A Painful Lesson For The Ethereum Community After a torrid few weeks arguing about what to do, while the DAO became ever more corrupted due to repeated attempts to recover the money without fixing the code problem that made it impossible to prevent the money being stolen again, the Ethereum community has finally bowed to the inevitable. The DAO code has been rolled back to a point prior to the original attack – a “hard fork”. Ethereum has had its first bailout.
The majority of Ethereum miners have agreed to this. This is hardly surprising, since a lot of them had invested in the DAO and it meant they got their money back. The puritans who objected to the bailout on the grounds that it fatally compromised the “immutability” of blockchain were never going to win. Accepting large losses for the “greater good” is the province of saints, and there aren’t many of those around these days.
Equally unsurprisingly, the tech geeks at Slock.it are now patting themselves on the back for their genius in solving the problem that they caused in the first place by putting live a bad piece of code after inadequate review and testing. “What an accomplishment!” cries Christoph Jentzsch:
Separate from the discussion of whether a hard fork because of the DAO is a good or a bad idea, the very fact, that the Ethereum community (devs, miners, exchanges, researchers, …) has come together, often setting personal opinions aside, and successfully managed a hard fork in this situation is truly remarkable. Given the time constraint, the fact that we were able to come to consensus on this matter is an outstanding accomplishment.