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Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Here is the thing: Ethereum contracts are unstoppable and uncensorable until a core developer loses money

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.

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.

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?

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).

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