>everyone will have to actively choose a side rather than the 'no' side getting all the non-active default votes
No, this just shifts the do-nothings from 'no' to 'yes', as they will have to actively create something that will let them stay with what they currently have. It is technically and morally dangerous because most people aren't technical enough to understand what they are being forced to accept.
I'll confess to only knowing the surface concepts, not the inner technical workings, so I could be wrong here. But this is my understanding.
With a future difficutly bomb in the current implentation, when a proposed hard fork from the ethereum team is approaching you have 3 options:
1) You do nothing (you don't vote - the default) - You'll end up on the chain that eventually get's it's difficulty scaled up and will die. You will not be able to continue running this chain practially after this point.
2) You agree with the fork (a yes vote) - You need to actively install the update.
3) You disagree with the fork (a no vote) - You need to activly install a competing patch to remove the bomb.
(Assuming we are talking about a widely controversial fork, not just something that you alone oppose. I'm not talking about having to create a patch yourself. I'm talking about the situation where there are two competing sides, both creating their own patches. So the difficulty involved with voting either way is exactly the same, just pick a side and installing their update.)
Having the difficulty bomb guarantees that (eventually) all users post fork must have actively made a concious choice one way or the other and upgraded. The users that do nothing are guaranteed to end up on a dead chain, and hence have not cast a vote in either direction.
I'm not sure how that can be interpreted as the do-nothings casting yes votes. Anyone who does nothing becomes no part of any future chain.
Exactly. The Ice Ages have always been part of the plan. By installing a client with a built-in Ice Age, you're voluntarily joining a pact to upgrade at a certain point in the future. It's game theoretically effective for decentralized consensus.
No, they have neither. This is just a script to purchase an amount of bitcoin. It has to be run manually for each purchase. It is easier I think to just login to the exchange every day and make the purchase. Not sure why this is so high on HN.
Pieter Levels wrote pretty much the same thing a few days ago, but most people that know about Pieter know he likes to automate things. I'm pretty sure he set his up as a cron job.
Yes, the legacy chain people can create their own new fork, but then it has to deal with all the disadvantages of being a hard fork, and the old chain will be dead.
It really depends on the use case. In general, in the commercial world, we want to be able to have transactions/contracts that can't just be voided without consequence because one of the parties thought it was a good deal at the time but it turned out not to be. On the other hand, most legal systems aren't going to enforce contracts that have ruinous effects on someone because of a simple mistake or event that no one could have foreseen.
Ethereum developers use Solidity almost exclusively, because it is by far the most developed, but there is also Serpent, Viper and LLL. I don't know if Serpent and LLL are still being actively developed. Yoichi Hirai is also developing Bamboo [1].
No, this just shifts the do-nothings from 'no' to 'yes', as they will have to actively create something that will let them stay with what they currently have. It is technically and morally dangerous because most people aren't technical enough to understand what they are being forced to accept.