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I haven't followed Ethereum since the whole DAO debacle. I was very excited about the technology but the way the whole hard fork/Ethereum Classic thing was hand

I haven't followed Ethereum since the whole DAO debacle. I was very excited about the technology but the way the whole hard fork/Ethereum Classic thing was handled really turned me off. Has progress been made on formally verifying contracts or anything like that? And why aren't more people bothered by the whole hard fork thing?

LeoPanthera 10y ago
I think the current Bitcoin situation is really showing that rapid, organized hard forks when problems occur is an extremely good thing. Bitcoin is currently frozen in time, since there are two major competing clients, and neither dare make any incompatible changes for fear of creating a fork, and right now neither has a majority. A decentralized cryptocurrency is a lovely ideal, but in the dirty real world, Ethereum and its ilk will win out.
- adamrezich 10y ago
  I understand and my knowledge of cryptocurrencies is very limited, but from what I understood, there was no "bug" in Ethereum itself; there was a loophole in the DAO contract script that someone exploited. To my uneducated-about-cryptocurrencies mind, hard-forking based on that sets a terrible precedent, and shows that users of the currency are willing to have that happen again if a similar situation arises, giving me absolutely zero trust in the system.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    I at least partially agree with you, and it's definitely a grey area. If Ethereum hadn't been so young at the time, the fork may not have happened.
    - mook 10y ago
      I haven't kept track of this very much, and am curious: why might the fork not have happened if Ethereum was older? Assuming the undesirable transaction happened relatively close the the point of forking, only a small number of descendent transactions would need to be reverted, right?
      - bhaak 10y ago
        No transactions were reverted. The rules were changed so the account with the "stolen" ETH could be drained to an address without the owner's approval. But for this to happen, a hard fork was needed and if enough of the miners would have rejected that, it wouldn't have happened. In part, this is exactly what happened. The hard fork was done but a group of miners used code without the new rules, therefore creating a separate blockchain. Ethereum is the Ethereum blockchain where the DAO hacker was drained, Ethereum Classic is the Ethereum blockchain were their account wasn't drained (lots of turmoil followed on the ETC chain but that's a different issue).
  - latenightcoding 10y ago
    Here is the thing: Ethereum contracts are unstoppable and uncensorable until a core developer loses money
    - synchronise 10y ago
      And the majority of miners decide to go with the new fork. Everyone who wants someone to blame, keeps forgetting to place blame on the miners who facilitated this decision.
- WikipediasBad 10y ago
  >A decentralized cryptocurrency is a lovely ideal, but in the dirty real world, Ethereum and its ilk will win out. So basically you're saying centralized, institutionally backed and controlled currencies are better, or at least you're saying that hard forks are ok. Ok great. We have the dollar for that. Why even bother with cryptos.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    We have the dollar for that. Why even bother with cryptos. Network-based trust decentralization, even with limitations on its effectiveness, does provide somewhat provable insurance against state actors. Currently, state actors and state actor based monopolies are the biggest barriers to financial service innovation and essentially seek a continued global monopoly on financial systems access and financial systems derived intelligence feeds, largely self-justified with 'four horsemen of the internet apocalypse'[0] FUD[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      People don't realize that bitcoin is small-scale. If a powerful government had an interest in overtly or aggressively disrupting it, it'd be dead overnight, on both technical (51% attacks) and practical grounds ("rubber hose cryptanalysis"; large portion of mining power is China-based, where they already have a massive network censorship appliance). The blockchain is not an effective "insurance against state actors" on the macro scale.
- JeremyBanks 10y ago
  The problem is not with forking to develop the protocol. Certainly, that is a good thing, and BitCoin's inability to do so is a serious issue. The problem is forking to undo a specific transaction. That should never happen. The fact that so many people over-invested in a risky experimental project that they felt they had to sabotage the protocol to protect themselves reflects very poorly on the community.
  - max_ 10y ago
    >The problem is forking to undo a specific transaction. That should never happen. Ethereum already had plans to from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake as a consensus algorithm (in Q3). The attacker stole over 10 million ETH How would you feel using a system whose transactions are audited in majority by a thief?
