Bitcoin Forum

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oif2x/dao_attack_exchanges_please_pause_eth_and_dao/

Don't move your ETH until solved.

I think that would be a very bad idea.

Can't roll-back every time someone writes a buggy contract. No matter how much is invested in it..

THIS is the HEART of crypto.

If he(Vitalik) does roll back, it means ETH is not decentralised..

There are literally 10's of thousands of other contracts running that have no issue at all.

Its going to be a bit late to do  a hardfork once that eth gets dumped.  Im noticing some people are still buying atm.  I guess they never got the news yet.

I remember when the devs of Vericoin did something similar, it did not go down too well with the community.

I agree. I would rather let the theDAO burn and save ETH but based on that post looks like this is what they will do.

TheDao is not ETH. They are betting that ETH will survive whatever happens to the DAO. It is a sensible bet IMHO.

If those hacked eth taht have come out of the dao get dumped then eth will plummet much further than  it has already.  Eth will still be alive but dumped down to very low prices. 

Satoshi did rollback.

This: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810141857/http://bitcoinmoney.com/post/53207712103/your-bitcoins-are-not-safe-at-alt-coin-exchanges (https://web.archive.org/web/20150810141857/http://bitcoinmoney.com/post/53207712103/your-bitcoins-are-not-safe-at-alt-coin-exchanges)

Shit, meet fan.

He did it for a bug in a coin code itself, not because someone sent coins to the wrong address.

They can't do it, it's not decentralised if they are going to do shit like this. No one is going to invest seriously if a couple of nerds can reset all the stuff. They are going to kill ETH along with DAO.

Yes, I remember when mintpal was hacked and a large share of all Vericoins were stolen.  They had to fork because the percentage of coins was so great that the entire coin would be effectively owned by the hacker.

I remember the LTC dev Coblee was totally against it and had some harsh words for the vericoin devs.

The next dogecoin?  lol

Agree.
It looks like DAO is finished - I feel bad for DAO investors, however that is one thing and future lessons will be learned.

However it would be a huge mistake for ETH devs to jump in without due diligence (something DAO team and investors may have done more of) and compound the DAO failure by trashing any confidence in ETH.

Maybe there should be voting on whether to allow smart contracts to proceed and on a time delay before they are allowed to start?

can you kill a 1.3B marketcap coin?

Hmm..

IF they do a roll-back.. what happens to all the ETH put in exchanges and sold in the period that get's 'reset'.. ?

Not only that.  If they roll back, Ethereum will be one big joke in crypto.  But it could be doomed either way.  They continue, it's bad, Ethereum's pet project the DAO loses over a hundred million.  If they roll back, it's laughable, and they're viewed as incompetent fools.

This is a bad time.  I hope they figure this out real quick and that no one loses their investment.  I feel fr those people who are invested.

http://pastebin.com/aMKwQcHR

They will roll it back and try to spend the next year in 'glossing it over' hoping the glamor has not rubbed off and another pump to save their reputation..bet on it :)

Looks like there is a fix though, seems the stolen eth cant be sold for a while. It may give them time to fix it.

A hardfork would be the worst thing they can do, it would be better to try and salvage what is left after this in some other way.

This is very interesting..

As they say - IF they can somehow 'FIX' this.. (rollback / blacklist / some other thing) it means any government that wants it's ETH back can 'FIX' that too.. very dangerous.

I think Ethereum should 'NOT GET INVOLVED'. At all. The truth is that the ETH network is running completely fine.

Let DAO sort it out if they can. And if not.. a lesson learned.

hmm..

This will probably send us(crypto) back a few years in credibility though.. :(

If they do that, then I can't see a serious dev working on a serious project using Ethereum as their base platform.  They should keep calm and think this through.

hard fork of ETH and it's over, they need to show some cojones like NXT did when thesir guy hacked BTER .. crypto hard forks kill credibility forever

The problem is related to deposits and withdrawals rather than with the actual trading. At the moment the situation is very risky for exchanges.

Hard-fork is suicide for a coin, don't do it Vitalek!!!

Looks like there is a solution that doesn't involve a rollback after all. -> https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oiqj7/critical_update_re_dao_vulnerability/

sounds really good to be honest, im curious if everything will be solved that easily

What a joke. The DAO switching to proof of vitalik where he can make demands to freeze all exchanges so investors cannot flee a burning building and than make arbitrary decisions like freezing peoples funds at whim. Decentralized  ::)

great news, or that depends on what side people are on :)

yeah, a lot of people will understand that eth is not so decentralized how everyone is made to think, this step will surely have negative impact on eth in the future

Proof of Vitalik is a very efficient algo that can make quick and final decisions without debate, but it does have a tradeoff...

Eh?

They are saying -

1) Blacklist the address with a soft fork - so hacker can't cash out.

2) Then wait and do a hard fork to get the Ether back.

It doesn't seem like DAO can recover the funds in a straight forward way..

..

I don't like.

I feel for those who lost, BUT this could be done to ANYBODY, for any reason, and all it took was Vitalik and Co's say so.. So Ethereum could be coerced with 1, maybe 2, guns to a couple of heads..

That's not cool. (And it's certainly not decentralised)

AGAIN - 'Ethereum' should stay well away. This is none of your business. Your network is doing exactly what it was meant to. And running fine. Let the chips fall.

The whole DAO thing was a risky shit from the start, i would just leave it and let it burn.

What pisses me off is that poloniex wont let me withdraw my Bitcoin for some reason.

i agree, any rollback sets a precedent, and that kills confidence ... if it can happen once, then what would be other triggers?

DON"T DO IT!!!

thats insane actually, in my opinion bitcoin shouldnt have controlled withdraws and deposits for sure, now it seems that eth has more impact than any other currencies, thats definitely a bad thing for their reputation

The worst part is I didnt even trade any Eth or DAO today , I sold it all on the 14th when it hit the price i wanted.

First, the DAO should have capped investment like Digix did.  That way it could have been hacked and failed but not threatened the entire Ethereum project.

Second, the hard fork may not be so bad because ethereum hasn't even chosen it's final PoS algorithm. It's not like they are forking a mature coin.  To people who argue that this makes it centralized, I would answer yes, but they never pretended that it wasn't going to be until after they took care of the difficulty bomb and forced change from PoW.

sorry, for you, had all my coins on bittrex, lucky for me they still allow withdrawing it, poloniex exchange surely should get negative reputation for that in my opinion

They were always going to have to hardfork anyway to take care of the diff bomb werent they? or am I wrong?

King Vitalik is forking the stolen DAO ETH's out of existence: https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4oiqj7/critical_update_re_dao_vulnerability/

Decentralization. Cool ;D

Yes, my understanding is that is why they put it in there in the first place: to give themselves a deadline for changing to PoS. Although I think I read they planned to fork first now to delay the bomb so that they could have more time to work on the algorithm change.  So obviously it's not great to hardfork because of the DAO situation but it isn't like Ethereum is just free floating out in the wild like LTC or something.  It's still actively being designed.

That even make it more super creepy. So not only they can "bail-out-too-big-to-fail" hard fork from a top to down centralized fashion, now they can "blacklist" addresses ? Than bye-bye fungibility, and network neutrality as well...

Free market is all about paying the price for your mistakes, no rich uncle/regulator to bail you out.

That is true, since the DAO is the problem and not Eth, they should just let it go and have the DAO deal with its own shit. Getting involved in it might drag both of them down.

ETH is heavily involved with DAO because all DAO investments made with ETH and they're locked in. Everything about DAO is related to ETH. They had to do something so they did the right thing.

Yes, and the mere thought - or message, asking for exchanges halting trade - is a 100% trust killing move. It is already too late for many of us in crypto to ever again take ETH seriously. They should have thought before speaking...
Not to mention that someone wrote here, so now 2 gunmen can go and "ask nicely" for a rollback from a few devs??? Than it is not a trustless network.

10's of thousands might be an exaggeration; but, similarly there is other poor code being written by other ETH developers out there.

http://www.coindesk.com/leaderless-dao-put-test-following-reported-ethereum-vulnerability/

You are right that you can't roll back every time someone writes a buggy contract. This is just an example of the excitement that will happen when you develop a turing complete system. It will repeat again and again as more poor code is written.

This isn't a hack actually. The function is proper and were always in the code for DAO. In a sense it is legit, the contract does what it supposed to do :

"There is an attack going on against "theDAO". A recently discovered recursive-split attack can be used to to initiate ether-sends before the contracts burns them. Buy this the contract will hand over ETH that you shouldn't have control over.

Technically, this attack can be continued until all ETH are drained from "the DAO".
It seems Daniel Larimer was right about Is The Dao going to be DAO https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dan/is-the-dao-going-to-be-doa (https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dan/is-the-dao-going-to-be-doa)"

from https://steemit.com/thedao/@xeroc/ongoing-attack-on-thedao---eth-draining-from-the-pot (https://steemit.com/thedao/@xeroc/ongoing-attack-on-thedao---eth-draining-from-the-pot)

rollback is madness, don't do it!

Do you think the developers hacked the DAO? If so, why would they invalidate the coins with a hard fork?

