Another Quick $DAO & $ETH update

I didn’t expect that I was going to have to write another update after my previous one. But it’s the dramatic story that keeps on giving.

The last update I ended with the conclusion that the soft fork would probably happen, allowing them to blacklist the “attacker’s” funds.

Security Alert — DoS Vulnerability in the Soft Fork

That blog post was posted yesterday on the official Ethereum website. The original plan was to do the soft fork at block 1800000. About 3 days before it was supposed to happen Felix Lange reported that the soft fork would create a new attack vector; making the Ethereum network vulnerable for a DOS-attack. So for now the idea is that the soft fork will be cancelled and they will have to come up with another/better solution.

The next step: The Hard Fork:

Lefteris Karapetsas, Slockit Tech lead and Ethereum developer, posted the following tweet:

He clarified the tweet on Reddit. Basically that doesn’t mean that the “attacker” will get access the 15th of July, but that then the first (legit) split will be executed and it will make the hard fork a lot more complicated to implement.

The “attacker’s” DAO will only be able to withdraw the Ether the 30th of August. But is that still even a point? A hard fork is a lot more invasive procedure than a soft fork.

Conclusion:

Currently there are 2 options left:

• They do the hard fork, which is even worse than the soft fork.
• The other option is to just let the “attacker” keep the Ether and consider it a very expensive lesson and a nice bug bounty for the “hacker”.

The community sentiment is getting worse, obviously, and I don’t see how the devs can fix that in the short term. Ethereum is in full bear mode.

I’ll be following the story unfold and maybe… just maybe… the “hacker” has another trick up his sleeve.