    - JeremyBanks 10y ago
      I'd be concerned. But the community already accomplished that by recklessly creating the situation in the first place, from which there was no truly good outcome.
  - flashmob 10y ago
    Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules set in the future. The users of the new version also had a choice if they wanted to support the fork or not, the majority went with the fork. This is a screenshot of the choice everyone was asked when starting up their wallet: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Ethereum-Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png/1113px-Ethereum-Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et... Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to Proof of Stake (PoS) mining in the future.
    - baobabKoodaa 10y ago
      Nice whitewashing. While you are technically correct that no transactions were undone, in practice a theft was (largely) reverted. You are also misrepresenting "users' choice" with regards to supporting the fork. If you make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order to effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions. Censorship was a good choice in this case, but let's not pretend it's something it wasn't.
- samdoidge 10y ago
  Bitcoin is doing very well for those wanted an uncensored decentralised currency. If you want to make many transactions for small amounts at a time, you want to use something else. I think of it like physical gold, but with more utility - you don't use it for day to day transactions, but as a store of value it is very good.
- eth1 10y ago
  the fact that you can't just fork bitcoin willy nilly, is a feature, not a bug.
RexetBlell 10y ago
I would ask an opposite question, why were so many people bothered? When the fork happened, Ethereum was just a baby (and still is). It was barely out of Alpha (Frontier) stage, in very early Beta stage. Letting the hacker walk away with millions at that point would have been silly. It was enough Ether to give the hacker the funds to DOS the system to death for years to come if he wanted to.
- adamrezich 10y ago
  Like I said in another comment, there was no bug in Ethereum, there was a loophole in the DAO contract script. In my mind, this is somewhat akin to creating a new currency, and then when a major bank trading in/holding that currency gets robbed due to lax security, the bankers decide that everyone needs to round all the currency up and rewind time and pretend like that never happened as a solution. Who's to say that won't happen again? I know that the DAO is instrumental to the early success of Ethereum, but what if some other major third-party is attacked in a similar way in the future? Are we just going to hard-fork every time something like this happens? What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Will undesired election results cause hard-forks by the dissenting party? It just seems like a slippery slope to me, with no solution other than "well let's hard fork it now and reserve the right to hard fork it again in the future". It also concerned me that it sure seemed like nearly everyone who was in favor of the hard fork had invested in the DAO and nearly everyone who was against it had not.
  - robomc 10y ago
    It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.
    - laughingman2 10y ago
      Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-an...
lifty 10y ago
An interesting project that tries to tackle governance and the formal verification aspect of smart contracts is Tezos (https://tezos.com https://tezos.com). I find their approach very appealing and I think it has the potential to grow big, while retaining a solid foundation. It's worth reading their position and white papers.
animex 10y ago
I am bothered by it and steer clear of Ethereum, although the basic premise & ideas behind Ethereum interest me. There have been (4) hard forks so far. Of great concern was how the DAO fork/vote was conducted, this article provides a good summary: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-why-ethereums-hard-fork-will-cause-problems-coming-year/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-why-ethereums-har... I wouldn't be surprised if ETC gains more popularity for adhering to the decentralized principles but I have no idea who is at the helm in terms of development for ETC. ETH has seen a tripling in their value in the last few months. Definitely, the platform is a serious one, with serious goals and isn't a "shitcoin" (1000+ coins that fork bitcoin and pump and dump). They have buy-in from some major/bluechip players in the tech industry.The creator of ETH has stressed that ETH is a new technological experiment and volatility is part of the norm. So don't throw your life savings into it.
- nluejeans 10y ago
  ETC has hardforked since then also, and will hardfork again in order to defuse the upcoming difficulty bomb. Hardforks, although not ideal, are needed at this point in time in order to facilitate technological progress
  - gcmartinelli 10y ago