So.. now 'they' are going to 'convert' (shutdown) DAO into a simple contract that allows you to withdraw your funds and nothing more..

https://twitter.com/DanDarkPill/status/743789597482692608

How in 'Holy Hell' are they able to completely rewrite the ETH code when it was meant to be a  completely Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.. !?

I just don't get it..

Me thinks someone has more power over this DAO than they should have.. or anyone thought they would have.

It is not that simple as you say. Vitalik was one of its Curators along with many others, he put his credibility on the Dao. If it was someone elses project i could agree with you, but he is part of the team and for that i aspect him to take responsability for it. Ethereum is a much larger project, it is not about ETH only, thinking small like that will never get ETH the future it is designed for, btw smart contracts is all about that otherwise it is only a coin.

I don't understand how a rollback can be accomplished. Please explain if I'm missing something.

For miners it would mean any blocks that they find would just disappear back to the moment of the rollback? If so miners would not want to adopt the new code or at the least should stop mining now (waste of electricity).

All transactions back to the moment of the rollback would just disappear? If so how could that be accomplished? If a user transfers all their ETH to an exchange now sells it for bitcoin, transfers bitcoin out of exchange now, after the roll back doesn't he have his ETH back plus the bitcoin? Doesn't the buyer lose all thier ETH? I understand Kraken has stopped trading ETH (but their CEO has been very supportive of ETH from start?); but, not all other exchanges have followed through.

Seems like a rollback just does not make sense. Is considering one just marketing so those in the know can get their money out?

Ripple is a laughing stock and has been since day 1.
It is regarded as the started of all these ICO scams.

Your comment is retarded .

Nope.. it's a DAPP isn't it ?

A centralized ICO shit coin scam on top of another centralized ICO shit coin scam..

Proof ?

The fact a roll back is even possible.

Funny part is neither is a crypto-currency. LOL
And what was the point here Investards ?
I don't suppose it was a.... decentralized crypto-currency ?

Not only that , but the central masters are looking to Hunt down and DOXX any opponents to their HF.

https://twitter.com/DanDarkPill/status/743789597482692608

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClJ7BrRWgAAZEZu.jpg:large

Don't betray your masters you mETH users!

I think the hard fork to make sure the hacker cannot move the stolen Ethereum is good. I will run the new code.

How can one even discuss the possibility of a hard fork? Nothing's wrong with ethereum's code.

There was no hack, and there is no 'hacker'. There is someone who owns what I would call a spin-off DAO.

Don't buy the propaganda.

Maybe they can use another exploit to get the coins back instead of a fork.

That would be fair, and seems entirely possible given how bug-ridden The DAO and many other Ethereum contracts seem to be.

Shouldve bought Monero.

In retrospect he shouldn't have allowed himself to become so closely tied to the project.  And the DAO should have limited themselves to a much smaller max ETH investment the way Digix did.

We were about to run our project on Ethereum.

After hard fork I'm not sure it is a good idea.

I don't understand how can anyone use blockchain which could be hardforked by creator's decision. :(

Well spoken, so how can you ensure he's not moving lots of coins to himself ....

No. We the community will decide if we want the fork. If you do not agree with the fork, you can run the old codes.

Guys hard fork is almost always a bad idea.

getting the new save heaven ?

... some found NAUT at Polo ...

It is high time the community to alert thieves that will not be tolerated. To attract people to the idea of bitkoin must observe basic human norms.

What will be next step? Court of any country?

I also agree that thieves should not get stolen eth, but hardfork is the worst ideas.

It is the worst ideas. But the bitcoin had many hard forks before, it is doing very well now. Ehtereum is still young.

Bitcoin never had a HF. 2010 was a SF , and 2013 We decided to reject the HF and stay on the original chain!

Hold on, if we hardfork and you can redeem DAO tokens for ETH at 100:1 again, wouldnt be a good idea to buy a bunch of DAO right now when the price is VERY low and redeem it for ETH afterwards for crazy profits?

Nope there was no proof or burn here , as those tokens are holding back ETH from hitting up the market. Once those ETH are release a certain amount of Eth users will sell out to btc or fiat out of fear of further capitulation and uncertainty. Price is likely to continue Dropping. whether you should short or not is another matter.

If you already have the Ethereum, you can buy the DAO at 50% discount and make 100% profit when converting back.

You are gambling on what those ratios will be like in 27 days , and you are assuming that the price of ETH won't slide as it gets dumped for fiat/btc and that there won't be direct trades created that place others ETH ahead of your in the queue.

Honestly i dont see ETH staying very low, theres nothing wrong with it really.. this whole thing will blow over and once BTC stabilizes for a little while ETH will start rising again..

Eth contracts are riddled with Security holes and attack vectors as well. Aren't you aware?

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/

Turing complete and recursion allow for a tremendous amount of exploits and attack vectors. This is just getting started. What you call Ethereum's principle feature is also its greatest weakness.

eth concept is broken. The devs have no idea what they are doing. It's a shitcoin and always was.
There is no way of fixing it. They need to start from scratch. They will soon admit this too.

Vitalik does not decide, the Ethereum community decides if they want to hard fork or not. The miners decide.

A little incentive to "help the miners decide":


https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/exclusive-full-interview-transcript-alleged-dao-attacker/

The fork is for the eth in question is don't think it has anything to do with buying now

Yeah, right. VB was able to stop ETH deposits and withdraws at the exchanges with a conversation. The soft fork is opt-out, not opt-in aka default for the update. VB and his buddies lost coins so they will push everyone to "fix it". ETH is probably the most controlled coin out there. What good are ETH contracts if they can be reversed?

I propose that Ethereum be renamed DoOverCoin.

Ever sent coins to the wrong address?

Ever lost your private key?

Every sent coins to insecure smart contracts?

No problem! DoOverCoin has your back!

Why not VBCoin? He has absolute control over it even on the exchanges.

Where is Vitalik now and what is his latest decision? As he's the one and only decision-maker you all have to listen to him.
Don't trust anyone but especially never trust Russians.

The miners are the decision makers. So for the DAO holders if they want to get their money back, they should become miners as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClToCImUgAAsRzi.jpg

Nice list of scams--

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/

Everybody has an agenda here. Otherwise why do you post here? Just to save the Ethereum community from being destroyed?

Article here where Vitalik Buterin acknowledges some of the ETH stolen on various other smart contracts. Apparently the problems that showed up in the DAO are wide spread.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/

It is getting worse. The DAOAttaker is playing with all the ethereum devs and staying one step ahead.

http://pastebin.com/9MRVDC9h

"We come to you with great pleasure to now offer 2000% or 20x return contracts."

I admit my math skills are old and rusty (similar to my physique); but, none of the price break downs seem to give the type of returns initially offered.

They are the thieves. They want to cheat us again. So I will not trust them. It is as simple as that. They said x20, it is actually x5 or less.

Of course, which was precisely my point.

Perhaps if you read smooth's explanation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15292118#msg15292118) you will understand that miner's should have no voting power whatsoever, as that is the definition of Nash equilibrium, which provides the security of the concensus. In other words, no one should have enough political clout to break the Nash equilibrium and instigate a vote to fork.

That is better, not worse (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1515550.msg15292305#msg15292305).

What he has done is offered to drain the rest of the DAO into others' accounts for them in exchange for a fee. He is increasing his leverage over Vitalik. I expected him to do this, because he understands leverage as he had created MPeX. Vitalik is being revealed to be the ignorant/myopic fool he is. He will force Vitalik to plead with miners to do an emergency hard fork to stop the leverage, which will of course entirely destroy Vitalik's and Ethereum reputation.

I think it is important to note that anyone can start becoming a miner now, to avail of this lucrative offer. Checkmate Butalik! Thus the current vote (http://ethpool.org/stats/votes) is meaningless as it should be in Nash equilibrium (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1515550.msg15292305#msg15292305). The DAO and Turing-complete smart contracts broke Nash equilibrium, as we had warned in the Ethereum Paradox thread.

He paused his contract and offered a 30% haircut for those n00bs who failed to do their due diligence, but the n00bs doubled-down on stoopid by voting for a fork and praying to Butalik, and so now they will lose everything and the clusterfuck will die.

And I expected this, because I know who the attacker enforcer is as I had explained in other posts.



I wish you all could see this memes I made yesterday predicting this outcome:

If I am a miner, I will support the soft fork and freeze the stolen funds. If the DAO holders offer us 50% of the stolen funds, we will do a hard fork.

If the miners can benefit from the hacking like this and the hacker does not benefit, he may think twice before his next hacking.

Other miners will mine more profitably by accepting his offer and thus have a greater hashrate.

Checkmate. Your vote has been economically overridden.

Andreas and Emin getting frantic and grasping for straws:

https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/744769932739624960

Goodbye Ethereum.

An attacker can short ETH as this one already has and walked away with 1-4 million USD. Therefore still has a strong incentive to attack all the many security holes and HF and blacklisting does nothing to stop this.

