Forking Ethereum. Big deal.
What makes Ethereum better than Bitcoin? Pragmatism. Let me explain.
The recent success of DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) caught everyone’s attention when it raised an incredible amount of money for its decentralised investment fund. On the surface this marked the next phase of Ethereum: let a global community decide where to invest money to the benefit of Ethereum’s development. On consider.it you can see how this sparked a lively discussion of proposals. Even now in the face of adversity different proposals are being discussed on how to deal with this fiasco. What fiasco you say? Well, someone spoiled the fun when he/she/they found and exploited a bug to ‘steal’ more than $60m worth of Ether.
A lesson from the past
Those who remember the Mt Gox days of Bitcoin can attest to the fact that it had a backlash to Bitcoin’s already tainted brand and slowed adoption. It justified banks saying no to companies that dealt with Bitcoin and it gave room to the blockchain narrative that became the talk of the town in 2015. Only now in 2016 we are seeing a resurgence of the cryptocurrency where financial institutions are finally turning around to flirt with the idea of public blockchains, including Bitcoin.
Sceptics may point that it follows a classic hype cycle pattern or that recent events are directly related to the halvening. Be that as it may, the Mt Gox collapse did have the knock-on effects and it begs the question; if we could’ve reversed the theft, would we have done so?
To fork or not to fork
In order to reverse the theft a fork of the protocol is needed. In Bitcoinland forking the protocol is a highly contested event leading to debates of biblical proportions as can be seen here, here, here and in a blog post of mine. Overall Bitcoin’s community seems to be more divided than Ethereum’s and leans towards crypto purist implementations where Ethereum favours pragmatism. Just compare the endless block size debate with the swift response of Ethereum’s brain child Vitalik Buterin in his critical DAO update post and in his follow-up smart contract security post where he digests the feedback from the community to look ahead. To quote Vitalek:
Progress in smart contract safety is necessarily going to be layered, incremental, and necessarily dependent on defense-in-depth. There will be further bugs, and we will learn further lessons; there will not be a single magic technology that solves everything.
Of course none of Vitalik’s words would matter if it weren’t for the fact that he is listened to and that miners are willing to adopt the changes he proposes. Unlike Bitcoin with its absent anonymous inventor, Ethereum has a leader that in this phase of the development has the voice to stir the protocol in the right direction while incorporating wider community feedback. This DAO fork will be Vitalik’s biggest challenge to get mining support, but if Homestead’s successful hard fork is any indication, Vitalik will likely succeed in convincing miners to reverse the DAO ‘theft’. And why not? It’s just common sense. The intent of the contract was obviously breached and while the hacker should be rewarded for discovering the exploit as is currently being proposed, reversing the ‘theft’ would avoid this — at the time of writing — black hat from holding a large percentage of Ethers. And who doesn’t see a problem with that has not read up on Ethereum’s ambition to implement a proof-of-stake system. And as for DAO, we will see a new attempt soon enough. Forking? Big deal!
