This could actually prove to be a huge milestone for the crypto-economy's ability to self-regulate. There are probably not many people who believe the hacker deserves to have $50mil+ of their money. Those funds were put together for the express purpose of improving ETH's infrastructure. Although, I suppose it could be argued that those coins are his bounty for finding a vulnerability in the system, thereby improving future contract security.
To me, this is like someone robbing Santa's red bucket in front of the grocery store; except now, with broad, voluntary consensus the money can be restored to its intended purpose.
I've seen people saying a fork is like a central bank forcefully interdicting transactions, but this is NOT like that. Still, if this sets some kind of slippery slope precedent within Ethereum, that just makes space for a new competitor. With blockchains, we have a choice. Blockchains are cheap, we can switch pretty easily if we don't like the rules. Not so with fiat.
This statement from the devs sounds reasonable to me.
Decentralised consensus networks are peer-to-peer networks where individuals acting in their own self-interest maintain consensus on an agreed upon state of the blockchain database. It is these two terms; ‘agreed upon’ and ‘self-interest’ that are the most important. These two notions took bitcoin through bug after bug during its bumpy launch; the community would decide to act when the intended execution of the protocol did not match the real world outcome.
Fixing bugs in the protocol has always been a part of the iterative process of development that all software systems must undergo. Planning new features to be implemented with hard forks is a philosophical difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin.
This, however, is different. The DAO is not the Ethereum protocol. The bug discovered is an exploit of poorly written solidity code. The threat is not from the bug per se - but from the magnitude of the (illicit) redistribution of ether that this bug is allowing.
So what can we do? Ethcore is a part of the developer community of Ethereum. We do not run mining farms. We are not controllers of the network. Neither are Jeff’s or Christian’s teams. We are technologist and codebase maintainers. Ethereum belongs to the ether holders, the miners, the full nodes. These individuals, who are operating in their own self-interest, are maintaining an agreed upon state of the blockchain.
We would like to give you the option to agree on another state of the world. In this state theDAO attacker would not be allowed to take control of the ether inside theDAO - nor would he or she be able to move or spend it. Instead, the DAO tokens will be returned to the Dao token holders, theDAO experiment will end and we will move on wiser.
We will offer you this choice through an optional update to the parity client that will move ether to a recovery contract that will allow DAO token holders to recover their ether. This will maintain consensus with other updates from the Geth team and the CPP team.
We are at a fork in the road - we hope that you guys make the right decision.
The EthCore team.
Ethereum has always been a consensus mechanism. My bet is the consensus will be that the DAO investors should get their money back, esp. considering that many of the miners who mustlikely invested in the DAO.
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