Slock.it founder: Hard fork does not mean centralization, it is a democratic voting mechanism

Translator's note: The author of this article, Stephan Tual, is the founder and COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Slock.it. He is the former CCO (Chief Cultural Officer) of Ethereum.

Ethereum is a "warehouse" and database for smart contracts. The entire Ethereum platform is built on blockchain, so its smart contracts are immutable unless developers set permissions to accept modifications before the contract is officially released.

Ethereum has therefore attracted a large number of developers, and its founder Vitalik Buterin called it a techno-utopia.

People are rushing to build their businesses on Ethereum because of its trustless mechanism. My company Slock.it is committed to promoting software anonymization and facilitating machine-to-machine communication. Augur and Gnosis are both open and transparent market prediction platforms based on blockchain. Some successful people, such as Marc Andreessen, the developer of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser in the history of the Internet, compare blockchain to the future of the Internet.

Hard Fork vs Soft Fork

Many people believe that a hard fork is a dictatorial manipulation of a blockchain, where an unknown party restores or completely rewrites smart contracts and their data.

I want to say here that this idea is completely wrong.

Hard fork is the most democratic consensus mechanism in the world. It is essentially a democratic voting mechanism.

A soft fork is designed to modify the software client code and requires 50% to 75% of miners to jointly carry out, which will change the community consensus rules. As an end user, you cannot express any opinions on soft forks, only miners can. No matter what changes the soft fork makes to the code, as long as the miners agree, other users, including Ethereum wallets, have no say.

Soft forks can only temporarily solve some urgent problems. In the long run, this kind of centralized mechanism among miners is likely to lead to some "cross-border" behaviors, such as bribery. Soft forks will eventually face elimination. A year ago, Vitalik said that soft forks such as blocking addresses are absolutely impossible to achieve, proving once again that he is right.

The decision to hard fork is entirely up to the end user, just like you are free to choose your virtual machine, whether it is Homestead or Morden, it is up to you. In fact, after the Frontier hard fork in February, you are currently using the Homestead virtual machine. But you can choose to do either fork, whether you choose to continue using Frontier or use your own fork is your freedom.

However, does this mean that there will be many different versions of the client, running under different governance models and ethical standards? This is unlikely, but again, the final decision is in your hands and has nothing to do with the Ethereum Foundation.

All client code changes must be voted on while complying with the Ethereum basic protocol. If the Parity client releases a new version and the hard fork method chosen by the developer is what you want, you can vote on the chain. If the hard fork method chosen by the Parity developer does not meet your requirements, you can switch to other clients. Therefore, client diversity is actually a good thing.

What’s next for Ethereum?

Ethereum is still in the 1.0 stage of development and has not yet been completed. In fact, Ethereum is still far from version 2.0.

Ethereum is still in its early stages of development, with no sign of version 3.0 being released yet.

No matter which stage Ethereum is in - Metropolis, Serenity or Ethereum 2.0, its hard fork is actually an update and upgrade.

As for the DAO, I think the soft fork is a good start. But only the hard fork plan can best respect the community's opinions and decide the next step. Either a hard fork is performed to recover the lost funds (nearly 100% of the funds can be recovered), or no fork is performed and the lost funds are abandoned. Whatever the answer is, it will be the final conclusion that determines the fate of the DAO. Please think about the Brexit vote (millions of British people are currently petitioning for a second vote), so please vote seriously when the time comes.

In short, please remember that if you oppose hard forks just because you think hard forks represent support for Vitalik’s “dictatorship”, then you are wrong. If you support hard forks just because you think “technology has surpassed reality” or intend to “seek authoritative protection”, then you are wrong.

Hard fork is just a consensus method, nothing more. Hard fork distributes power equally to the entire network, which actually suits everyone's appetite.

I believe this will lead to discussions about client diversity, whether we should trust compilers, and whether we need formal verification procedures for contracts. But beyond these technical issues, we should start thinking: How can people self-regulate and manage in an evolving software environment?