I’m not even sure it matters at this point whether or not a fork is implimented. The damage to the idea pitched and sold for the past year by Ethereum of immutibility is already in question. If the possibility of a fork exists and all it takes is consensus, it doesn’t really inspire confidence. The fact that the exploiter is actually bribing the miners not to fork shows that this implimentation is flawed. Consensus of the crowd or by a powerful party is all it takes to game a system purportedly immune to it. People talk about transparency, but how much of a stake in the DAO do miners have? In fact we should just make all of that transparent…before you fork…who has what?

What’s fascinating is that most people likely thought nothing like this could occur, and yet here we are.

If the pressure to fork now comes from the DAO investors and Ethereum, what happens when it comes from a more powerful entity…with more to lose? How about platforms like Akasha, a blogging platform built on Ethereum which purports to be censorship free and immutable? Forking, in a way, is censorship. It is rewriting the past.

I don’t know the correct answer in this scenario…all choices look terrible, but it does speak volumes about managing expectations and controlling growth. I doubt very much (or at least hope) we won’t see a sum like this thrown into an alpha level platform again.

But it also makes me wonder…if we learned nothing from Lehman Brothers or Mt Gox…how do we expect the code to know better? And what’s next?