Perhaps one should focus on using secure block chains and not insecure ones ? Just some advice.

http://techgenix.com/mathematics-ethereum-hack/


This is a more generic point we want to make and not just in Ethereums case but with blockchains in general. HF for the express intent of targeting specific contracts, users, accounts or txs and not to fix fundamentals bugs or errors in future txs places a very dangerous precedent and undermines the integrity of the block chain.

If a block chain has to come to this than you may as well fork the code, rename the project , fix the underlying issues , and start over as all the trust has been lost.

In this case Ethereum cannot fix the underlying issues because it is fundamentally insecure by design and repairing these problems would create a radically different project.

90% of the miners accepts the soft fork. You can see in the http://ethpool.org/stats/votes. But the result is not final yet.

Try again to understand what I wrote.

The set of miners is open and unbounded. Anyone can decide to become a miner today and accept the hacker's more lucrative offer.

It's NOT the DAO attacker.

I think you're right. The DAO attacker most likely has basic math skills.

Redacted reality lol. I would have replaced 'smart' with 'disingenius' (misspelling on purpose).

Isn't the hashing power each miner has more important than the number of miners who support a fork? If a miner with a GPU farm comprising 100 GPUs rejects the fork he could have 100 times more influence than a miner with one GPU.

He who makes the most profit can rent the most GPUs.

He who can print tokens out of thin air by draining the DAO, makes the rules.

Sorry n00bs, you've been PWND.

Isn't there an inter-fork fungibility issue? He can offer miners "higher" payments, but only using coins on the fork that recognizes his ownership. Depending on market value between the forks miners may still be better off on the other one.

Seems to me that confusion is going to mean an ETH price of less than $0.25 for both forks, so the future relative price of them is not relevant right now.

So it seems this is mostly a shorting game now, to convert your ETH to BTC.

And/or to accumulate more ETH cheaply, in hopes it will someday recover and not go to $0 (i.e. die).

I don't think that it will lose value quickly. At most slowly capitulate because founders , developers, and original die hard investors hold most of the coins so the market cap can , misleadingly , remain high. I have seen many shitcoins last a long time in such circumstances. Where we should be looking is the moment when staff at the ETH foundation start leaving due to not being paid and a rush to switch to PoS - this will be the stronger indicator of problems.

Nailed it. But realize that the entire switch to PoS has been this all along.

It will take a long time to die, absent some other unforeseen 'event'.

Yes, but the Casper PoS switchover was planned for later this year (but realistically 1st Q 2017 or later) would likely be moved up if funds started dwindling and price kept falling. Thus any switchover this year would potentially indicate a sense of desperation.

The event you speak of could be multiple targeted and repeated attacks within ethereum contracts directly which indeed could happen. We are finding out that solidity is not the only flawed language on the EVM; Serpent is vulnerable to similar problems.

http://www.joeykrug.com/home/a-serpent-send-exploit


This is what could indeed cause a general panic inducing both investors and a few developers to get out while they can .

Expect Ethereum 2.0 however , these folks are married to the turing complete koolaid.

FTFY

If the "attacker" is successful at winning the majority hashrate to defeat the fork, I expect a dump down quickly to $7 out of the corner of currently closing wedge.

Might get a bounce from there as many might perceive this as a victory for a decentralized Ethereum, although then potentially start the lawsuits from all the DAO losers. So a bounce could later be followed with a series of declines, eventually taking it down < $1. But as you say, this might take a while.

There are other scenarios though.

That could happen. So why would the miners accept the bribe and destroy a long term business. i hope the miners will make a wise decision.

I think Nicehash could provide a rent service. Miners can rent their hash there, whoever pays the highest, get the hashing.

Forking Ethereum destroys their long-term prospects. The following linked poll only confirms 23% of the people here are retards (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15300322#msg15300322) (the other 77% might also be retarded but it isn't confirmed by the poll):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1516799.0


The rest of us (those who aren't retards) will create a replacement for Ethereum which doesn't break the entire goal of crypto (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15306121#msg15306121):

If the majority of the miners accept the bribe and do not soft fork, the Ethereum is destroyed. The ethereum they get is worthless.

Miners not soft forking is not an indication that they accept the bribe. In some cases the miner simply objects to the purpose and intent of the fork.

No forks!

You should buy some graphics cards to build some miners and have a say in the coming fork. You have about 20 days to do that.

That would dilute my capabilities. Others are better matched to that task. I am better matched to preparing a block chain that does everything Ethereum does but better, and which doesn't have a retarded culture.

Besides by miners voting, that means no matter the outcome, Ethereum is already broken. The Nash equilibrium is destroyed.

In fact, this is one of the flaws in Satoshi's design that I have a design fix for.

The miners should not have a vote! No one should have a vote. Politics and voting is what we intended to eliminate (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1520678.msg15309592#msg15309592).

Are you and your friends going to build a new coins similar to Ethereum but better? Will that be PoW mining?

Let's not talk about vaporware. I just want to say that there is a flaw and we need to fix it. And these aren't hollow words.

Im confused about this whole "ETH being forked" and all the controversy surrounding it.
In order for a successful fork to be pulled off by the devs, dont the miners have to majority agree to it for it to actually take place?
Isnt this still "whatever consensus rules?"
- OR -
Do the devs, single handedly have the power to enforce the fork w/o any sort of concensus?

If its the latter then, fuck ETH! Its a fucking scam and I cant support such a coin.
But, if its the former... well, isnt how all crypto works?

BLAH BLAH

as if anyone here would not have supported a fork that would have returned the stolen Gox coins, for example

BTC would be 2000+ now without that; it was 1200 when Gox was destroyed

Now there is an opportunity to prevent a similar thing for ETH so just come to your senses  8)

Also I highly doubt that ETH willl fork again; everyone deserves a 2nd chance.  ;)

The "attacker" (aka noble crypto baron) has gained another 15% of support, now at 35% who won't vote for the fork. The baron will win. It is an economic certainty. Money talks, BS walks.

This bullshit about Ethereum will die if The DAO holders lose their funds is FUD. Ethereum will die if you fork it. Don't make the mistake of investing with retarded crowds, as you'll end up bankrupt and retarded.

If the "attacker" wins, the Ethereum will be dead. If there is soft fork but no hard fork, the Ethereum holder will win, and there is some mining for miners in the near future.

I agree with what you wrote. In either case though the fork has to be first suggested by the developers (since they make the code changes). Then the question that needs to be asked is what are the criteria for these code changes? There are examples of other ETH being stolen previous to the DAO due to bad code and the developers never reacted (basically it was "sorry about your bad luck"). In the situation of the DAO the developers are heavily invested and suddenly theft due to bad code requires a fork.

The ethics are simply self interest of the developers. I'm all for self interest; but, the marketing apparatus is selling it as community driven. I think this upsets some people (which is understandable).

Repercussions need to be considered as well. Apparently the fix allows blacklisting of any ETH address in the future. This should worry anyone since once ETH becomes POS the stake holders and not miners will have unlimited control. Since the percentage of ETH mined is nothing in comparison to the percentage that was premined as a result a very small group will determine when a contract can be annulled.

That's my take on it.

Note: I have no intention of getting into a pissing match with the marketing group and as such won't respond to ignorance.

The soft fork is to save the Ethereum itself. I do not want to see a thief steal 3.6 million coins and dump on the market.

That could be right. But there still about 25% of the miners do not want to get back the funds from the thief.

https://petertodd.org/2016/ethereum-dao-bailout-vote

He said "A Bailout Needs a Coin Vote". How do we do coin vote? I thought the miners determines the fork.

It is well documented how one can do a coinvote and there are already services that do this.
In bitcoin land we consider economic full nodes to ultimately be in control and not miners. Miners can be discarded if they betray the users quite quickly.

 It will be interesting to see what direction the Ethereum community decides but they are headed in a very dangerous direction.

After the hard fork, will anyone continue to mine the old ETH chain for ideological reasons?

Most miners will continue to mine if there is no other profitable coin to mine. Most miners invest to make profit.

That's a bit cryptic. I think that's a 'no' for you?

If there is profit to be made, why not mine the Ethererm? But if the Ethereum is dead, nobody will mine it.

If they fork nobody will trust Ethereum ever again.  Curious to see how they'll resolve the hack.

Please reread the question. ::)

this is very special occasion. That shows the support of the community to alleviate the loss caused by a big theft.

Nash equilibrium is interesting stuff. As always ignorance and greed is the biggest dangers.  

Vitalik is a fool, really. He's good with maths but has no capabilities in bordering fields.
The whole eth-team is youngsters who haven't the slighhtest clue wtf they're doing.

eth is out the window already with the SF:


So the SF already was an illegal confiscation of funds under swiss law while the hacker just executed a contract they offered. So basically Vitalik and his friends are the thiefs, not the one executing their code.

This is 100% accurate

But is the hacker from Swizerland as well? How about the DAO owner who have their coins stolen by the hackers?

I do not think so. The old Ethreum chain could have very  low hash rate and it is vulnable to be 51% attacked.

I bet when a chain has 60% of the mining power, all the miners will mine that chain. Most miners are for the money.