    I believe the issue here is not doing a hardfork. Hardforks are needed sometimes. The issue is the purpose of "The DAO" hardfork (in practical terms, a bailout) and how it was done (destroying Ethereum's blockchain immutability).
    - bhaak 10y ago
      This is a point of contention. One side claims the blockchain immutability has been breached by draining the black hacker's DAO. The other side claims, it hasn't been as there has been no rollback of transactions. In that view, it was just an additional special case rule added to the code that removed the usual restriction for one specific address. Whatever side's opinion you share, there is one good thing that has achieved by this hard fork. The community has been split along those lines and the group that went Ethereum Classic is for the most part no longer involved with Ethereum. Besides small bickerings on Twitter, there is no drama about this anymore and the Ethereum community is no longer concerned about this event (although not the obvious problems with the complexity of smart contracts but that is an on-going effort). Imagine if Bitcoin would have split up along the SegWit / Big Blocks lines. We wouldn't have had a standstill for 3 years and we would have been spared that constant drama.
nexus9 10y ago
I supported the fork because it was the rational decision to make under the circumstances. I never invested in the DAO or cared about the investors. The simple fact is that the theft was significant enough to cause an unacceptable and pointless security risk to the network. Fortunately for us, there was a built-in delay in the DAO contract which provided the foundation and community with enough time to engage in public debate and determine the best solution. That solution was to carefully recover all the funds from the attacker without creating any negative externalities on innocent bystanders. In this sense, it was not a rollback as no other transactions were affected. Consensus was achieved on this goal and the community resolved the situation as expected. Despite all the ignorant comments and trolling, the truth is the HF worked out brilliantly. The extremists, fundamentalists, and other ideologues who rallied to defend the theft because of their false notion of immutability and demented claims about "bailouts" never came close to understanding the severity of the situation. They never had the moral high ground nor the stronger end of the argument. I'm very pleased they didn't get their way. In my view, the foundation and community handled the DAO debacle in a responsible, decentralized, open-minded, and respectful manner. I was not turned off in the least by the hard fork decision. In fact, it only strengthened my conviction and trust in the Ethereum project.
- AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
  Yep, TheDAO fork represents one of the best things about the community, which is a)ability to make rapid, high pressure decisions, yet still offer fair choice to everyone. People forget that the ETC exists and is viable for anyone who wants it. Everyone needs to stop talking about developer losses and whatnot. They gave us a choice, there is 100% consensus on the ETH chain, and there is 100% consensus on the ETC chain. If you want to blame anyone, blame the users. But the dev team has been incredibly top notch and professional all around.
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  That's interesting. My problem with Ethereum was they seemed to think that the need for trust, based on social interaction, could be completely eliminated through software contracts. That seemed to me to be impossible, in part because you could never write a software contract that would respond correctly in every possible situation that might arise. I am glad to here that I misunderstood how Ethereum works, and when thing go south human beings can intervene to get them back on track again. That's not perfect but it still seems to me that for many sort of matters it still would be a lot better than how the world presently works.
jesusthatsgreat 10y ago
Because most people aren't lawyers whose job it is to defend bad actors and deflect blame on to good actors for enabling the bad actor to carry out their bad act in the first place. If you're arguing there should have been no hard fork, then you're defending a person whom you know is guilty of an $80m robbery. You can claim that technically it wasn't robbery, and they just found the money unattended while searching for unattended money in a bank, but any reasonable person would interpret that as theft. Meanwhile, as you're fixated on how wrong Ethereum was to protect itself from a significant % of ETH falling in to the hands of a bad actor, there's a much larger issue in the cryptocurrency world right now which is mining centralisation in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular. It was viewed as merely theoretical once upon a time but now it's very much an issue and crippling the use of Bitcoin as a currency and as a project. Status.im is just one example of that. It could have been built using Bitcoin but it's using Ethereum because it's the more progressive platform / currency / blockchain / ecosystem.

