Dear Netbehaviour, I thought some might appreciate this attempt to explore the heinous possibilities of unstoppable evil on the blockchain and the need for governance, with the aid of artistic renderings.
*Ethereum: on-chain governance or unstoppable evil? <http://medium.com/@deepthings/ethereum-on-chain-governance-or-unstoppable-evil-3e219cec05af>* Ethereum provides a hugely extensible terrain for the implementation of cryptoeconomic logic. We hear a great deal about the innovation, the value and the freedoms this will bring us. What is less understood is the fact that unstoppable code can also be used to fulfil malevolent ends. As the DAO hack showed, smart contract design can produce effects so egregious that the community is compelled to respond with a fork, for example. The fork that followed the DAO was a nuclear option only intended for extreme cases. The ensuing debates were rich and instructive but we were left without clear red lines that smart contracts should have to cross before such a fork would be contemplated again. The Bottom Red Line diagramatically details an Ethereum smart contract which explicitly incentivises the creation of other smart contracts which are themselves sufficiently egregious to force a fork. Were this initial smart contract to be deployed, it would leverage features of Ethereum and associated blockchain services so as to motivate other developers to deploy new and beastly contracts with the objective of forcing a fork to halt such contracts. After the fork, the contract can be redeployed, achieving similar effects, until malevolent funders are satisfied, for example, that Ethereum has forked so much that it is no longer a threat to their preferred chain. More: medium.com/@deepthings/ethereum-on-chain-governance-or-unstoppable-evil-3e219cec05af
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