I support a hard fork, but I no longer support ethereum. Their dream and vision was nice but their implementations are flawed for so many reasons. I viewed them as a respectable team, but they don't know what they're doing, they're still learning and trying to figure this out. Even the former CEO of Ethereum said Vitalik had made a 'rookie' mistake, both by backing and hyping this project and then his own reactions to the event. He's new at this. Truth is not all founders are meant to be CEO and being able to write code and create a language doesn't mean you're able to create something good. They'll learn from this, and maybe they'll build better or fall apart. I'm sure there are enough people in the ethereum community who have enough trust and faith in Ethereum for it to slowly be earned back. Whether they build better or not, I don't know. I already have a problem with having to purchase an altcoin in order to send/transact with another altcoin so Ethereum in practice is just a nuisance to me. Plus now every other app including the digixdao is citing possible vulnerabilities as a result of Ethereum's issues. Definitely doesn't look good right now to say, "Built with Ethereum". We'll see when Serenity is released if that changes as they gain more experience.

I agree with you. We need more decentralised decision making. And the new programs have to be checked properly.

Yes, it's good for the future of Ethereum and acceptable in early stages. Then Factom can anchor into Ethereum and we can all go on with our merry lives.

"Geth 1.4.9 is a reversal release to undo the code changes that went into the 1.4.8 "DAO Wars" soft-fork release, as the soft-fork was deemed too vulnerable to DOS attacks, opening up the entire Ethereum network to resource abuse by malicious users."

When are we going to get the soft fork?

For anyone still wondering . . .

 :D

Quote from this article  https://blog.colony.io/why-a-post-hard-fork-ethereum-will-be-more-valuable-abc35bbf6e98#.2jfczxeho



(Maybe I misunderstood what immutability of a blockchain means , so please correct me if wrong.)

Doesn't forking an existing blockchain actually create a "new" blockchain with similar past and different future?
The "old" one still exists with unchanged parameters/fundamentals and with enough support from miners it can be kept alive.

So there could be 2 different blockchains running in parallel. Ethereum and NewEthereum.

Can you change a blockchain without effectively creating a new one?

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to say "Peoples/miners choice (on which blockchain to support) is not immutable"?

Yes sir. See the current dillemma with bitcoin classic/core. Two completely different block chains, hence the collective butthurt of the community as we struggle to pick a side. With that being said, really doesn't matter. The Chinese farms dictate which we will adopt. We lost our early lead on mining and are subsequently at the beck of those that currently control it.

One doesn't even have to read past the first three sentences to know that this guy is clearly talking his book.  He owns DAO and also has a couple of other Ethereum-supported projects. 

It's a well-written piece.  He makes some strong arguments.  He does a good job refuting some of the counter-arguments to a hard fork.  But I think his fundamental argument that it would be MORE valuable is completely unsupported.  Truth is, nobody knows the impact of the loss of trust caused by the sloppy work upfront and the efficacy of the attacks that inhibit the soft fork.  What will the next attack be?  Where will it come from?  Will they roll everything back AGAIN to thwart it? 

His argument that it somehow IMPROVES mainstream perception of Ethereum is, well, not actually an argument.  It's an anecdote followed by an opinion.  I happen to have the opposite opinion. 

Finally, he doesn't address my main concern, which is the precedent of colluding with miners to do the bidding of the Foundation.  This is NOT GOOD for a lot of reasons.  One of those reasons is the precedent it sets of collusion.  What happens if a government wants to intervene and threaten the miners to fork because they THINK there is a homeland security issue?  What happens if they want to roll back just because they feel people aren't paying capital gains taxes?  What happens if MegaCorp sees that they could easily afford the required bribes to do whatever it is that THEY want?  ETH is roughly a billion in market cap.  Apple has $160 billion on hand an Microsoft has $85 billion. 

ETH isn't too big to fail.  On the contrary, it's too small to save. 

That's what I think is going to happen. American regulators don't listen to ideological arguments (except for the ones that squarw with their own ideology) but they do listen to practical/technological arguments. One of the big reasons why they've been kept at bay from the crypto-only sphere, over and above the small-scale nature of this space, is the fact that a blockchain rollback is very messy with Bitcoin's chains of tx outputs.

If the Ethereum folks can show the wold that a "surgical" excision is possible with a blockchain-altering hard fork, that infeasibility argument becomes dubious for the Ethereum system and its likesake.

Normally a chain that matters should only be forked if it is defunct or very close to being defunct - in such circumstances you get an easy consensus on forking it.

One shouldn't expect a consensus for a fork on a chain that isn't defunct.

That's the nature of the thing. The consensus-algo protects the chain from hostile takeovers. It's a feature, not a bug that the chain is hard to change. If no change is necessary, why would you change it?

Colluding with the miners is not a problem. Some people think it is fine for the "hacker" to take away the money from the DAO by exploiting a bug in the system. It is also fine for miners to get the money back by not exploiting a bug. That is all the 51% attack does. It is in the design of any block chain.

If they hardfork eth then it's over for them.  No way.

Ethereum  is just an experiment, although quite expensive experiment. I saw the soft fork soft ware was withdrawn due to a bug. It is possible to create a soft fork which has no obvious bug? Is that limited by the Ethereum built in structure?

I think the hacker stole by deception and that is certainly theft.

My problem isn't collusion per se, but collusion at the behest of the Foundation.  I don't think anybody believes their motives are as pure as the driven snow. 

Foundation is dysfunctional. It lacks governance, it's full of factions. But the scheme behind this theft is probably more complex. Of course a certain faction could be a part of it. But following some trails, logs, public stances, Mircea, letters, timings, suggests that this was usual speculators game. There are many lies in truths in lies and so on, but ultimately all shows normal crypto world dirty tricks. Dressed in big words often.
Ethereum can be blamed for utter irresponsibility (especially certain people there) and inability to identify whom should they bribe first. Not for collusion per se. We live here in a very corrupted but funny world.

The Foundation members want to make some money out of Ethereum initially. But they did not realise they could have made so much. It was more than $1b.

Real time count of the ongoing fork - no fork vote -> http://carbonvote.com/

Sentiments are fud and bearish, hmmm maybe hardfork will do the opposite and price will increase instead :D

The old chain will live.
https://github.com/ethereumclassic/README

Kraken has some warnings about this which is worth noting for any user of their platform.

So what is the definite date of the hard fork? Have they decalred it already? This might be good or bad for the platform. If they do hard fork they should hope that banks and companies will still be interested in using the platform.

20th July....  Oh the banks are too far in now to cop out.  They were the ones that voted up the fork,  well you can't let just the miners decide about the future of the banking system can you?  Moreover: only about 6 months left of mining before PoS anyway.

>So what is the definite date of the hard fork?
The hard fork will occur at block 1,920,000 on or around Wednesday, July 20th.
>Have they decalred it already?
Yup. Totally decalred.
>This might be good or bad for the platform.
I 'spose.
>If they do hard fork they should hope that banks and companies will still be interested in using the platform.
Let 'em have it. ETHC will fork away from Vitalik and his nanny chain can whore itself out to the highest bidder. :)

Thats a done deal.  It's called The R3 Consortium
As of June 23rd they are:
Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, State Street, UBS, Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citi, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank,  Mizuho Bank, Nordea, UniCredit,  BNP Paribas, Wells Fargo, ING, Macquarie Group, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce,  BMO Financial Group, Danske Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Natixis, Nomura, Northern Trust, OP Financial Group, Banco Santander, Scotiabank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, U.S. Bancorp, Westpac Banking Corporation, SBI Holdings of Japan, Hana Financial of South Korea, Bank Itau of Brazil and Toyota Financial Services.

Not that there are any cartels in the banking world  :D  But, surely you didn't think that bloated market cap came from forum users did you?

Excellent observation!!! Many people still believe it came from normal users. Lol.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4t2jfq/security_the_oldtonewchain_replay_attack_and_the

Replay Attacks Incoming!

LoL, I was planning to run both chains at the same time too, I wonder how many others will do the same :D

"There could be an issue in the way the P2P protocol was split that causes cross-talk. There could also be myriad game theoretical attacks possible, like we saw in the DAO -- this is a protocol level change and not just a single contract, it's very much more complex. The DAO was studied for months and much was missed, this has been days from conception to completion."

 :)

So you should buy a lot of Ethereum now and then you will have double the amount in both chains.

Is tentative date for hardfork?

Is this true? Was there an official statement saying it so? Because Ethereum has a myriad of problems we have not seen yet. Who is even the expert telling them to commit to Ethereum? And also scalability is a concern.

Vitalik should relax and think this through. You can very may well see that the leadership in Ethereum is in panic mode. This is their inexperience showing.

If the majority of the miners accept the bribe and do not soft fork, the Ethereum is destroyed. The ethereum they get is worthless.

The soft fork proposal is long dead, it would have left ETH vulnerable to DoS attacks. You should know this.

https://ethereumclassic.github.io/

https://medium.com/@bit_novosti/a-crypto-decentralist-manifesto-6ba1fa0b9ede#.4o81jqizo

The revolt against the HF is growing.

