From crisis to crisis

For the last two months, ethereum has gone from crisis to crisis to crisis. First the DAO hack, then the failed soft fork, then the hard fork that resulted in two versions of ethereum.

In each step, greed, conflicts of interests, rushed software development and/or a failure to fully think through consequences of actions have been the factors that resulted in a the attempted solution to a previous crisis actually becoming the causes of the next crisis.

The next crisis - again a lack of forethought

Ethereum has built into it what is called a mining difficulty bomb. This is a hard coded increase in mining difficulty that will eventually make it too difficult to mine a block. Why was this intentionally included? It was included to necessitate a move to Proof of Stake mining from Proof of Work. It was assumed that the solution would be to hard fork to Proof of Stake from Proof of Work.

But what if you want instead to fork to make Proof of Work continue to be viable? That's easy, just remove the difficulty bomb from the code. It's very simple - it's only a part of a line of code.

What do you think miners want to do? Hard fork to put them out of business through Proof of Stake, or hard fork to eliminate the difficulty bomb? The choice is obvious. Ethereum will either abandon Proof of Stake as a whole or fork again into two ethereums. And by the way, this is true for both ETH and ETC, so we may have both of those chains forking in two directions.

There is a pattern here. It is the lack of forethought of consequences of game theory by the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation. They talk a big game about game theory, but if they have shown anything so far, it is that they are not good at modelling incentives and actions. You can't really blame them for not understanding human behaviour well, being that they are young, inexperienced and egomaniacs, but the community continually will have to put up with the consequences of this nevertheless.