Crisis based forking can pierce the Decentralized Veil of Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Crisis based forking can pierce the Decentralized Veil of Ethereum

blog.stakeventures.com

25 pointspelle8 comments

Perhaps a relevant question is whether this is caused by a bug in Ethereum itself or just someone using Ethereum wrong. The Bitcoin developers have rolled back transactions that were caused by a bug in Bitcoin itself but they do not intervene in the many cases of user error.

Arguably, Solidity makes it so hard to write secure contracts that it is negligent. If the Ethereum team decides to take responsibility for The DAO, I hope they fix Solidity once and for all, not just bail out this one contract.

From what I've read, it is a bug in the DAO contract. Someone is recursively calling some `split` function which has the side effect of draining eth out.

FUD article. No (soft/hard) fork will happen without community consensus. Decentralization is not violated.

It explains the reasons why the community should not do this. Also the community has generally updated and followed whatever the "leadership" has done so far and for good reason.

If the "leadership" decides to go this way as it appears they do, the community will likely follow them as they have done in the past.

This is a big test for Ethereum. The DAO holders were warned clearly about these kind of issues before hand, yet some sort of collective mania made very smart people go deaf.

As someone who hadn't followed closely: the consensus is among miners, right? The network is still PoW, not PoS?

So it's not a consensus based on DAO shares or ETH holdings, which represent the broader community, but rather based on GPU power, representing a small number of groups?

Yes, a soft fork means consensus (majority) among miners. The developers (of Geth, Parity, cpp-ethereum, etc.) can propose the changes, but it's up to the miners whether to adopt them.

Note that the Ethereum mining community is considerably more decentralized than e.g. Bitcoin.

Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, two mining pools control over 50% of the hash rate:

https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners

2/3 of the hashrate from three pools doesn't seem very decentralized.

This bailout has some similarities to the financial crisis. Of course ethereum doesn't seem to need the DAO to function. Bailing the DAO investors out voids a valuable lesson.

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