Yep soft fork is history.  Anyway what does it have to do with miners?  The pools decide which "Geth" they run.  Miners will not solo to their own "Geth", it takes to long to find a block.  And the pools will probably end up being the validators when it all goes to PoS

Anyone can vote on http://carbonvote.com/ it is not just limited to miners

I'd like to see a real exchange come out in support ETHC trading.

What is your definition of real exchanges?

https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/118
https://poloniex.com/press-releases/2016.07.15-Ethereum-Hard-Fork/

And we are locked in for the hard fork... -> https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.4.10

87% of ETH voted for the hard fork but roughly only 5% of the outstanding ether voted. It is going to be a very interesting experiment indeed. Can both chains survive long term? and could the aggregate value be greater than the original chain?

Make sure your ETH are in an address you control before block 1920000.

There is mention that Poloniex is the only exchange that will allow withdrawals to both chains. How true is this and what will be the implications? Would it also be possible for a user to own coins in both chains simultaneously?

Real enough. :)

Of course. You need to have the ETH in an address you control before the hardfork happens and then make a copy of your wallet and run 2 instances of geth one on each blockchain.
If your ETH are at an exchange when the hard fork happens you'll get whatever the exchanges decides.

Coinbase To Add Ethereum Direct Buys later This Month

Prob after 20th, but you will be able to buy Eth with a linked card or sell eth and have the cash put on your credit card, just like btc.  (Thanks R3)  ;)

quote:

The lay of the land

Within the decentralized community, there remains disagreement on the path forward, a factor that has given rise to vigilante efforts, most notably the mysterious Robin Hood group.

This group of coders, whose identities are largely unknown as a matter of security, has prepared a two-prong maneuver – or white-hat attack – against the Dark DAO exploiters.

The measure is a safety net of sorts, in case the hard fork, now the only option developers have to regain the funds, fails in any way.

At stake in this epic computer battle between white hats and Dark DAOs is more than investor funds, but potentially the future of a new business model without leaders.

Some, including Jentzsch, are now worried that, should efforts by the community to resolve the situation be unsuccessful, government authorities will step in.

end quote:

Source: http://www.coindesk.com/author-daos-original-code-minimize-regulatory-backlash/

Poloniex will support the main chain. But it will also support the secondary chain briefly. So you can have two coins.

the price will go down if:

A. They do not fork as the dao hacker will likely sell all that ETH

B. They do fork and those people who recover their funds from the hack will sell their ETH because they are scared and want out of a broken system/project.

Heads you lose, tails you lose.

They just lose less if they do A because then there reputation isn't now tarnished with "do-overs" and rollbacks that can happen in the future should there be another hack down the road.

Why are people buying this stuff up to this price? Like you, I can't see the uncertainly immediately after the fork helping anything. So why is this price riding so high? I think it's being manipulated up for the short of the century.

My guess: There are a lot of financial interests at hand that have a bias with the price going up as opposed to down.

But I think this whole DAO hack fiasco has been ETH's "mtgox moment".

Its not the same thing but it sure feels the same from a sentiment standpoint as far as a crisis is concerned.

It's indeed ETHs Mt Gox moment but it's also showing how strong and resilient the ETH community is. #TogetherWeAreETH

It seems the trolls are the people who do not own the Etheruem. They mainly own the Monero or other altcoin.

One big troll could be from the Monero community. Once up a time, they will post all over the forum about Monero.

From the current voting about the hard fork, it seems most of the miners who voted support the hard fork.

Only one pool ethpool.org has fewer miners vote for the hard fork. But it will follow the majority of the miners.

Announcement from ethpool.org:

According to the voting result (65% in favor of not supporting the fork) the pool is supposed not to support the fork. But as all other major pools (e.g. dwarfpool, ethermine, nanopool) are supporting the fork we can and will not jeopardize any mining income of the pool by mining on a chain that has a very high probability to get orphaned. Therefore, according to our voting policy stated in the announcement, we will support the hard fork. More information on the upcoming fork can be found on the Ethereum blog. As a pool miner you do not need to take any action on your side because of the fork.

65% of the miners in ethpool.org support no fork, but other pools support the hard fork, so it will support HF as well.

Gud news all round.

Almost 60% of Ethereum miners have upgraded to support Ethereum’s historical hardfork, reaching a conclusive and final decision in alignment with the wishes of Ethereum holders who voted overwhelmingly in favor of the fork, with 87% supporting the restoration of stolen property to their rightful owners.

So the interest of the miners and the Ethereum holder are the same. Does it indicate most miners are also holders?

The hard fork is just 30 minutes away. It seems there are not many Ethereum tolls in the forum now.

Don't worry. They will be here continually hating and fudding ETH even if the HF is a success or not.

So much eth FUD happening. Price will increase instead my gut feeling says

According to http://etherscan.io/,

Hard Fork Successfully Activated

Please ensure that you are running the latest Clients

Does that means, the hard fork is already over?

If not, when will it be over?

Yes. The largest chain has been established and the stolen funds returned.

That is good news. It seems the Ethereum price is also rising. The price is around 0.019 now. It might rise again.

So what are the updates on the fork and how is the Ethereum community coping?  Judging from the price it looks like it's business as usual for now.  I personally am still worried for the platform.  The attacker is still out there looking for his next victim.

There is a 1Bio bounty and a giant attack surface. I think there are 1k potential attackers out there, at least?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/rejecting-today-s-hard-fork-the-ethereum-classic-project-continues-on-the-original-chain-here-s-why-1469038808

It is good that some people will continue with the the Ethereum Classic. Those bitcoin shills can support it.

Yup and the classic chain is open to replay attacks. Have fun with that Spoetniktards.

As would the 'original' Ethereum; it was the DAO that was affected, not ETH. Replay attacks can still happen, on both chains.

Minecache, both chains are fundamentally flawed. What don't you get about this?  Do you have mental issues??

Has the relay attack happen? Very interested in seeing that happen. Somebody might make some money out of that.

38,000 ether sent to the DAO.
https://twitter.com/LaurentMT/status/756262043309793280
Fork it again!!

Both chains are open to replay attacks. But preventing replay attacks is incredibly easy to do. Just split your ETH into unique addresses on the respective chains. And if you don't intend to ever transact on one of the chains, you can ignore replay attacks entirely.

Unfortunately for that guy, Vitalik and ETH Foundation / Slock it do not have money at stake. No fork for you!

Similar things happen in bitcoin. Some people send money to wrong address, nobody cares about that.

So far, the Ethereum community is quite satisfied with the outcome of the hard fork, the price is rising a lot.

The Ethereum price might have reached a short term peak, it seems the price is dropping a bit now.

The drama is just getting started. Ethereum Classic is growing in support.

ETC/ETH and ETC/BTC pairs already trading on Poloniex

https://twitter.com/Poloniex/status/757069127018315777

And Ethereum classic being added to Bitfinex soon -

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4uczsp/bitfinex_to_list_ethc_soon/d5opzjn

https://twitter.com/EthereumClassic/status/757214748291141633

Miners are starting to move over to support Ethereum classic as that chain is currently more profitable to mine from. Hashrate on ETC is growing and it as Ethereum price crashes looks like ETC may start to eat away more market share. 

Complete lies. The hash rate on etc has collapsed and miners abandoned it.

Ethereum Classic Difficulty keeps climbing as miners switch over ... up 5.2% now - http://fork.ethstats.net/

Ethereum Core developer plans to support Ethereum Classic -
https://medium.com/@zsfelfoldi/a-tale-of-two-chains-3f6d58a9df4a#.4vchxki6m

Don't look now...  :)

All great news. It was tough going mining early on when all we had was Bitshares. We've really turned a corner here, and quickly! ETH users now have a true choice -- insiders tried to manufacture consensus, and failed.

In my opinion both sides  - the "hardforkers" and the "Classic" guys - are right in certain way:

ETH Hardforkers sustain that Ethereum is, above all, a community with democratic rules. That's what also Vitalik means when he talks about weak subjectivity. In my opinion, he is right: Cryptocoins with no communities would not work, and even in an nearly-objective coin design like Bitcoin there are subjective decisions to be taken (which BIPs to include, for example).

ETH Classic guys argue that smart contracts can only work if "code is law". That means that they value objectivity more than subjectivity. They are also right: Smart contracts, as they are modeled after real contracts, can only work really if they are regarded as valid and irreversible.

So who is right now? In my opinion, it depends how you market/communicate the platform. If you market it as a "objective" platform, how ETH has done until now, then the "ETH Classic" approach is nearer to the truth. But if ETH switches its marketing strategy to a "democratic contract model", where contracts are not totally objective, then its approach to take into consideration the community's choices is also valid. But it may have less usage cases.

I see a problem with a community that votes on wallet balances of other people. Don't you? Hardfork for wallet balance not for technical issues? Excuse me?!

What could go wrong? hahaha
mETH is a joke. If anything is viable it's ETC.

Exactly, that's the problem. If you have a community that can vote your balance to zero, even if according to the code of your smart contract your profits are "legit" (e.g. not the consequence of a real hack, e.g. a DDOS attack) then that means that the contract is not irreversible. Contracts should only be reversed by consent of all its parties, not by a majority.

