Christoph Jentzsch

And there's a lot of so-called altcoins or alternative coins because they want to improve on certain things on the existing protocol.

And Ethereum, people started calling it an altcoin, but I would not call it so because it was really developed from scratch with a different purpose in mind.

what it is there for, basically to build decentralized applications.

And I still think it is decentralized, but maybe not as decentralized as many people think, because there's a couple of dozen of Bitcoin miners who basically could control the whole network.

yes and no no because if the user would say we fork off and do switch to a different consensus algorithm let's say proof of stake they don't need miners anymore as long as most of the users are in this system then you don't mind about the miners i see the miners they serve the blockchain and yes therefore they do have some control of it but at the end my opinion is and everyone will give you some different opinions on this is

that the users are really in charge.

If the users say, I will switch to this blockchain or to this fork of a blockchain, then it will force the services such as exchanges and other services to use this and to use this coin and give this coin a value.

What we saw with the DAO was, after the DAO failed, there was a big discussion about what should be done.

And in the end, we did a so-called hard fork.

saying we split the chain into two and the new version we give everyone their money back in the old version does the hacker or the thief still has the money and why do you call him a thief oh well if you could because he did take money which didn't belong to him but why did he why did he how did he do that

because there was a bug in the smart contract which made it possible to do it so you could say from a legal point of view you could argue well it was he was allowed to do so after the smart contract yes but from a moral point of view you did take money which didn't belong to him that's why i would call him a thief and so we could not do anything because the smart contract was

permission to decentralize so we did have no control over it there was no thing we could do as as the one who created a smart contract so we could just look and see how we um to take 50 million dollars into a sub account but there was a rule in the smart contract which gave us about four to five weeks time to solve the problem and the only solution we really came up with which at work was the so-called hard fork making another blockchain on top of the old one and try to convince the maturity to go

with this one.

And if they would have chosen not to, well, then the thief would have gotten his $50 million.

But the maturity of the people said, no, I think it's better to make this improvement and follow the new protocol where everyone got their money back.

But there's still a small group which did follow the old chain and say, no, we did not agree with this.

Let's call it Ethereum Classic.

That's why we today have actually two Ethereum blockchains, Ethereum Classic and Ethereum.

This is just one example where the users decide what they can do.

They can today choose if they want to go with this blockchain or this blockchain.