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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

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 9y 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 9y ago
  It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.
  - laughingman2 9y 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...
    - baobabKoodaa 9y ago
      I stopped reading this at the point where the author referenced DAO as "Vitalik Buterin's corporation".
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Surely if you're able to undermine the trustless nature of them, they weren't trustless in the first place - i.e. you're merely trusting a possibly larger group of people to fail to come to an agreement on changing the protocol.
  - splintercell 9y ago
    If a rogue journalist gets "Donald Trump is great" article published in NYT, bypassing the Editorial board, and 95% of the audience and Editorial board leaves and subscribes to a 'New New York Times' paper started by the same editorial team, has it undermined 'Free Speech'? Has it undermined their motto "All the news that's fit to print"? Keep in mind, the old NYT still exists with 5% of original capacity.
- rabbyte 9y ago
  forks are part of the protocol but the vast majority of them are tossed away due to the miner incentives to stick with the most popular chain. a hard fork happens when there's either a widespread bug that conflicts with older/other clients -OR- when there's a consensus failure in the population using the chain. in The DAO's case, there was a consensus failure in the population but the majority decided to go along with a recovery. There were good reasons to go either way but most people decided this was an experiment, it's early stage, and a move to PoS would be more difficult with a wealthy attacker. I invested but did not want to fork because I was willing to take on the risks. I lost out but I still stick with the main chain because what matters is where we're going with this not where we are. It was a valuable lesson for the community, devs have heavily stepped up investment in security and stability, I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. still, if you look at the effects it's pretty interesting. You now have ETC and ETH and the market caps for each have waved to reflect the interest in the two competing ideologies. this means blockchains resolve failure through replication and the social effects that happen after can retroactively decide who the winner is or, as it is in this case, you now have two compatible technologies going different directions. ETC is staying PoW, ETH is moving to PoS, both have different governance attitudes and the split has been mostly amicable. not too bad. edit- I should note this is also true of Bitcoin. the only reason it hasn't split is because its miner and user culture strictly adhere to immutability. if the population decided immutability didn't matter, it wouldn't. there are points of resistance to push back on the way people are but ultimately these things don't run themselves. they depend heavily on incentives.
  - Aaron1011 9y ago
    > I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. That's one my my main concerns - the hard fork has set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Etherium has shown that it's willing to jettison the idea of 'code as contract' whenever the code ends up doing something 'bad'. In the case of theDAO, 'bad' meant anything from "people losing a lot of money" to "we found a 'bug' in an experiment that still isn't ready".
    - 9y ago
- cel1ne 9y ago
  > What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Not meaning to be snarky, but does anyone seriously believe that? Sometimes I do think software-engineers should go and try to understand processes of non-techies a bit more.
  - AroundTheBlock_ 9y ago
    Yep we seriously believe it. It's no more crazy than using crypto for actual money.
    - cel1ne 9y ago
      It is not crazy. I'm fairly certain though, it won't reach the adoption you imagine. Why would a nation ever adopt anything like this? Can you give me a scenario?
- vidarh 9y ago
  Consider it a light preview of the chaos is to come when courts get involved and make rulings about required transfers of assets and decide to hold people in contempt when they claim they technically can't transfer them. The inability to undo financial transactions based on ownership claims instead of hard currency flies in the face of centuries of expectations of modern society. Evidence of past ability to undo transactions via hard-forks will create "interesting" legal conundrums for anyone trying to claim to a court it can't be done.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    In practice, courts will say "pay the expected value of replacing the loss in USD", as they've always done for transactions that can't be undone. Permanent transactions are not a new thing to the legal system - if, for example, you sell a one-off art piece to someone else, then they sell it to someone else, and a dispute arises between the first two actors, the solution could not be to return the art piece.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      For monetary transactions that's fine. But they are not the only type of smart contracts. Consider the people trying to e.g. bootstrap systems for using the blockchain as a share ledger for a company for example. There the court will just say "X is the owner of those shares. Ensure the record reflects that." If the system they have chosen for the ledger can't let them rollback a transfer because of a bug, that is the company's problem. There are a lot of potential circumstances where people will need to find human workarounds for the supposed immutable nature of these blockchains because courts will simply say "this is how it is; make it happen". The above example is "simple": The company can worst case just pass a board resolution to replace the ledger and/or reissue it. But it is a demonstration that the immutability of the ledger will often be irrelevant, in the face of a court that says "this is the truth now".
Aaron1011 9y ago
> Letting the hacker walk away with millions at that point would have been silly. The issue is, the person wasn't a 'hacker' in any meaningful sense of the word. Etherium claims to be "a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference" (from etherium.org). That is, an Etherium program doesn't implement a written contract, it is the contract. Despite this lofty goal, the core team saw fit to hard-fork the chain because they didn't like how a particular program was executing. The claim that the 'hacker' had 'stolen' funds from theDAO is ridiculous - you can only steal what doesn't belong to you, and ownership of theDAO's Ether is defined by the program itself! More broadly, the hard-fork seems to imply that an Etherium contract is really made up of two contracts. One contract is the program itself, which explicitly spells out what is and not allowed. The other contract is an implicit understanding of what the program 'should' do, and exists only in the minds of the creators of the contract. The issue arises when this implicit 'contract' is used to override the real contract - flying in the face of how Etherium claims to work. A much better solution would have been to try to address the underlying issues in Solidity - perhaps requiring future contracts to explicitly allow recursion? I personally question the decision to use a Turing-complete language to express contracts in the first place.
- RexetBlell 9y ago
  Turing-complete language is just the base layer. You could build more limited languages (decidable languages) on top, which are more appropriate for smart contracts. There is a new decidable language that compiles to EVM bytecode: https://github.com/ethereum/viper https://github.com/ethereum/viper Visually it looks similar to Python. The language is not turing complete, and one of the advantages of this is it's easier write bug free code and easier to verify that the code is doing what you think it's doing. The reason why the entire EVM is turing complete (and not more limited) is because making it decidable instead is harder than making it Turing complete and would have made the protocol more complex: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#computation-and-turing-completeness https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#computatio... A Turing-complete language is base layer: you can build any paradigm you want on top.
runeks 9y 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. Was this fact communicated out to the people who invested $150 million in Ethereum? Attracting a hundred million dollars in investor money, then failing and saying "woops! that was just a test run.", I'm not surprised some people were bothered a bit. The crux of the matter is that some people were way too confident about the viability of their product, and as a consequence a lot of investor money was lost. One or more programmers somewhere were too impressed with their own skills, without the ability/willingness to see the weaknesses.
- baobabKoodaa 9y ago
  People didn't invest $150 million in Ethereum. Ethereum and "The DAO DAO" are 2 different entities.
  - runeks 9y ago
    I disagree. When the Ethereum protocol changes as a consequence of a weakness in the DAO, they are essentially the same entity. I agree that the point of Ethereum is to be the lowest layer protocol, and thus independent from what runs on top if it (like the DAO), but this clearly isn't the case when the core protocol changes as a result of a bug in an app running on top of it.
    - baobabKoodaa 9y ago
      So after the U.S. government bailed out banks, did you deduce that "USA" is the same entity as "Bank of America"?
unixhero 9y ago
Just a baby, but it had gone live. People had solid vested interestes, by actually having put money into it.
laughingman2 9y ago
I think this article portrays why trust is needed even in decentralized systems. 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...
- baobabKoodaa 9y ago
  You keep spamming this link in multiple places. Are you the author? Stop spamming.

