what inspires people to continue to imagine and build transparent societies where we have better and better distribution of power, perhaps it has artistic value.
But these events jade people, and the reason they lose trust in the system is because they learn just how easily it is not to be trusted.. how human it is. You put your faith in a system only to see the network owners use their power to operate outside of it.
Of course this is great when you are the beneficiary of a network reset. But by condoning rewriting history, you've chosen to sacrifice the system and pander to your emotions above those of the people who shared trust with you when everyone agreed to play by the rules. So maybe you don't live in an ivory tower: there may appear to be few victimes (namely the bad actor) but finally don't forget the contracts that become void when the network is reset. To those who bought in ideologically to ETH, these events effectively invalidate the entire system. And ETH becomes a failed experiment.
We both appear to agree that ETH is still human. You claim this is a boon. I am skeptical. I am still curious why being human innately makes ETH more valuable. Perhaps you mean the fact that the participants evoked "human mode" over "machine mode" is an indication that people value this system dearly. I do not disagree. But I'd argue this value comes from a different place. This value comes from a desire for, well, value itself. This is a different, darker, value. It's no longer simply valued for its merit: the vision for a mechanically infungable system isolated from human emotional responses. But it's just another victim of human irrationality, greed, ignorance, and laziness. And that is a little sad in my opinion.
Just to be clear I'm not bitter I've never owned any ether.
In crypto-anarchist mythos, hackers interact via deterministic, mechanical intermediary.
What a completely idiotic notion that is. Language can be used to deceive, and if the neverending freakshow of "smart contract" bugs shows anything it is that computer languages are not exempt.
Removing human judgement is exactly the point.
The Underhanded C Contest is not about human judgement.
This thread has effectively devolved to "humans will be humans" vs "we can build systems that make us better humans". I don't disagree with your jaded stance that humans will be humans. But I don't think it's idiotic to try and continually improve the systems we imagine in pursuit of higher standards for society.
My argument is that it is absolutely barmy to think that a piece of Solidity code is something like an impartial arbiter that is completely independent of the human who wrote it.
We have processes that deal with human reality. We build political parties to extend power, we have judges and parliaments, where laws are written, people enter contracts every day - the system works mostly well. Ethereum is an improvement on exactly what?
It may not be for you, and it may not be for society writ large, but it is an excellent and very important idea. Removing human judgement is exactly the point. Whether this thrills or horrifies you is, I think, a personality trait.