I know they're saying now "all ETC supporters are sympathizing with the hacker". It's not about that. It's about to recognize that contracts can be buggy and that you have to make a risk analysis before you invest in a DAO or a similar model.

That's why I'm more in favor of ETC than of the old ETH in this conflict.

There is no problem if you are in favour of the ETC. Have you bought any ETC or mined the Ether Classic.

The ETC is very cheap to buy now, its price dropped 50% in the last day. You might buy cheaper in the future.

ETC is gonna skyrocket!!!  From $50 million to over a billion. 

And all that with no devs? lol

so etc will replace eth ?  ???

No.  Both are game.  At least short - medium term.

Oh, you mean like the brilliant devs from ETH?  lol

I'm going to hold 5 coins for a week, on an experiment. My ultimate prediction is that ideology (and profit motive) is going to cause a temporary exit from ETH to ETC. My reasoning? Way easier to mine ETC. This will create some selling pressure, but I think everyone won't be so quick to sell. ESP if btc keeps sliding down.

Slightly concerned about the dip.


Disclaimer: holding 5 etc

Yes. With 10 months we've made a billion dollar market. What have you done?

The Eth technology can be applied to the ETC. But if the ETC wants to develop other things, it has to employ somebody.

It is too early to think about that. I am wondering if the ETC can withstand the attack from the dumping of the ETC by various interested parties,

Please, if you realized how dumb your post was, it would not finish with lol.

When the Ethereum holders dump their ETC, the price could drop a lot, and not many people will mine it, it is quite dangerous.

Looks like the ETC pump is fading. ETC hash rate is now 10% of ETH.

I have a question. Why and how did the slock.it developers end up developing an insecure smart contract? I thought they have security reviews and security audits done with them and they were very confident it is secure. Maybe someone should get to the bottom of this.

According to coinmarketcap.com there are twice ether (eth + etc) in circulation. That's correct or am I missing something?

In what way did they have an insecure smart contract ?  They simply had a smart contract that didn't do what they said/intended it to do.  But that's normal.  No code ever does exactly as intended.  They told you upfront that you shouldn't take their intentions as the law, but rather the code.  And then people came in and changed the block chain, so that what they said wasn't true either.  Now nor the code, nor their intentions are the law.

At present there are two versions of the Ethereum being listed by some exchanges. But one of them could be a scam.

All ETH developers are automatically also, whether they want or not, ETC developers, given that it is essentially identical open source code.

So what you are saying is that ETC being the Criminals coin they are stealing all the ETH devs hard work.

#ETC=EthereumCriminals

Visibly, you didn't understand the concept of smart contract and "code is law", and now you don't understand the concept of "free open source code".

No, law is law. And a thief will always be a thief.

"theft" is a legal concept, and hence, whether an action is theft, depends obviously on the law system under which it is considered.

But in case you don't know, it is a legal property of free open source code that copying it is NOT theft.

I wish the DAO hacker will sue the miners responsible for the hard fork, so that we will know if he "steal".

he probably understand, but since he is a mETH head he will keep spaming "ETC criminal" for whatever you say.

So do not think it is also legal for somebody to 51% attack a crypto currency and hacking due to a bug in a software?

There is discussion about ETC hardfork:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4vfeif/we_should_hardfork_to_prevent_replay_attacks_on/?st=iraj1ct3&sh=d1c05768

thats what "open source" means.

do you know how much in cryptoland is open source and build on or with common code? miners, pools, coins?

So there is no problems that the ETC is 51% attacked by some people as that is built in the protocol?

According to code is law theory, you can do anything wit the codes, you can explore the bugs without being arrested.

children will be children..

No, "code is law" is a specific property of smart contracts, when the code, and only the code, is the contract.
Most, not to say, all, other code running is not a contract, and is supposed to implement intend, can hence contain bugs and exploits (= deviations from intend).

The funny thing is that the people crying about the absurd concept of "code is law" are the ETH guys, who were in fact promoting ETH because.... it proposed smart contracts and "code is law".  Nowhere else, code is law.  Not even the Ethereum or bitcoin system.  There, code is trying to implement intend (of white paper protocol), like everywhere else.

It is hugely, mightily, ironic and funny that people crying "thief", "bug", "exploit", are the ONLY ONES that were touting "code is law" as the superior property of their baby, ethereum !  Nobody else in his right mind was ever considering "code is law".

On the other hand, a 51% attack on a block chain is also a rightful thing to do in a certain respect, because a block chain is supposed to be an emergent property of mutually antagonistic entities.  The theory is that the emerging block chain will be immutable and respect the protocol, but that's nothing else but a hope for an emergent property.  A 51% attack is nothing else but that hope failing.  But a 51% attack is perfectly "legit" in the framework of block chains, as the goal of such a system is that every agent in the system tries to rip off every other agent.  If some succeed, that's their good "right".    A block chain is simply postulated to be the right thing that emerges from a war zone.  If that theory fails (the "51% attack") that's a pity, but not unlegit in a war zone.

Does it also mean that double spend is allowed as if you have 51%+ mining power, you can do whatever you want?

Everything is allowed.  That's fundamental in the "trustless" world.  It is a Darwinist fight.

If not, then you need only to put in sufficient safeguards so that any mischievous action is difficult enough for it to be able to be taken to court and justice, and you wouldn't need to spend 400 million dollars a year on wasting PoW on bitcoin for instance.  Much less PoW would be sufficient to limit the number of attacks to a reasonable number so that "justice" (whatever power game THAT is) can handle it.

It is the difference between putting a lock on your door to make life more difficult for a burglar, but the real protection against burglars is the law and police, on one hand, and an old sea pirate hiding his treasure on an island in the Pacific, with no legal protection at all.

It is ironic that they coined the term "the code is law" and yet if it goes against them they throw the concept under the table and roll back the transactions. This made them look like fools trying to act like geniuses. The only fix that can be done is to continue with the original chain.

Indeed, and that with a system that is, by definition, not verifiable, because Turing complete.

The only smart contracts, where code = law can make any sense, are those where the full tree of possibilities can be explored (which means it has to be a tree of reasonable size, and not a graph, hence not Turing complete).

I think smart contracts and code=law can be a great idea, but with SIMPLE contracts that can be totally explored.   If the full tree of all possible behaviours can be analysed, then one can be sure that it doesn't contain "exploits" and "bugs" - somewhat similar to the safety analysis of code in airplanes or in nuclear power plants. 

That is right. You can ask for the 400 confirmation instead of 6 confirmations to determine a transaction is valid.

That will make the transaction too slow. So basically the coin cannot be used a any kind of normal business.

Many Ethereum developers have stated that they will support the Ethereum ETC only. So there will be less development for the ETC.

Maybe the ETC supporters will have enough money and employ developers to do the development.

If the DAO hacker declare that he will not dump his coins, the price of ETC will rise a lot. And he will have enough to support the development.

Anyone could claim theyre "the attacker" and that they either dump / support ETC to manipulate the price. And he only atacked dao to get rich, not because he has a kind heart and cares about eTC, don't be naive and stupid. I mean, i do expect alot of messages from hacker / manipulators to try and manipulate the price further by telling something and doing the opposite, like chandler guo guy who threatened to atack ETC and then mined on it because the difficulty was so low, it was profitable. Better play lottery than invest in ETC, you'll never have inside information about the manipulations ahead.

The point of this post I agree with. Yes, it is every man for himself in trading in the cryptosphere. Any newbie that comes here in the forum is a sheep among wolves. Some of them get skinned alive but others adapt and get out a better investor but has become more cynical and skeptical.

The DAO hacker does not necessary like the Ethereum or the ETC. He is in for the money. So the price of ETC might crash to zero.

That could be true. We should not pin our hope of the success on the actions of the a single hacker who might not care about other people.

The ETC price is dropped against ETH at the moment. The price has dropped 25% in the last 24 hours. The dump might have started.

The dump is indeed on right now. There are massive sell walls across all exchanges.

I will be sad to see ETC go. The ETC has diverted some hash rate from ETH so I have mined more than expected ETH.

I mined few ETH in the last two days due to the increased difficulty. Maybe the ETC should be kept live for longer.

In several months you will not be able to mine ETH anymore because Vitalik will fork it again and make the switch to Casper POS. :D So better for you to start also mining ETC to help secure it so that it will not die.

Do you mean there is no plan for the ETC to fork into PoS in the future? If so, I will mine ETC when I cannot mine ETH.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4xasg3/follow_up_statement_on_the_etc_salvaged_from/?st=irri2xtr&sh=eda9fbff

The full statement.

Following the events of the last 24 hours we want to keep the community updated:

After having received repeated legal threats from various individuals holding significant stakes in The DAO (still continuing), we sought legal advice to help us pursue our goal without endangering ourselves or the salvaged funds. We found support and legal advice from Bity SA, a trusted Swiss entity. It has agreed to protect, secure and later distribute the funds equitably under an independent Swiss legal structure. The number 1 goal has always been to ensure that the salvaged funds are distributed in a fair, transparent and just manner. This remains unchanged.

