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Comment by tigershark | Hacker News Reader

Ethereum worked very well with the DAO...for the hacker that stole several million and that forced them to fork. I will never trust a system where they can decide arbitrarily to void all the transactions that everyone made after several days.

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The way I recall it, they didn’t void past transactions; they added “irregular state changes” that would “return” the “stolen” funds to their “legitimate“ owners. Nor were they forced to fork; it was a voluntary decision of a group of people with enough social power over the platform.

Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds. They simply followed the DAO contract (not the “smart-contract”, mind you, but the one put forward by the Slock.it team on their page), according to which everything that went on the blockchain according to the DAO code was legitimate.

>Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds...

Verification is Ethereum's Achille's heel. Everyone seems to trust that someone else will verify that the contracts they participate in will work securely as intended, and the DAO showed how well that works.

If Ethereum ever gets used as its proponents imagine, with multiple interacting contracts in progress at any given time, rolling back an error will not be nearly as easy as it was in the DAO case (and that was not particularly easy.)

That's every system's Achille's Heel. It's a human fault.

The point is that in Ethereum's case, the extent of the problem is vastly underestimated by almost all of the participants. In most other cases, it is a risk that can be mitigated or accepted, but in Ethereum's case, it undermines the fundamental premise ('trustless' contracts.)

I think Ethereum users will mostly converge on a limited set of useful cookie cutter contracts and simple combinations thereof. New types of contracts will hopefully be received with skepticism, as "The DAO" should have been. So the premise isn't really undermined. It's just that the focus on writing custom contracts in a programming language will diminish as the basic framework matures.

That is not the vision Ethereum was sold on.

There was always a pretty limited range of basic use cases for smart contracts: crowdsales, auctions, debt registries, currency tokens, multisig wallets, etc.

As people begin to use Ethereum for real-world organizations, they will of course prefer to use popular, tested, verified implementations of these basic contract types.

I'm not sure what vision you refer to, but anyway, original visions aren't binding!

>they will of course prefer to use popular, tested, verified implementations of these basic contract types.

That worked out so well with the DAO. There was, of course, at least one person who did take the trouble to do his own investigation of its security ;-)

Perhaps you could point us to some verified implementations of these basic contract types (together with the arguments for their veracity, of course.)

It's something that will change with experience.

It certainly will - people will realize that the fanciful dreams are not feasible.

And others will realise the possibilities opened up by Turing Complete contracting.

Unless Ethereum can solve its verification problem, its biggest opportunities will be for scammers.

I think it's unlikely that scamming will be the biggest opportunity in the long run, given how unsustainable it is. Mutually beneficial uses will predominate over time because that's the only way to get repeat users.

Unless an effective defense is developed, scamming can be continued as long as attempts at legitimate use are being made. Whenever activity ticks up, scammers will be attracted by it.

Scammers are fighting a losing battle against better security technology. They can only capitalize on insecurity. They cannot prevent people from developing and adopting more secure products/services/technologies.

Nobody forced anything. A bunch of people agreed to use new rules with old data, which is why the new chain is in common use. Democracy in action. The same could happen to literally any cryptocurrency you could think up, unless you can come up with a way of invalidating past state to a point where nobody can use it with a new set of rules - which is impossible unless you can somehow cryptographically encode the rules into the chain to a point where you can't access the data without adhering to the rules. (I think a zkSNARK could help with this if it's something that people actually desire.)

> Democracy in action

For a weird definition of "democracy" where one person has 25% of the votes and the vote itself is badly/too quickly announced and organized to the point where almost no one votes. This doesn't even take into account the incredible amount of shitty actions or plain incompetence from the Ethereum Foundation guys at that time or since then.

A quick (tongue in cheek and quite partial in its tone, but also pretty accurate) recap of the events leading to the HF: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereu...

People could've kept using a continuation of the old chain without breaking anything. In fact, some did - see Ethereum Classic. People decided to use the forked Ethereum because they believed it was the correct choice, not because someone made them.

Oh, absolutely. I'm still an interested watcher/user of ETC. And indeed, people "voted" in the end with their mining power (which is why the original chain hasn't disappeared).

I just believe that their actions basically destroyed any future that ETH (and likely ETC too) might've had - it's dead; if the initial hard fork wasn't enough to remove all credibility in the project, the circus since then (subsequent forks, attacks, incredibly mismanaged communication...) certainly is.

Frankly, the DAO fiasco killed Ethereum for most people on its own, everything else was icing on the cake. This was Ethereum's first real "smart contract" that did something you couldn't really do without it, and it failed quickly and miserably, showing most reasonable people that they can't trust smart contracts to do what even their creators believe that they do. At least with a legal contract, the intent of the people agreeing on it matters.

So, the current banking system?

I never heard that all the transactions in the world got rollbacked after days, and I don't think it is even technically possible. Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button.

> Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button.

The rollback was (and still is) very controversial. It required the agreement of the large mining pools to support the fork, which they eventually agreed to. It wasn't quite as simple as "pressing a button".

Banks get hacked all the time, eat the loss, keep it quiet and move on, e.g. http://www.businessinsider.de/how-to-hack-a-bank-mikko-hyppo...

http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20141107/banks-keeping-quite-de...

You can get insurance with the current banking system.

As long as you have the money to prove the law is on your side.

That's not relevant. A bank account is an insurable device. An ethereum implementation is not. Until that changes, nobody will take it seriously.

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