I supported the fork because it was the rational decision to make under the circumstances. I never invested in the DAO or cared about the investors. The simple fact is that the theft was significant enough to cause an unacceptable and pointless security risk to the network.

Fortunately for us, there was a built-in delay in the DAO contract which provided the foundation and community with enough time to engage in public debate and determine the best solution. That solution was to carefully recover all the funds from the attacker without creating any negative externalities on innocent bystanders. In this sense, it was not a rollback as no other transactions were affected. Consensus was achieved on this goal and the community resolved the situation as expected. Despite all the ignorant comments and trolling, the truth is the HF worked out brilliantly.

The extremists, fundamentalists, and other ideologues who rallied to defend the theft because of their false notion of immutability and demented claims about "bailouts" never came close to understanding the severity of the situation. They never had the moral high ground nor the stronger end of the argument. I'm very pleased they didn't get their way.

In my view, the foundation and community handled the DAO debacle in a responsible, decentralized, open-minded, and respectful manner. I was not turned off in the least by the hard fork decision. In fact, it only strengthened my conviction and trust in the Ethereum project.

Yep, TheDAO fork represents one of the best things about the community, which is a)ability to make rapid, high pressure decisions, yet still offer fair choice to everyone.

People forget that the ETC exists and is viable for anyone who wants it.

Everyone needs to stop talking about developer losses and whatnot. They gave us a choice, there is 100% consensus on the ETH chain, and there is 100% consensus on the ETC chain. If you want to blame anyone, blame the users. But the dev team has been incredibly top notch and professional all around.

That's interesting. My problem with Ethereum was they seemed to think that the need for trust, based on social interaction, could be completely eliminated through software contracts. That seemed to me to be impossible, in part because you could never write a software contract that would respond correctly in every possible situation that might arise.

I am glad to here that I misunderstood how Ethereum works, and when thing go south human beings can intervene to get them back on track again. That's not perfect but it still seems to me that for many sort of matters it still would be a lot better than how the world presently works.

This is a promising approach. I believe what the author is suggesting is that we construct an unbroken chain of custody binding various real-world proofs of identity to an arbitrary address on the blockchain. For instance, If there is a secure and unforgeable way to take periodic photographs of ourselves, which doesn't sound infeasible given the existence of modern facial recognition systems, we could certify the evidence in a mutable fashion using the timestamping data. The general idea is to provide a way to document some uniquely identifiable set of details that only we could have access to at a given time.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph. Doctored personal IDs, attestations from third parties, and biometric devices could serve a similar function. All we actually need to do to prove uniqueness is to be the person who maintains this continuously updating record of entries.

The main draw back has more to do with the fact that you could still create more than one identity by re-using the uniquely identifying information, in which case we would need some kind of pattern recognition system to analyze the number of times the information has been invoked to create multiple identities in some larger public dataset.

Truth is most academic philosophy is irredeemable garbage of the first order. Philosophy was transmitted from the Greek to the Latin, from the Germanic to the French, and presumably it was also extended to the English. There is in fact a clear line of descent in terms of the reasoning and discoveries made which can be traced from the Pre-Socratics to the critical romantic enlightenment strains of Kantian and Post-Hegelian philosophy, ending ultimately in a series of complex distortions wrought by the Marxist school.

After the second World War, however, a rupture occurred in the English language tradition that broke ties with this movement. This is why we have a "Continental" / "Analytic" divide. The former attempted to stay consistent with the philosophy passed down to the Germans and French, whereas the latter severed most of its relations to these systems of thought. It did this by largely cherry-picking the parts it liked from the Renaissance scientific thinkers along with certain Irish and British figures like Hobbes, Locke, and Mill but without ever confronting the Germanic philosophy at the peak of its development (the only notable exception being British idealism, which was shortly replaced by the logical positivists). Although it later made some amends with Kantianism, what the analytic tradition has ended up with is a one-sided formal empirical philosophy grounded more in ideological posturing than the rational discourses that characterized all preceding philosophy.

What people call British-American philosophy today then is dangerously out of step with itself. It's retracing the same errors that were worked out centuries earlier by their predecessors. There are countless examples of this, which I simply don't have the patience to enumerate. That's not to say the Continentals are without blame. They've created their own share of mistakes. But that, in effect, is a very large part of the answer about why philosophy is mostly irrelevant today in North-America. It was lead down a blind alley by ideologues and has yet to recover.

Thanks for the great historical overview. I encounter a lot of these terms and ideas as independent concepts throughout my experiences but I don't have a great overall sense of their evolution and relationships to each other. Do you havd any concise overviews you could recommend? Wikipedia tends to delve right in for audiences largely familiar with the names and contexts. Id love to find a phylogeny of philisophical evolution.

My strategy is more or less to start by figuring out the structure of a text. This may be in the table of contents, introduction, index, chapter sections, or subsections. I generally scan the text as fast as possible to find all the essential points of interest, marking them down for future reference. What I do after this point is likely different than most. As every text I read is digitally formatted, I don't actually try to remember or deeply understand much at all on my second pass through the material. Instead, I will open a text editor and copy and paste the passages that strike me as most essential, retaining as much context as necessary to retain the original meaning. On my third pass, I will restructure the extracted content, cutting out the redundant parts, re-mixing, or re-expressing them until each chunk I want to remember is accessible and concise. This completes what I'd call the conceptual phase of my reading, which takes a fraction of the time it would take if I were attempting to understand the work using a more linear or comprehensive approach.

There is still much I don't understand at this point. This is natural since I haven't had an opportunity to apply the information to a personally meaningful context. This is the point at which I begin the practical phase. As most of what I need to know is documented in my notes, I will keep it on hand as a memory queue as I engage with specific questions or problems that interest me. And so when an issue comes up that I can't settle, I refer to the notes and also search around online to find out how I should apply the content in that particular problem situation. It's over the course of this process that I internalize the most vital details. That's where the learning happens, at least for me.

Another advantage to this approach is that you will have a type of mnemonic device to reboot your knowledge. As most people forget practically everything shortly after moving on to new subjects, it's critical to have a way to index the information you don't want to forget in the future. Something along the lines of a "memex" (or external memory system) is a good metaphor for what I'm talking about.

I must disagree with you about the prospects of revolution. As I've come to see it, a radical cultural shift is taking place, or is about to take place, in the technological fabric of most post-industrial societies.

This is related to the growing trend, or rather movement, to redesign central databases in terms of blockchain-based, cryptoeconomic systems. As the vast majority of the world's Internet, its economic, political, and legal institutions, are built in a way that concentrates management of central databases between vested authorities, there is now a very real threat to re-appropriate, if not entirely automate into irrelevance, the state's most important functions.

This is profound on many levels since it doesn't depend on the currently existing system. You don't need to believe in the futility of the current system. It's not set in stone. It can be challenged in a very realistic sense. In truth, the most essential aspects of economic life and governance can all be re-created and re-engineered in the code of social networks. All this can all be done without violence. All this is possible without trusting a single politician.

If that's not a recipe for revolution, then nothing is.