When the salvaged ETC were able to be recovered, signals were received from the greater community to distribute these ETC in ETH, to continue to support Ethereum projects. Also, a large portion of the community does not have the technical ability to safely work both with ETC and ETH in the same address; therefore, returning part of salvaged ETC in ETH seemed to be the safest for all the parties involved. The first actions from the Swiss structure took place Tuesday August 9th and it preferred to not announce the movement of ETC in advance to avoid speculators taking advantage of the situation. Part of these funds are still on exchanges and the rest of the funds are held in the following accounts:

ETC Multisig: 0x1ac729d2db43103faf213cb9371d6b42ea7a830f

ETH Multisig: 0xd3b0b4fc31ee1f8570c75c19caa93cc1557e538f

BTC Multisig: 3JYwxuaHGKt8rZ9NbTEcyYRXtqkfN5Lz5Y

BTC Multisig2: 3Er3uMqBruv8VnhXUjyRbp2McASUE8t9HA

It has now become clear that this approach will introduce many unnecessary complications and wouldn’t bring certainty to all DAO Token Holders that they would be treated equally and with fairness. The objective evolved from the most desirable outcome (distributing ETH and ETC) to the most efficient and comprehensible distribution solution, that all funds will be made available in ETC to the DAO Token Holders. To achieve this, all exchanges will be asked to return the funds to the Multisig wallets.

We would like to thank the community for their trust and ask for their patience as the responsibility of returning this value to the DAO Token Holders is not an easy task. We are under a lot of pressure, but throughout this process we will continue to do the best that we can to protect the interests of the DAO Token Holders.

All the legal and technical work of the community members and the companies involved, has always been on a volunteer and pro-bono basis. Following our first statement, members of the community have expressed their keenness to donate crypto assets in recognition for the efforts deployed to salvage the ETC from the attackDAOs and to distribute it back to the community. Accordingly, it will be possible to donate when retrieving the funds. We will communicate next with a detailed plan for the distribution.

You are right. After the hard fork, the DAO hacker did not steal any Ethereum, or at least, he did not get what he wanted.

More information about the plan of the white hat.
https://blog.bity.com/2016/08/13/the-white-hats-and-dao-wars-behind-the-scenes/

They will return the ETC to the original holders. They have sold some ETC to get some ETH. But they will buy the ETC now.

That is their intention. But it might not happen very soon. As they want to do the things right this time. It could take months.

They might hold until the ETC price crash to 0 and then buy back the ETC and return to the original DAO holders.

etc price is definitely not going to go down to such low numbers, in my opinion right now it is only going to grow because it is better than ethereum

How the fuck can a coin based purely on greed and theft be better than ETH?!? That's correct, it isn't.

You stupid fuck. Figure out the words immutably and fugibility.

ETH is the coin based on greed and theft. Get it right.

It seems crazy when folks attempt to characterize ETC as being based on greed and theft, when in fact ETC seemed to be an attempt to temper the level of greed and theft occurring within ETH, especially in the most recent days.

Neither ETH nor ETC are great coins, but at least ETC had attempted to make a better effort to modify ETH in such a way to make it closer to bitcoin (at least in the decentralized and immutability direction), which almost makes ETC an honorable approach that is attempting to fix a bad foundation.

How lofty Wisdom must wonder at the revolts of usurping Power.  :'(

Remember the clack of scared stones,
the rhythmic throat-songs of upheaval,
the rush of fledgling warriors.
Remember the foot-falls on earthenware and bone,
the blood-feuds, the oaths pledged to idols of block and chain.

It is the other way around. ETH is based on greed and part of the Ethereum foundation and slock.it are thieves. They have shown a propensity that they are capable of such criminal acts. White collar crimes, yes but still the criminal intent is there.

So Minecache, if ETH is hacked again with millions stolen and Vitalik again decides to fork will ETH be a criminal coin now?

I think that I am saying very similar things to you, and I am in agreement that ETH has many greater problems with various attempts at intermeddling - and sooner or later they are going to fuck up too much and get some attention... I would not put it passed government institutions and financial institutions attempting to enable Ethereum in its various centralization intermeddling.. but sooner or later, they are going to have to snuff them out because too many people are getting screwed by some of the internally conflicting attempts to contain complicated outcomes, while playing with people's money.

To the extent that ETC can decentralize Ethereum, wow, ETC may become the savior of the shitty coin(s) situation.

The situation that I do not want to happen is what if the financial institutions and the government institutions come after not only Ethereum and their founders but all of the cryptosphere. They will attempt to control it and ban it that they will not allows us to take part in the world of cryptocurrencies because it is "illegal". Another question is will that stop you?

Maybe it is a good time to start learning about how to be more anonymous online.

Does it mean it is better not to have a foundation type of centralised controller? Then the development will be similar to bitcoin, very inefficient.

And that's exactly what it should be.  Once the protocol is correctly coded, there's actually almost no need for "development".
Once the rules of the chess game were laid out, there's no need for "development".  You play chess the same way one played it 100 years ago.

So why there still bitcoin developers in the play? I think the protocol can also be developed after many years later.

You seem to be suggesting that inefficiency is a bad thing for bitcoin.

You know there are a lot of balancing of attributes in this world, and efficiency is one of the balancing attributes.  Bitcoin brings some things much greater to the table of currency - and efficiency is not one of them (at least not efficiency from a centralized point of view).   If you want to achieve decentralization and immutability, then in order to achieve such paradigm shifting greatness, you likely have to be willing to give a little less priority to efficiency...

Let me give another example of efficiency... human emotions are not efficient, but if we want to allow humans to have some semblance of agency, then we need to allow some of those emotional inefficiencies .. there are other examples as well, but I think that I have said enough for now to largely attempt to make my point.

Maybe they have a hard time leaving ?

Well one thing is developing, and another thing is promoting and selling or changing for the sake of change.

I agree that there is likely very little need for development with bitcoin, except to entertain the possibility of possible changes, tweaks with the passage of time... so for example, scaling will likely always be a bit of an issue... to not make too big and not allow to stay too small.

Also, if an improvement proposal is made, there is likely needs within a community to assess whether such a proposal is capable of achieving consensus, and certainly developers could be sufficiently familiar and articulate enough to assess possible technical issues.. so in the end, it seems quit logical that with an adequately programed coin, such as bitcoin, changes to the protocol would be extraordinary occurrences rather than something that took place on the regular.

The foundation formation is very efficient. But if there is anything wrong with the Foundation leadership, it is bad for the Ethereum.

Yes it will be better.  Look what happened to Ethereum because of this central controller.  They did a sloppy hard fork which would not happen if the 'inefficient' governance structure of Bitcoin was in place.

I think the hard fork was not implemented properly. They should declare that they would not support anyother fork during the time.

That certainly eth will give something good for the future. We just have to wait for an extraordinary life on this earth, because we need time to do it all. Still delight in the way this world and life we never envied (negative) about the success of a person. So just give the spirit knows

Yeah.. right...

That's not how a hardfork works.  You must be thinking about a softfork, if you think that you are going to slowly merge folks into the dominant chain.   

In fact, the ETH foundation jumped to a fairly rash conclusion and had been throwing around the idea of fork for quite some time, and really they had forked before; however, this particular latest fork happened to be a bit more controversial than they had expected.

Yeah, if they had clarified that the hardfork was not controversial, before they did it, then it would not have been a problem.  Instead they acted rashly.

The Ethereum Foundation should make clear it would kill the other fork to keep the main chain, then there will be no ETC.

I think that will happen in the next few weeks with the Foundation to dump ETC and so will some big holders of the ETC.

Are you talking about "should have done"?  That is water under the bridge.  What is done has been done.  ETC is here, and it is very likely that ETH foundation fucked up in the way that they implemented the hardfork and their lack of due diligence before they jumped into such a quagmire.

So?  What is that going to do?  Temporarily drive down the price of ETC and cause fewer ETC coins to be held by ETH holders, and then after that will the ETC price bounce back or not?  Is ETC going to be dead?  A lowering of the ETC price might cause a lot of buying of ETC, then what?

The idea of lowering the price is to turn off miners from supporting the ETC chain. If the hashing power goes down then it would be less secure and more open to attacks. Remember if miners do not find it profitable to mine ETC they will go somewhere else to mine. The likely destination for them would be ETH which is what the ETH people want.

Sure that is a decent point, but even if turning off miners is part of the motivation, it is likely an inadequate motivation because we cannot assume that miners are creatures that only act upon the current price, they are also speculators, and there still remains some questions regarding what makes ETH more valuable than ETC.  Merely because some folks ETH proponents drive down ETC prices, they are only going to be able to sustain such driving down for a limited period of time.. sooner or later they will run out of coins and sooner or later ETC will begin to rebound. 

Ultimately, there is no real logic that institutionally approved ETH should be nearly 10x more valuable than non-institutionally supported ETC... and there are also some arguments that ETC is more valuable without having as much centralization and mutability... so in essence there are decent arguments that can be made that the two coins are going to approach parity, whether that takes several years or whether that takes ETH going down in value or ETC going up in value is likely more of a longer term projection, assuming that both coins can endure the short term pumps and dumps and ongoing inter battling.

