They technologically cannot. The central entity has no power to decide to keep user funds, nor can anyone compel them to do so, because they don't truly have the user funds in their possession; rather, the contract has control of the funds, and they don't control the contract, the immutable rules burned into the contract upon its creation control the contract.
The central entity get to initially craft those rules however they like, and so can certainly design the contract to act favorably to them; but then the contract gets (immutably) deployed, and everyone else then gets the opportunity to look at the rules of the contract-as-deployed, to decide for themselves if they're equitable. If they're not, nobody will bother to interact with the contract.
Societies (and their evolutions) don't run by truly immutable rules - so having truly immutable things is placing things outside of them in a way. Would mean either the use cases for immutable rules are highly regulated and limited or there has to be a way to change them.
The immutability of a blockchain isn't fundamental; it's rooted in the consensus of the chain state. Look at the Ethereum "The DAO" state-fix hard-fork: if the entire community of node operators agrees to forcefully alter the state-database of the chain, they can do arbitrarily anything they like to that state.
But crucially, this "community of node operators" consists of a multilateral coalition of people and companies operating under every different society / government jurisdiction on the planet, with no single government that can compel enough operators at once to actually get the majority required to compel the state of the blockchain to change.
In other words, blockchains are systems with democratic recourse, but not authoritarian recourse. They can be altered from the bottom up to fix problems caused by immutability, if basically "a referendum run against a representative sampling of the population of Earth" agrees with the alteration; but they cannot be commanded to change from the top down, just because some individual entity with a conflux of power wants it to happen. No legal system can force a smart contract to do what you like; but common sense and human empathy can still override bad machine decisions when necessary.
So we can choose rule of law, or cryptocurrencies?
I vote for rule of law, 100%.
> In other words, blockchains are systems with democratic recourse, but not authoritarian recourse.
No, "lawful" and "authoritarian" are not synonyms. No, letting people "vote" with their money is not democracy.
You pervert the meanings of the words sufficiently that you have literally reversed their meanings. Laws are created by the people's representatives, who are elected democratically.
> No, "lawful" and "authoritarian" are not synonyms.
I didn't say they were. But laws that the majority of the public agree with / would enforce themselves if given the chance, don't really need to be laws; in such cases, bottom-up action (not in a lynch-mob sense, but in a "petition that literally everyone signs, so people just agree amongst themselves to make it happen" sense) will correspond 1:1 with what any government optimizing for "the public good" would institute top-down as law. You can ignore the existence of bottom-up-supported top-down laws when speaking about the interface between "law" and decentralized technology, because regardless of whether the law can influence the decentralized system, the cultural zeitgeist of societal pressure that underlies the law, still can.
As such, it's only laws that the majority don't agree with — i.e. top-down dictated laws in authoritarian societies, un-audited regulations from corrupt bureaucracies, etc — where things behave differently in a decentralized system than they would under rule of law.
(Good secondary example of this: BitTorrent trackers. The majority of people seemingly don't agree with the sort of corporate IP "use rights" that underlie the illegality of media piracy; so most/all BitTorrent trackers do nothing to prevent the sharing of copyrighted materials. But the majority of people do generally agree that CSAM is unethical to distribute; and so public BitTorrent tracker operators do bother to prevent their nodes from enabling the sharing of such files.)
Also, I think you're potentially forgetting that there are multiple "rules of law" to talk about here. A decentralized system is inherently a single system shared across participants who exist under multiple countries — i.e., a multilateral system. If you want "rule of law" to pertain to such a system's logic, then whose rule of law would that be? Do you want China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to all have a say in what transactions you're allowed to do?
(To be very pedantic, a world government could easily dictate what happens on a blockchain, because they would have authority over every single node operator. So one could technically say that blockchains aren't abandoning the rule of law per se... but rather are just holding "the rule of law" to a very high standard — ignoring any law that everyone on earth can't all agree on.)
> No, letting people "vote" with their money is not democracy.
Nobody said anything about voting, or money. Blockchains exist on a lower level than the abstractions they enact. Fundamentally, changes are made to how a blockchain works not because people vote, or stake, or whatever else; but rather because blockchain-node-software operators voluntarily opt in to upgrading their nodes to versions/variants that have a given feature, and then to enabling a proposed hard-fork upgrade point that makes that feature happen.
These blockchain node operators are peers in a network, and the "democracy" they participate in is one of voluntarism — i.e. choosing to run a piece of node software that encodes particular rules, or not; choosing to validate/mine for a particular network, or not. Networks that people don't care for, die, because people voluntarily stop running the nodes. Network changes (which really means "node software changes") that people don't like, don't get adopted by node operators, because doing so is always an explicitly opt-in process.
This isn't representative democracy. This is direct democracy. Each software change is a default-deny referendum, "proposed" by coding it into a piece of node-software, which operators "sign" by upgrading+configuring their node software. The network only changes if enough people actually do upgrade+configure their node software, for the fork block that was created using the novel code to reach fixation in the network over the fork block that would be created by anyone in the network still running the old code.