LeoPanthera 10y ago

I think the current Bitcoin situation is really showing that rapid, organized hard forks when problems occur is an extremely good thing. Bitcoin is currently frozen in time, since there are two major competing clients, and neither dare make any incompatible changes for fear of creating a fork, and right now neither has a majority. A decentralized cryptocurrency is a lovely ideal, but in the dirty real world, Ethereum and its ilk will win out.

adamrezich 10y ago
I understand and my knowledge of cryptocurrencies is very limited, but from what I understood, there was no "bug" in Ethereum itself; there was a loophole in the DAO contract script that someone exploited. To my uneducated-about-cryptocurrencies mind, hard-forking based on that sets a terrible precedent, and shows that users of the currency are willing to have that happen again if a similar situation arises, giving me absolutely zero trust in the system.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  I at least partially agree with you, and it's definitely a grey area. If Ethereum hadn't been so young at the time, the fork may not have happened.
  - mook 10y ago
    I haven't kept track of this very much, and am curious: why might the fork not have happened if Ethereum was older? Assuming the undesirable transaction happened relatively close the the point of forking, only a small number of descendent transactions would need to be reverted, right?
    - bhaak 10y ago
      No transactions were reverted. The rules were changed so the account with the "stolen" ETH could be drained to an address without the owner's approval. But for this to happen, a hard fork was needed and if enough of the miners would have rejected that, it wouldn't have happened. In part, this is exactly what happened. The hard fork was done but a group of miners used code without the new rules, therefore creating a separate blockchain. Ethereum is the Ethereum blockchain where the DAO hacker was drained, Ethereum Classic is the Ethereum blockchain were their account wasn't drained (lots of turmoil followed on the ETC chain but that's a different issue).
- latenightcoding 10y ago
  Here is the thing: Ethereum contracts are unstoppable and uncensorable until a core developer loses money
  - synchronise 10y ago
    And the majority of miners decide to go with the new fork. Everyone who wants someone to blame, keeps forgetting to place blame on the miners who facilitated this decision.
WikipediasBad 10y ago
>A decentralized cryptocurrency is a lovely ideal, but in the dirty real world, Ethereum and its ilk will win out. So basically you're saying centralized, institutionally backed and controlled currencies are better, or at least you're saying that hard forks are ok. Ok great. We have the dollar for that. Why even bother with cryptos.
- contingencies 10y ago
  We have the dollar for that. Why even bother with cryptos. Network-based trust decentralization, even with limitations on its effectiveness, does provide somewhat provable insurance against state actors. Currently, state actors and state actor based monopolies are the biggest barriers to financial service innovation and essentially seek a continued global monopoly on financial systems access and financial systems derived intelligence feeds, largely self-justified with 'four horsemen of the internet apocalypse'[0] FUD[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    People don't realize that bitcoin is small-scale. If a powerful government had an interest in overtly or aggressively disrupting it, it'd be dead overnight, on both technical (51% attacks) and practical grounds ("rubber hose cryptanalysis"; large portion of mining power is China-based, where they already have a massive network censorship appliance). The blockchain is not an effective "insurance against state actors" on the macro scale.
JeremyBanks 10y ago
The problem is not with forking to develop the protocol. Certainly, that is a good thing, and BitCoin's inability to do so is a serious issue. The problem is forking to undo a specific transaction. That should never happen. The fact that so many people over-invested in a risky experimental project that they felt they had to sabotage the protocol to protect themselves reflects very poorly on the community.
- max_ 10y ago
  >The problem is forking to undo a specific transaction. That should never happen. Ethereum already had plans to from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake as a consensus algorithm (in Q3). The attacker stole over 10 million ETH How would you feel using a system whose transactions are audited in majority by a thief?
  - JeremyBanks 10y ago
    I'd be concerned. But the community already accomplished that by recklessly creating the situation in the first place, from which there was no truly good outcome.
- flashmob 10y ago
  Technically, no transactions were undone, but the fork agreed to new rules set in the future. The users of the new version also had a choice if they wanted to support the fork or not, the majority went with the fork. This is a screenshot of the choice everyone was asked when starting up their wallet: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Ethereum-Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png/1113px-Ethereum-Wallet_and_Mist_Beta_with_Hard_Fork_choice_0.8.1.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Et... Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to Proof of Stake (PoS) mining in the future.
  - baobabKoodaa 10y ago
    Nice whitewashing. While you are technically correct that no transactions were undone, in practice a theft was (largely) reverted. You are also misrepresenting "users' choice" with regards to supporting the fork. If you make a transaction and everyone moves onto a different chain in order to effectively cancel your transaction, that's censorship of transactions. Censorship was a good choice in this case, but let's not pretend it's something it wasn't.
samdoidge 10y ago
Bitcoin is doing very well for those wanted an uncensored decentralised currency. If you want to make many transactions for small amounts at a time, you want to use something else. I think of it like physical gold, but with more utility - you don't use it for day to day transactions, but as a store of value it is very good.
eth1 10y ago
the fact that you can't just fork bitcoin willy nilly, is a feature, not a bug.

