I'm really disappointed in how the DAO heist was handled. The promise of cryptocurrencies was that they are harder to manipulate than fiat currency. If the fork succeeds (or even if it fails), I think the very notion of rolling back transactions is a step backwards.<p>The next time there is something like the DAO, people can invest without fear since rollbacks are the modus operandi. Isn't this why people are upset with the financial system? When people invest in stuff, they need to be responsible for the results. As someone who didn't buy a house in the crazy mid-2000s, I am paying the price for everyone else's stupidity in the form of crazy low interest rates (which have fueled record home prices). But who is standing up for me? No one. I thought cryptocurrencies were leading to a better world (or at least one where the system couldn't be rigged as easily). I guess not in this instance :(
<i>Most people didn’t know, didn’t care, or couldn’t figure out how to vote. Carbonvote is a poll that weighed user votes by their ether account holdings. Only 5.5% of the total ether holders bothered to vote. A quarter of the DAO-Fork votes came from a single account.</i><p>That's wild. It seems like the largest holders of Ether can tie their investments together and agree to "undo" anything that loses money. Am I misunderstanding how the hard fork process works? Why would anyone bet on this being the "killer cryptocurrency" if it already has entrenched interests capable of manipulating it for personal gain? How is this system decentralized beyond the trivial, technical sense?
As a layman, vis-a-vis blockchain and crypto in general, the language of this post reinforces my sense of a community of very smart, dumb people who I wouldn't trust with ten cents.<p>Whenever I find myself looking at a topic which technically goes over my head, I generally have to rely on the way the people involve express themselves. The language of the Blockchain community is awful from that point of view. It reminds me of sitting in meeting with too-clever lawyers, lost in a world of cunning minutiae, oblivious to the fecking meteor about to land on their heads.
I've been following the Ethereum/DAO situation since the drain of funds occurred. I currently do not own any cryptocurrencies so this has been my first real look at the communities surrounding Ethereum and Bitcoin. In laymen's terms I am under the impression that these crypto coins are to be treated the same as cash. If I hand someone $10,000 in USD and they disappear and/or spend the money without fulfilling their side of the contract, I'm out of luck. Sure, I could take them to court but if I can't find them (or I sent my crypto coins to another country) or they can't repay, my coins are still gone. I know there are different schemes to handle this situation, such as coin burn, escrow, etc. But, barring those methods, once a coin is spent it's forever spent, same as a crisp $100 I hand to some door to door salesman that never comes back.<p>After dipping my toe into the crypto currency world, learning about the DAO and Ethereum, there are a few things that bother me about this whole situation.<p>1.) Rolling back (voiding) transactions, which seems to go against the concept of cryptocurrencies in general.<p>2.) The conflict of interest between the DAO, slock it, and core Ethereum developers, and their hefty co-mingled investments in the DAO.<p>3.) The labeling of this person as a "thief" when they played by the rules set forth by the DAO contracts. Maybe not the spirit, but courts generally decide that. The code is the law and is final is my understanding. (I don't know how you code the spirit, by the way.)<p>4.) The non-inclusive "democratic" vote of the Ethereum community on the hard fork that appears questionable.<p>5.) The different rules for reversing a "theft" depending on whose funds where taken (see #1 and #2) or how much was involved.<p>6.) The centralized decision making on the fork by a small number of people who stand to lose substantial funds based on a poorly understood investment vehicle.<p>This whole situation occurred because of some poorly implement code and now there's a whole lot more code being deployed in a hurried manner. If there is another unnoticed, unintentional way to run code that is not within the spirit of a contract in the future and no core Ethereum or slock it funds are involved, will another hard fork occur? Will they legally be forced to do it? It seems as though the risk was contained to the DAO's funds and now, with the hastily rolled out fork, the whole Ethereum market is put at risk.
Insane how there will be a pool of $6m worth of DAO tokens to be distributed according to the will of trustees.<p>Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but that seems to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in the context of a trustless system of computation.
If Ethereum is just another way that humans muddle through (and not the dispassionate justice of machines), is it still something different then the legal and political systems that came before it?
<p><pre><code> “Invent a new version of the universe” is normally not
permitted by the software protocol, which is why this
involves a client update and a hard fork.
</code></pre>
To have "separate universes" is to have separate blockchains with different genesis blocks. There's an incentive to do just that with Ethereum[1] since the effective doubling of funds (X ETH on each chain) is bound to cause disruption.<p>Anything other than a new fork is going to fail for the reasons the author mentions.<p>[1]: <a href="https://reddit.com/r/etheregen" rel="nofollow">https://reddit.com/r/etheregen</a>
The author makes a lot of assumptions about DAO holders. I am both an ETH and DAO holder. I am pro hardfork, not because I will get my DTH back, but because 1) the consequences of the attacker having that much ETH as Ethereum migrates to PoS and 2) it's much better than eternal white hat battles to control the DTH and the drama it would bring. TBH if we could just destroy all the DTH without a HF, I would be happiest with that solution. But, of course that cannot be done. I would prefer if the HF just burned the DTH.<p>Slock.it was very irresponsible not to cap The DAO from the beginning. Growing pains.<p>I didn't vote with carbonvote.com because I didn't have to. It was clear the HF was going to win. No need to mess with my cold wallets. There was no perfect outcome from this situation, but I see the HF as the least bad.<p>IMHO Bitcoin could use a HF, but they can't get one due to the centralization of mining in a few Chinese companies. I see that as a negative.<p>The threshold for a HF will likely grow for Ethereum as the network grows due to the diversity of stakeholders and their interests. These are very early times for Ethereum, and even for Bitcoin.<p>Ethereum does have more scheduled hard forks coming, BTW. The switch to PoS is going to require one.
This heist a nice demonstration of the usefulness of politics. So much so that the zealots are willing to forgo actual money and let that injustice stand rather than admitting defeat. Well, some of them are.
The entire hard fork idea was a case of "your choices are shit and shit, pick one". On one hand, if the hard fork fails, the hacker gets away with millions of dollars, representing a very large chunk of the entire market. On the other hand, if the hard fork succeeds, the entire idea of a decentralized currency where everyone's equal and there are no higher authorities (i.e., corporations or governments) to intervene against you is dead.
VeriCoin did something similar when MintPal was hacked. They rolled back the blockchain prior to the heist. Now it's a shadow of itself, and MintPal is dead.<p>What a mess.
this may explain, why expanse(ethereum clone) has so much volume at the moment. Seems like a lot of people are bearish on eth. <a href="http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/expanse/" rel="nofollow">http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/expanse/</a>
I was hoping that the title would be a pun on the phrase "Stick a fork in her, she's done." I was a bit disappointed given such a prime opportunity for a pun.
one day later, Looks like all the naysayers were wrong.<p>only one block remained on the old fork.<p>I'm glad I bought in when I did, during all this FUD. I'll be making a killing now.
The mistake was putting so much money in one untested contract.<p>It was a big mistake.<p>But Ethereum is still the leader in terms of a lot of technical aspects and also the ability to pull people together.<p>To try to give people a perspective: say you and your friends took out second mortgages on your houses and came up with 5 million to invest. Then you invented some tool, and someone found a back door or bug in this tool that allowed them to steal 1 million dollars.<p>So most of the group would like to undo this 1 million dollar theft with a patch.<p>Now, most outsiders are condemning you for trying to work around the bug and recover your million dollars with a patch.<p>I think that the mob is fickle. Quick to pile onto a bandwagon, and quick to burn it.<p>So, I hope Vitalik and the other group of hard working, intelligent and ethical people involved do not take the mob's response to heart.