Kraken confirms July the 20th #ethereum Hardfork
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1. Undisclosed investments on DAO from top ETH devs
2. The 5% "consensus" on hardfork
3. The inherent fragility on the implementation design of smart contracts
The whole situation is really messy and Ethereum foundation didn't step up to think what's best for the future of Ethereum. The most important gripe for me is that there is still no proper retrospective from the Ethereum organisation and how will they prevent this from happening again.
All these made really unattractive the use of ETH, not to speak of value storage of course.
I hope Rootstock will learn from Ethereum's mistakes and do better.
No doubt the contracts and the protocol will be refined many times until they convey the intention of the community better.
The beautiful thing about a correctly implemented cryptocurrency is that single actors cannot act against the majority will of the community. But that doesn't mean we can't shut down our computers for a minute to reconsider the rules of the game, if we find a new consensus.
The 'consensus' was not by a vast majority either, unless you consider 5% a vast majority.
If the system allows 5% of users (or computing power) to make arbitrary changes, then that is the problem.
If I'm correctly informed, the cause was not a bad investment, but a bug/loophole in the contract that allowed people to steal etherium. (Of course you could take the code-legalistic position and say whatever the original code did, was the contract, even with bugs, and if people invested, they accepted these bugs as part of the agreement. But then I raise you this: the features of etherium that allow people to make changes to contracts are also part of the agreement! So if you say they shouldn't have invested in a buggy contact, tough luck, then I can say tough luck you invested in a malleble system :-))
If there was a bug (unexpected functionality) in the specification, then a certain quorum of users should be able to change the spec to match group expectations, even retroactively. I consider that to be a feature, not a bug.
It'll be fascinating anthropology though. We've never seen a cryptocurrency betray its fundamental principles to help a few rich people save face before.
If the majority of users agree a change is better, then by all means, why shouldn't they change. The protocol should convey the intentions of the users, and not result in random behavior.
It's analogous to forking the bitcoin blockchain because a group wanted to reverse specific transactions in their favor.
By Creating DAO tokens through interaction with The DAO’s smart contract code, you expressly agree to all of the terms and conditions set forth in that code. If you do not understand or do not agree to those terms, you should not Create DAO tokens.
[...]
The DAO’s smart contract code governs the Creation of DAO tokens and supercede any public statements about The DAO’s Creation made by third parties or individuals associated with The DAO, past, present and future. The software code currently available at https://github.com/slockit/dao is the sole source for the terms under which DAO tokens may be created
Now it seems to me that there are plenty of people who have neither understood nor agreed with the terms and conditions, and explicitly decided that the code was not the intent of the DAO. So, the question remains, what is the intent of the DAO? If the old code was not the intent, we have no reason to believe that any of the future versions would be either.