RexetBlell 10y ago

I would ask an opposite question, why were so many people bothered? When the fork happened, Ethereum was just a baby (and still is). It was barely out of Alpha (Frontier) stage, in very early Beta stage. Letting the hacker walk away with millions at that point would have been silly. It was enough Ether to give the hacker the funds to DOS the system to death for years to come if he wanted to.

adamrezich 10y ago
Like I said in another comment, there was no bug in Ethereum, there was a loophole in the DAO contract script. In my mind, this is somewhat akin to creating a new currency, and then when a major bank trading in/holding that currency gets robbed due to lax security, the bankers decide that everyone needs to round all the currency up and rewind time and pretend like that never happened as a solution. Who's to say that won't happen again? I know that the DAO is instrumental to the early success of Ethereum, but what if some other major third-party is attacked in a similar way in the future? Are we just going to hard-fork every time something like this happens? What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Will undesired election results cause hard-forks by the dissenting party? It just seems like a slippery slope to me, with no solution other than "well let's hard fork it now and reserve the right to hard fork it again in the future". It also concerned me that it sure seemed like nearly everyone who was in favor of the hard fork had invested in the DAO and nearly everyone who was against it had not.
- robomc 10y ago
  It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.
  - laughingman2 10y ago
    Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum https://aeon.co/essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-an...

lifty 10y ago

An interesting project that tries to tackle governance and the formal verification aspect of smart contracts is Tezos (https://tezos.com https://tezos.com). I find their approach very appealing and I think it has the potential to grow big, while retaining a solid foundation. It's worth reading their position and white papers.

animex 10y ago

I am bothered by it and steer clear of Ethereum, although the basic premise & ideas behind Ethereum interest me. There have been (4) hard forks so far. Of great concern was how the DAO fork/vote was conducted, this article provides a good summary: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-why-ethereums-hard-fork-will-cause-problems-coming-year/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-why-ethereums-har... I wouldn't be surprised if ETC gains more popularity for adhering to the decentralized principles but I have no idea who is at the helm in terms of development for ETC. ETH has seen a tripling in their value in the last few months. Definitely, the platform is a serious one, with serious goals and isn't a "shitcoin" (1000+ coins that fork bitcoin and pump and dump). They have buy-in from some major/bluechip players in the tech industry.The creator of ETH has stressed that ETH is a new technological experiment and volatility is part of the norm. So don't throw your life savings into it.

