A quick DAO update
After my previous story a lot of things have happened. I’ll try to give a quick update.
There have been multiple attacks on the DAO after the first big initial one. I guess it’s mostly people trying to see how and if it works, nothing major though.
The counter-hack:
Yesterday Alex van de Sande(Ethereum dev) send the following tweets:
The idea was that if they drained the DAO, no further attacks would probably happen since the entire funds was in the white hat Child DAO’s set up by Alex.
Now they just do the (un-eth-ical) soft fork and that’s it right? Not exactly.
The counter-counter-hack:
We already knew that the hacker was a pretty smart guy, and he went one step further. This morning (22nd of June) he “donated” some Ether back to the DAO which allowed him to vote to join the white hat DAO splits. He is now in those child DAO’s which in theory allows him to again drain them. But don’t worry, with a soft fork this can all be undone, until someone else messes up code in another smart contract again.
The soft fork:
This brings us back to the soft fork. They have 24 days left until the original DAO hacker gets control of the Ether he drained (and the extra Ether he might drain from the child DAO’s). It’s clear that there is a big split in the community. Voting censorship is being heavily abused on the Ethereum subreddit, everyone that doesn’t agree with a soft fork is basically an outcast.
There are currently 2 mining pools where you can vote with your hashrate about the potential soft fork:
As you can see the big majority didn’t even bother voting. My guess is that the soft fork will likely happen, even though I personally don’t support it. A couple of the more prominent Ethereum community devs and members have already spoken out their support, the majority will likely just follow.
Stephan Tual update:
Stephan “The Tool” Tual is still blaming others and has not yet admitted how all of this is a large part his fault. Yesterday he personally attacked on Twitter the very well respected Emin Gün Sirer, claiming he is (at least partially) responsible for all of this.
Emin replied with the following tweets:
Conclusion:
Will the soft fork fix everything? Oh dear god no, lots of PR damage, loss of trust in devs and the platform, community split, there is still that huge bug that allowed this to happen, you can read more about this here, written by the very intelligent Philip Daian.
If people get their Ether back, after the soft fork, that they invested in the DAO, they will probably sell most of it and most of that will be at a loss.
