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Comment by rabbyte | Hacker News Reader

you have to look at the full precedent though which is that forks can be used to keep a chain nimble and if you do disagree with where the majority goes you can still use the unaffected chain with others who feel the same. I don't mean to downplay, there are very serious effects that come from unforeseen forks and they should be avoided, but the dogmatic view just doesn't hold any weight with me anymore. Bitcoin will fork eventually. It's mostly fear and apprehension that has kept it where it is.

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> you have to look at the full precedent though which is that forks can be used to keep a chain nimble and if you do disagree with where the majority goes you can still use the unaffected chain with others who feel the same

That's probably true in general, but the idea of 'code as contract' is supposed to be one of the defining features of Etherium. If the project wants to move away from that, then it should stop pretending that smart contracts are "applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference."

This all makes sense to me as these cryptocurrencies mostly remain experiments with minimal effect on the real world, but what happens if one of them takes off, as they all aim to? Society can't handle its underlying currencies forking and splitting all the time. Why should I trust Ethereum ever again after the DAO hard-fork?

I would argue that today ironically the chance of Ethereum forking again due to a poorly written contract is much lower than it was a year ago. Many lessons were learned and the community is much larger. Also many people who supported the Dao fork, would be against the fork today, because there is no more excuse that "we are early and we don't know how to write secure contract code".

The recursion thing was an interesting loophole, and we now know to avoid it when writing contracts. What if there is another interesting loophole that we haven't yet discovered, and that gets exploited? You say,

>Also many people who supported the Dao fork, would be against the fork today, because there is no more excuse that "we are early and we don't know how to write secure contract code".

but what you really mean is, we've identified a single "attack vector" and now know to avoid it. And, in the process, we've set a precedent that the discovery of any sufficiently large-scale-affecting (or core developer-affecting?) "attack vector" can potentially result in the software contracts being overridden by human action, i.e. a rollback and hard fork. Thus, I personally see no reason to trust the Ethereum network, even though it's full of really cool ideas and technology.

Fwiw there was no rollback. The fork moved the stolen funds, but didn't affect unrelated transactions.

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