adamrezich 9y 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 9y ago
It fundamentally undermines the trustless automated nature of smart contracts.
- laughingman2 9y 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...
  - baobabKoodaa 9y ago
    I stopped reading this at the point where the author referenced DAO as "Vitalik Buterin's corporation".
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Surely if you're able to undermine the trustless nature of them, they weren't trustless in the first place - i.e. you're merely trusting a possibly larger group of people to fail to come to an agreement on changing the protocol.
- splintercell 9y ago
  If a rogue journalist gets "Donald Trump is great" article published in NYT, bypassing the Editorial board, and 95% of the audience and Editorial board leaves and subscribes to a 'New New York Times' paper started by the same editorial team, has it undermined 'Free Speech'? Has it undermined their motto "All the news that's fit to print"? Keep in mind, the old NYT still exists with 5% of original capacity.
rabbyte 9y ago
forks are part of the protocol but the vast majority of them are tossed away due to the miner incentives to stick with the most popular chain. a hard fork happens when there's either a widespread bug that conflicts with older/other clients -OR- when there's a consensus failure in the population using the chain. in The DAO's case, there was a consensus failure in the population but the majority decided to go along with a recovery. There were good reasons to go either way but most people decided this was an experiment, it's early stage, and a move to PoS would be more difficult with a wealthy attacker. I invested but did not want to fork because I was willing to take on the risks. I lost out but I still stick with the main chain because what matters is where we're going with this not where we are. It was a valuable lesson for the community, devs have heavily stepped up investment in security and stability, I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. still, if you look at the effects it's pretty interesting. You now have ETC and ETH and the market caps for each have waved to reflect the interest in the two competing ideologies. this means blockchains resolve failure through replication and the social effects that happen after can retroactively decide who the winner is or, as it is in this case, you now have two compatible technologies going different directions. ETC is staying PoW, ETH is moving to PoS, both have different governance attitudes and the split has been mostly amicable. not too bad. edit- I should note this is also true of Bitcoin. the only reason it hasn't split is because its miner and user culture strictly adhere to immutability. if the population decided immutability didn't matter, it wouldn't. there are points of resistance to push back on the way people are but ultimately these things don't run themselves. they depend heavily on incentives.
- Aaron1011 9y ago
  > I doubt anything like it will happen again as even those who were in favor now understand the damaging effects it can have. That's one my my main concerns - the hard fork has set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Etherium has shown that it's willing to jettison the idea of 'code as contract' whenever the code ends up doing something 'bad'. In the case of theDAO, 'bad' meant anything from "people losing a lot of money" to "we found a 'bug' in an experiment that still isn't ready".
  - 9y ago
cel1ne 9y ago
> What happens if/when Ethereum takes off, and eventually is used for elections or something? Not meaning to be snarky, but does anyone seriously believe that? Sometimes I do think software-engineers should go and try to understand processes of non-techies a bit more.
- AroundTheBlock_ 9y ago
  Yep we seriously believe it. It's no more crazy than using crypto for actual money.
  - cel1ne 9y ago
    It is not crazy. I'm fairly certain though, it won't reach the adoption you imagine. Why would a nation ever adopt anything like this? Can you give me a scenario?
vidarh 9y ago
Consider it a light preview of the chaos is to come when courts get involved and make rulings about required transfers of assets and decide to hold people in contempt when they claim they technically can't transfer them. The inability to undo financial transactions based on ownership claims instead of hard currency flies in the face of centuries of expectations of modern society. Evidence of past ability to undo transactions via hard-forks will create "interesting" legal conundrums for anyone trying to claim to a court it can't be done.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  In practice, courts will say "pay the expected value of replacing the loss in USD", as they've always done for transactions that can't be undone. Permanent transactions are not a new thing to the legal system - if, for example, you sell a one-off art piece to someone else, then they sell it to someone else, and a dispute arises between the first two actors, the solution could not be to return the art piece.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    For monetary transactions that's fine. But they are not the only type of smart contracts. Consider the people trying to e.g. bootstrap systems for using the blockchain as a share ledger for a company for example. There the court will just say "X is the owner of those shares. Ensure the record reflects that." If the system they have chosen for the ledger can't let them rollback a transfer because of a bug, that is the company's problem. There are a lot of potential circumstances where people will need to find human workarounds for the supposed immutable nature of these blockchains because courts will simply say "this is how it is; make it happen". The above example is "simple": The company can worst case just pass a board resolution to replace the ledger and/or reissue it. But it is a demonstration that the immutability of the ledger will often be irrelevant, in the face of a court that says "this is the truth now".