nluejeans 10y ago
ETC has hardforked since then also, and will hardfork again in order to defuse the upcoming difficulty bomb. Hardforks, although not ideal, are needed at this point in time in order to facilitate technological progress
- gcmartinelli 10y ago
  I believe the issue here is not doing a hardfork. Hardforks are needed sometimes. The issue is the purpose of "The DAO" hardfork (in practical terms, a bailout) and how it was done (destroying Ethereum's blockchain immutability).
  - bhaak 10y ago
    This is a point of contention. One side claims the blockchain immutability has been breached by draining the black hacker's DAO. The other side claims, it hasn't been as there has been no rollback of transactions. In that view, it was just an additional special case rule added to the code that removed the usual restriction for one specific address. Whatever side's opinion you share, there is one good thing that has achieved by this hard fork. The community has been split along those lines and the group that went Ethereum Classic is for the most part no longer involved with Ethereum. Besides small bickerings on Twitter, there is no drama about this anymore and the Ethereum community is no longer concerned about this event (although not the obvious problems with the complexity of smart contracts but that is an on-going effort). Imagine if Bitcoin would have split up along the SegWit / Big Blocks lines. We wouldn't have had a standstill for 3 years and we would have been spared that constant drama.

nexus9 10y ago

I supported the fork because it was the rational decision to make under the circumstances. I never invested in the DAO or cared about the investors. The simple fact is that the theft was significant enough to cause an unacceptable and pointless security risk to the network. Fortunately for us, there was a built-in delay in the DAO contract which provided the foundation and community with enough time to engage in public debate and determine the best solution. That solution was to carefully recover all the funds from the attacker without creating any negative externalities on innocent bystanders. In this sense, it was not a rollback as no other transactions were affected. Consensus was achieved on this goal and the community resolved the situation as expected. Despite all the ignorant comments and trolling, the truth is the HF worked out brilliantly. The extremists, fundamentalists, and other ideologues who rallied to defend the theft because of their false notion of immutability and demented claims about "bailouts" never came close to understanding the severity of the situation. They never had the moral high ground nor the stronger end of the argument. I'm very pleased they didn't get their way. In my view, the foundation and community handled the DAO debacle in a responsible, decentralized, open-minded, and respectful manner. I was not turned off in the least by the hard fork decision. In fact, it only strengthened my conviction and trust in the Ethereum project.

AroundTheBlock_ 10y ago
Yep, TheDAO fork represents one of the best things about the community, which is a)ability to make rapid, high pressure decisions, yet still offer fair choice to everyone. People forget that the ETC exists and is viable for anyone who wants it. Everyone needs to stop talking about developer losses and whatnot. They gave us a choice, there is 100% consensus on the ETH chain, and there is 100% consensus on the ETC chain. If you want to blame anyone, blame the users. But the dev team has been incredibly top notch and professional all around.
woodandsteel 10y ago
That's interesting. My problem with Ethereum was they seemed to think that the need for trust, based on social interaction, could be completely eliminated through software contracts. That seemed to me to be impossible, in part because you could never write a software contract that would respond correctly in every possible situation that might arise. I am glad to here that I misunderstood how Ethereum works, and when thing go south human beings can intervene to get them back on track again. That's not perfect but it still seems to me that for many sort of matters it still would be a lot better than how the world presently works.

jesusthatsgreat 10y ago

Because most people aren't lawyers whose job it is to defend bad actors and deflect blame on to good actors for enabling the bad actor to carry out their bad act in the first place. If you're arguing there should have been no hard fork, then you're defending a person whom you know is guilty of an $80m robbery. You can claim that technically it wasn't robbery, and they just found the money unattended while searching for unattended money in a bank, but any reasonable person would interpret that as theft. Meanwhile, as you're fixated on how wrong Ethereum was to protect itself from a significant % of ETH falling in to the hands of a bad actor, there's a much larger issue in the cryptocurrency world right now which is mining centralisation in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular. It was viewed as merely theoretical once upon a time but now it's very much an issue and crippling the use of Bitcoin as a currency and as a project. Status.im is just one example of that. It could have been built using Bitcoin but it's using Ethereum because it's the more progressive platform / currency / blockchain / ecosystem.