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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

I'm as "fuck cryptocurrency/NFTs" as the next guy, but that's not accurate. As others have said, forks require community consensus, not just the decision of a single individual. Regarding the specific fork you're referring to (italicized emphasis is mine):

>It was initially unclear as to whether the fork would be executed. Though it was proposed by Ethereum developers, they did not have the unilateral power to implement the change. Miners, exchanges, and node operators also had to agree to update their software. After more heated debate in public forums, on July 20, 2016, at block 192,000, the Ethereum hard fork was implemented.

https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...

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The crucial question, to me, is: would the fork have happened if Vitalik had not been part of the DAO? I don't think there's any chance he would have entertained that.

There have been many large ETH compromises since then, and the idea of forking for any of them would be considered outrageous.

One of the main reasons it went through is because there was 'only' one losing party - the hacker, and multiple winning parties (developers and investors in the DAO). A couple years later when the parity mutlisig was hacked such that the funds (150K eth from an ICO) were 'permanently locked', the proposal to unlock the funds via hardfork was rejected. More or less specifically because it would only benefit a very small subset of parties, while leaving the frozen funds in place meant the rest of the chain benefited from the effective reduction of eth supply. Since then no one else has seriously proposed forks to move funds out of protocol.

Vitalik was not part of the DAO, and the Ethereum Foundation took an extremely hands-off approach to the DAO hack.

This is pretty well documented in the Cryptopians book; the DAO hard fork was driven almost exclusively by people outside the EF.

What's crazy is they never "fixed" The DAO "bug." Reentrancy is a feature of Solidity. They just tell people to make sure to do exception checking for it. Which of course makes contracts bloated. Which in turn makes contracts cost more in gas fees. So every now and again a Defi will be attacked by the very, same, thing, that got The DAO, because they didn't put in expensive reentrancy checks. Couple of recent examples: https://ambcrypto.com/how-these-two-defi-protocols-fell-prey...

Yup. The combo of “this is hyper critical financial code” and “every extra instruction to check invariants is very expensive” are two fundamentally opposed ideas and will cause pain forever.

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