Aaron1011 9y ago

> Letting the hacker walk away with millions at that point would have been silly. The issue is, the person wasn't a 'hacker' in any meaningful sense of the word. Etherium claims to be "a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference" (from etherium.org). That is, an Etherium program doesn't implement a written contract, it is the contract. Despite this lofty goal, the core team saw fit to hard-fork the chain because they didn't like how a particular program was executing. The claim that the 'hacker' had 'stolen' funds from theDAO is ridiculous - you can only steal what doesn't belong to you, and ownership of theDAO's Ether is defined by the program itself! More broadly, the hard-fork seems to imply that an Etherium contract is really made up of two contracts. One contract is the program itself, which explicitly spells out what is and not allowed. The other contract is an implicit understanding of what the program 'should' do, and exists only in the minds of the creators of the contract. The issue arises when this implicit 'contract' is used to override the real contract - flying in the face of how Etherium claims to work. A much better solution would have been to try to address the underlying issues in Solidity - perhaps requiring future contracts to explicitly allow recursion? I personally question the decision to use a Turing-complete language to express contracts in the first place.

RexetBlell 9y ago
Turing-complete language is just the base layer. You could build more limited languages (decidable languages) on top, which are more appropriate for smart contracts. There is a new decidable language that compiles to EVM bytecode: https://github.com/ethereum/viper https://github.com/ethereum/viper Visually it looks similar to Python. The language is not turing complete, and one of the advantages of this is it's easier write bug free code and easier to verify that the code is doing what you think it's doing. The reason why the entire EVM is turing complete (and not more limited) is because making it decidable instead is harder than making it Turing complete and would have made the protocol more complex: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#computation-and-turing-completeness https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#computatio... A Turing-complete language is base layer: you can build any paradigm you want on top.

runeks 9y 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. Was this fact communicated out to the people who invested $150 million in Ethereum? Attracting a hundred million dollars in investor money, then failing and saying "woops! that was just a test run.", I'm not surprised some people were bothered a bit. The crux of the matter is that some people were way too confident about the viability of their product, and as a consequence a lot of investor money was lost. One or more programmers somewhere were too impressed with their own skills, without the ability/willingness to see the weaknesses.

baobabKoodaa 9y ago
People didn't invest $150 million in Ethereum. Ethereum and "The DAO DAO" are 2 different entities.
- runeks 9y ago
  I disagree. When the Ethereum protocol changes as a consequence of a weakness in the DAO, they are essentially the same entity. I agree that the point of Ethereum is to be the lowest layer protocol, and thus independent from what runs on top if it (like the DAO), but this clearly isn't the case when the core protocol changes as a result of a bug in an app running on top of it.
  - baobabKoodaa 9y ago
    So after the U.S. government bailed out banks, did you deduce that "USA" is the same entity as "Bank of America"?

unixhero 9y ago

Just a baby, but it had gone live. People had solid vested interestes, by actually having put money into it.

laughingman2 9y ago

I think this article portrays why trust is needed even in decentralized systems. 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...

baobabKoodaa 9y ago
You keep spamming this link in multiple places. Are you the author? Stop spamming.