Vitalik got indirectly pwned by the infamous DAO smart contract hack, but had the social clout to pause/rollback the supposedly decentralised/immutable Blockchain.
Maybe not the best example of cryptographic security.
Maybe not the best example of cryptographic security.
Vitalik (and all DAO ETH hodlers) luckboxed in that the ETHs locked in the DAO, although "stolen", couldn't be withdrawn by the attacker before a few weeks.
There has been zero pause and zero rollback. Most people don't understand that: by chance the stolen funds were inaccessible to the attacker for a few weeks.
What Vitalik did is he forked (soft fork) the ETH blockchain to modify the rules. That soft fork happened before the cooldown period expired, so the attacker never got to access his funds.
Some members of the community said "adding new rules is against the spirit of decentralization, so we keep using the old chain". The old chain was named "Ethereum classic" while the forked chain kept the name "Ethereum".
But there's been no rollback.
The proof of this is that some people didn't agree with undoing that transaction. They stayed on the old chain, which is now worthless.
This is such a boring and widely known story now, but it has to come up literally any time someone wants to play crypto tribalisim.
The reason why people got confused with your comment is because ex. you purport it was fine, it can never happen again, and everyone who didn't agree went to 0.
Lot of tensions between those things.
We also understand how one person could have those views and even steelman it into something intellectually consistent. But then the post seems really off because it's sort of a rushed, poor, justification for why you believe something, coupled to bemoaning some sort of unrelated group none of us are privy to.
the DAO hack happened, immutably, no one disputes it. the hashes and blocks and transactions are well-known. so there was a "schism", that explicitly validates the fact that without this large-scale cooperation, without the redefinition of what Ethereum is, it would be still be what is on that other branch. these both provide evidence for the immutably and decentralization.
The fact that there are far fewer users of Ethereum Classic (and the market cap is significantly lower) is a testament to how much people care about the community which chose to follow a different history of the Ethereum network.
But in one chain the whole community decided to disown the attacker by injecting hard coded transactions that would send the Ethers back to their original owners.
How exactly was Vitalik "indirectly pwned"?