Very bold societal proposal to abandon the rule of law (in parts), but it is an intriguing way to consider certain things - is there data on how stuff like that (i.e. consensus forming in good ways) performs through big changes in societies?
It's not that binary though. Imagine you belief Twitter is worth 45.01USD but it's trading 45USD, would you throw your life savings at it (disregarding fees), no, of course not, way too risky!
The way I see it, people (and other entities!) don't think Twitter is worth X, they think there is a distribution of worth.
This means there is risk in their bet, so if I thought Twitter was worth (on average) 100USD, that wouldn't mean I would sink my life savings into it but would put in some, based on the risk and also what else I need capital for.
Also, how much one thinks Twitter is worth probably also depends on your time horizon: like the old adagium that the market can stay stupid for longer than you can stay solvent, e.g. when shorting a scam.
For the most part. However one person's bug is another person's feature and given the huge number of PHP users, where many aren't formally trained developers the ways in which PHP is (ab-)used is manifold. Thus sometimes things slip through as Bugfix, which then annoy people. But over recent times PHP got a lot better (maybe since I'm not involved anymore)
You aren't very explicit what you mean, but I disagree I think.
The main thing is willing things into existence (like ZFC, the Axiom of Choice) is equally consistent with not having it (ZF + not AC) or not deciding it (ZF) as shown by forcing.
Russel's Paradox in particular was worked around by not allowing to "build sets" quantifying over all sets (see axiom schema of specification).
If you are talking about avoiding "unprovable statements" (i.e. Godel's incompleteness theorem), you have to strip things way back further: it applies to systems that only have e.g. Peano arithmetic. An actual practical statement that is unprovable in Peano arithmetic is Goodstein's theorem:
- write out a number in its base 2, including its exponents (i.e. recursive)
- replace all the 2s with 3s
- subtract 1
- write out a number in base 3, including its exponents
- replace all the 3s with 4s
- subtract 1
- ...
The question is whether for all starting numbers this sequence eventually ends at 1. The answer is yes, trivially if you use ordinals (and replace all your base numbers with omega: the +1 will basically do nothing and -1 means it must be finite because ordinals well-ordered), but this cannot be used in Peano arithmetic.
Fundamentally, like Paris-Harrington Theorem, I think the way to think about why this cannot be proved, is because these sequences get big before they end up at 1.
A better example is the "real" numbers, which do not physically exist but are a constant source of theorems that don't apply to physics, and this is taken as proof that real numbers are a fascinating complex object, instead of a poor foundation for analysis. Standard Mathematics does not use a good model for infinitesimals, which should not be allowed to be densely non-differentiable.
Yep, this is a good example. And maybe it helps illustrating my point
On N and Q we can come up with any number we want. Even though there are infinite numbers, we can come up with any number
On R we can do that as well. But at the same time we can come with "vapid" statements like "for each x in R exists x' < x" which are completely correct but don't really mean anything.
True, the R's are a good foundation, and in a way they do exist physically (after all, Pi exists in nature).
Thanks for your answer, I didn't know about Goodstein's theorem
> Russel's Paradox in particular was worked around by not allowing to "build sets" quantifying over all sets (see axiom schema of specification).
Ah I didn't know that by name but this is pretty much the gist of what I'm getting.
ZFC and AC, while Axioms, seem like a better foundation than something that allows "set of all sets" which sounds like a vague specification even for a mathematician. And in the end, Russel's paradox raises the exact issue of (pardon my non-mathematical language) "Set of all sets is BS"
Hence the axiom of specification which lets you build sets that exist.
I'm not talking about Gödel or unprovable statements, because even if something is not provable it might be constructable.
> I'm not talking about Gödel or unprovable statements, because even if something is not provable it might be constructable.
What precisely do you mean by that statement? What is the thing that is not provable but constructible? A conjecture? If so, then what do you mean when you say that a conjecture is constructible? What does it mean to construct it?
As far as I know, "construction" in maths usually means a finite process. And proofs are finite sequences of strings, satisfying certain rules specified by a proof framework (such as sequent calculus). So I'm curious in what way something could be constructible, but not provable. To be honest, I don't understand how those words could apply to the same things, because proving usually applies to conjectures, statements, formulas etc. But constructing usually applies to definitions and proofs, which cannot said to be true or false at all.
>I'm not talking about Gödel or unprovable statements, because even if something is not provable it might be constructable.
>Or proving the Collatz Conjecture. You need only basic algebra to build it, but something much more complex to prove it (if it is provable)
It seems like your first statement is about constructibility of the same object (that should be a proof). In your second statement you talk about constructibility of an object and provability of a certain statement about an object. I may be be judgemental, but being so imprecise is a big no-no in metamathematics.
