IBTimes spoke to Vitalik Buterin, Alex Van de Sande and Emin Gun Sirer about the imminent hard fork decision.
(Ethereum Homestead) The Ethereum community, a large and disparate group of people, must decide in just over two weeks’ time whether or not to implement a hard fork of the protocol as a way of dealing with the DAO debacle.
To recap, the DAO hacker drained around $40m (£30m, €36m) worth of ether. The community considered and voted in overwhelming support of a soft fork, which was about to be implemented. Then, Cornell associate professor Emin Gun Sirer with two students Tjaden Hess and River Keefer, discovered that a soft fork would pose a vulnerability for Ethereum. This led to the community abandoning the soft fork, leaving the choice of either a hard fork or taking no action.
The basic idea of the hard fork spec is actually quite simple. It is to transfer ether from the "attack DAOs" into a contract from which DAO token holders will then be able to withdraw their ether at close to a 1:100 ratio. Hard fork clients will be released as early as next week, stated Ethcore.
While it seems likely the Ethereum community will reached consensus on a hard fork, to make this change would seem to contravene the philosophy of decentralisation and principle of censorship resistance. Vitalik Buterin, the chief scientist of Ethereum, pointed out that this is a democratic decision and not a top down edict from the Ethereum Foundation.
He told IBTimes : "Note that the Ethereum Foundation is not explicitly pro-hard fork and has not committed to any specific stance on the issue; developers both inside and outside the foundation (eg. Ethcore) are writing the software to activate the fork if needed but I think that the developer community is generally aligned […]
