News: My Terra forum account has been suspended since 2022-05-27 20:18:28. I am unable to reply to posts or PMs there. Please see below for my contact information; I am not on TG or Discord. Thanks to those who have emailed me supportive messages or inquiries.
I request that someone should please post a note to the Rugfork.com announcement thread (archive), explaining in a polite and professional manner that I will be unable to engage in the discussion right now.This occurred soon after I opened an inquiry that was promptly deleted. I later removed this alert message from my websites for a few hours, because the system sent me some messages that seemed ambiguously to imply that my account may be active again. I needed some time to try making a substantive post. Nope! Still can’t post.
The Bitcoin community inspires me. In the autumn of 2017, a contentious hardfork threatened to fracture the network and cause users problems—including, in the worst case, potential loss of funds. The Bitcoin community rallied to warn users so that they could protect themselves (Bitcoin.org #1824). Almost five years later, I personally still try to avoid the companies on that list: They lost my trust. Trust, once lost, cannot be so easily regained. Those companies showed that they are unsafe to interact with.
Today, delegated proof-of-stake (DPOS) ecosystems face an even graver threat. I think that the threat is fundamental to POS itself: POS is broken by design. Nonetheless, investors in DPOS ecosystems deserve to be warned so that they can mitigate the threat to the extent practical. (Disclosure: I still have small holdings in a few DPOS ecosystems.)
The Terra network has now set the precedent that a corrupt central authority backed by a relatively small group of DPOS companies can hardfork the blockchain, break fungibility, divert value away from disfavored coins, and convert legal, fungible cryptocurrency tokens into illegal unregistered securities.
The Terra precedent proves in practice that when these corrupt DPOS operators so wish, they can violate the principles of a decentralized, immutable blockchain. They can do it on a whim. They can do it by fiat. If circumstances play out just the wrong way, they can do it while preventing any new stake that could oppose them. And they can do it so fast that the community has no time to organize adequate responses, thus placing opponents of this extremely contentious hardfork in the position of struggling against accomplished facts. (Never mind adequate time for code reviews and testnet—is this supposed to be a toy, or a financial network?) They can pull off a contentious hardfork in ten days from first announcement. And since Terra defaults the voting weight of stake delegators to the so-called “validator”, they did this using the coins of all delegators who didn’t explicitly make their own votes.
Large stake operators often run nodes and take delegations in multiple ecosystems. Other communities need to be warned, so that small holders and retail investors can avoid delegating to the same companies. Don’t empower them to do this to your network!
This is an early draft. Rugforkers.com will be a simple companion to Rugfork.com, a project to document and preserve evidence of the Terra Rugfork. In the future, Rugforkers.com will provide an easy-to-use, easy-to-cite reference of who backed the rugfork—with a listing of any other networks on which they operate.
But first, I must obtain the information. Snappy artwork and webdesign can wait: I need data!
Terra Station no longer says (archival snapshot 2022-05-25 22:26:47 UTC). Of course, it cannot give this information: The API doesn’t say who voted for what.
https://lcd.terra.dev/cosmos/gov/v1beta1/proposals/1623/votes
{
"votes": [
],
"pagination": {
"next_key": null,
"total": "0"
}
}(Retrieved 2022-05-25 and 2022-05-26. I wasted way too much of my time playing with the poorly-documented REST API before the fork, attempting to dig out the Prop. 1623 vote information. I didn’t want to run executable code from Terra on my systems; I strongly distrust their dev team, and I have no time to audit it.)
Look, I’m new to Terra chain stuff. I frankly never liked Cosmos blockchains. My experience with Terra consists solely of holding their coins through cross-chain bridges. If they want to pump their coins to bridge buyers (perhaps in the sense of “I have a bridge to sell you”?), no one should look askance at me for my lack of experience with the Terra chain.
On a forum that censors honest discussion, Terra shills with mod hats proclaim, “It’s all on the blockchain!” as their canned response to any questions about the integrity of the vote. Well, would someone with a copy of the actual blockchain please help me dig out the record of the Prop. 1623 votes? This should preferably be done without trust in Terra’s centralized infrastructure, or at least with a way to confirm what it alleges.
Anyone who knows how to obtain the votes, please contact me. I am also gathering, and have gathered some relevant evidence (TBD). Any relevant evidence is welcome.
Hyperion
moon@doomed.money • PGP: 0C84 3524 B17F 59A9 3119 1A88 B044 D450 5EBA 310B
Last updated: 2022-05-27.