I don't believe that.  Even if a miner is a speculator, he has the choice between mining and buying.  If buying is cheaper than mining, there's no reason to mine.  In principle, in a liquid mining market, the hash rate is determined by current price only.

But that is at the same time also the answer: if the price is low, the hash rate is low, and the "security" is low, but the incentive to attack is low too !  Why would you spend a lot of money to attack a chain that doesn't contain much value ?

For years, bitcoin's chain has been less secure than ETC's chain right now. 


Economically you are right, and I'm also of the same opinion, *in as much that ETC/ETH have some genuine value proposition (like a smart contract platform that is actually *used*) *.  But in as much as ETC and ETH are simply abstract speculator's tokens with no other usage, then anything goes, because it is a pure recursive belief system.  There doesn't even need to be a block chain or code.  Only IOU on exchanges.  They are then simply betting tokens and that is really totally arbitrary.

My idea is that ethereum, as a platform, is essentially dead apart from some betting games, and ponzi contracts.  What remains is a set of better's tokens.

Is there any possibility that a rich organisation create a new Etheruem clone saying that the ETH is a fork, and ETC is a hack that people should use the new coins?

You seem to be talking about some kind of pure form of theories that do not play out in real application.

Surely, there are going to be some instances in which miners take pure and rational views based on wearing just one hat, but the reality of the matter is that most miners are going to be dabbling and diversifying their investments in a variety of ways and there is going to be a combination of rational thinking and emotional thinking, which causes behavior that is a bit more difficult to quantify into some kind of pure model.



I agree with the first part of your point, and I think that the second point that you are making concerns the low incentive to attack ETC based on its relatively low value... yet it seems to be a wrong conclusion based on the fact that bitcoin has enough computing power security to comfortably and securely support at least a 10x increase in value.  So, I am not really sure what you are getting at with making such BTC/ETC comparisons, when in the end, there is a lot more complicated politics going on with ETC as compared with BTC's more simple foundational use as a financial instrument (I mean bitcoin is extremely secure because the main intention is storage of value and use in those kinds of currency-like applications).



I largely agree with your first point here, yet regarding your second point, it seems dangerous to attempt to pigeon-hole Ethereum too much.  There continues to be a lot of pump and dump dynamic and marketing, etcetera, so I doubt that we can easily write off ethereum and/or its related ETC in the coming several years.  Yeah, sure it may continue to be a kind of valueless scam, but it is likely going to be able to continue to play on its previous marketing and pumping success for quite some time to come in at least the medium term future... In other words, there continue to be a hell of a lot of ETH "true believers" who have not yet caught on to the scam nature of the way the whole Ethereum marketplace has played out to date.

Sure, anything is possible, but the way that you outline the scenario seems to be a bit ridiculous in terms of specifics.  We have enough going on right now with the various battles within ETH and ETC, so any future coins that develop from that are likely going to be related to forks of one or the other of those two, rather than some attempts at a solidarity coin to combine them.  On the other hand, there is some low level likelihood that somehow the ETH and ETC camps will combine forces in such a way to come to some kind of compromise agreement in which one or another of the forks dies off in order to create one coin from the two (which would likely be branded as ETH, even though it may in essence absorb the ETC ideology of non-mutability and no fucking around intervention into its new perspective)

I think it is quite possible that the insurance companies can elect to create their own block chain for the insurance business only.

I think it will cost less for them to build their applications on the main Ethereum chain. It will cost them less.

Some interesting read about the conference.
https://medium.com/@alwaysbcoding/the-insanity-and-brilliance-at-ethereums-developer-conference-baa89880d1ce#.al6nu0qu1

The Insanity and Brilliance at Ethereum’s Developer Conference
It’s 4am and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, China. The second ever Ethereum developers conference is set to kick off in a few hours. The time-zone shift woke me up early, and I’m sitting in my bed playing with my newly modded phone. The Chinese government censors most large American mobile apps behind something colloquially referred to as “The Great Firewall” so you need to use all of these shoddily made, Chinese government approved, replacement apps instead. The preferred app for messaging is an app called WeChat, a bizarre Slack / Venmo / Tinder hybrid that 800 million people use to communicate every day. We have a group chatroom for the conference going, which I’m scrolling through when my phone buzzes. Someone posted a new message into the chatroom. “The Ethereum network is under attack”.
Ethereum is this insane thing going on in the tech world right now. It’s a new cryptocurrency that is picking up the pieces of the fractured Bitcoin ecosystem and trying to succeed in accomplishing what Bitcoin has failed to do, deliver the first batch of successful consumer applications built on top of blockchain technology. You can think of Bitcoin a bit like a shared google doc spreadsheet that anyone in the world can send data to, one global ledger of accounts and balances. Ethereum builds on this idea by providing a mechanism for users to add custom formulas into the cells. Anyone who has done any kind of Microsoft Excel programming knows how powerful spreadsheets can become with just a few simple formulas. Ethereum is the first working implementation of programmable money, a simple concept that may one day bring the entire global financial system to it’s knees. And it draws brilliant people from all walks of life into its orbit.
The 4AM attack on the network is bizarre in that it’s not really a malicious hack, but more like comical mischief. Ethereum runs as a distributed system. At any given time, there will be thousands of separate computers (also called nodes) running the Ethereum protocol and keeping the network online. The actual software that the computers use to run the Ethereum protocol comes in many different flavors, the most popular one is an application called Geth, written in Google’s Go programming language. 85% of all Ethereum nodes are running Geth at the time. The attack pushes a piece of data onto the blockchain that exploits a bug in the Geth software causing the program to crash. Because every live node syncs the latest version of the blockchain in real-time, just like that 85% of the Ethereum network goes offline. Some developers are able to respond by switching over to the Parity Ethereum client, a new client written in the high-performant Rust Language that is currently gaining market share, but for others switching over to Parity is too risky without having time to run extensive testing. The Ethereum network is essentially frozen until an update can be pushed to Geth.
The main developers of Geth are asleep in Shanghai. They might not even have their laptops with them, as it’s risky to take your work computer into mainland China if it contains any sensitive information. They’re also scheduled to go on stage and give a presentation in a couple hours. When they wake up, do they fix the bug and miss their talk or go onto the stage? Like I said, comical mischief. People slowly start to wake up and news of the attack starts spreading. In a back room somewhere developers start pounding on their laptops. In a matter of hours, the bug is identified, an update is shipped, the nodes download the latest version of the software and go back online. Crisis averted. The net result of the attack? The conference start time gets pushed back half an hour. The Geth developers come out on stage to a raucous applause. Just another day in the cryptocurrency world.
Ethereum has a certain resiliency to it. It reminds me a bit of being in Israel. When you live under the constant threat of attack, you develop a desensitization and rationality around the notion of outside threats, so you respond to them with logic instead of emotion. The term ‘anti-fragile’ (meaning something that becomes stronger every time it is put under attack) has been a buzzword in Silicon Valley lately, but Ethereum has thus far personified it. Nobody is overly phased by the 4am attack. It’s doubtful that such a large portion of the network will run the same client software at the same time in the future. This attack vector won’t work again.
DevCon is the single best tech conference that I’ve ever been to. It’s a firehose of technical information and ambitious product demos blasted at you non-stop over the course of three days. There’s an energy and an optimism that I’ve never felt before, and an underlying belief amongst the community that Ethereum has finally gotten it right and we’re t-minus one year away from cryptocurrency truly exploding into mainstream consciousness.
While other technical communities are bickering about who can censor more conference speakers, Ethereum is moving along with a laser focus on solving real problems, like how to scale the blockchain to thousands of transactions per second, how to make developer tooling more approachable, and how to keep the network running despite the constant barrage of hacks and DDoS attacks being levied against it. At DevCon you’re just as likely to find a web developer, a systems engineer, an academic, or an MBA. A transexual, an avid Trump supporter, a Chinese entrepreneur, a New York City venture capitalist, or a techie in a hoodie who has 5 million dollars worth of Ether. It’s a safe space for eccentric personalities. You still have your typical discussions at the bar about immutable databases and functional programming like you would at any tech conference, but the whole thing has an elevated sense of scope around it, like these discussions you’re having actually matter somehow.
The biggest news from the conference comes in the form of two competing visions for Ethereum’s eventual switch to a proof-of-stake model. A make-or-break release under the code name “Casper”. The proof-of-work model was one of the brilliant inventions of the original Bitcoin protocol. A system that manages to align the incentives of all actors towards keeping the network running honestly and investing in the future of the currency. Ethereum is switching away from this battle-tested methodology to something more ambitious and unproven. Something that, if it works, will consume less electricity and allow for faster transaction processing times.
Vitalik Buterin, the 22-year old brainchild behind Ethereum, presents his “Mauve Paper”, a well-reasoned approach for how to move the Ethereum network to proof-of-stake. Vlad Zamfir, a theoretical mathematician, later unveils his competing vision for proof-of-stake. Vlad speaks at 100 miles per hour. “I feel bad for the Chinese translators” someone says. The entire conference is being live-translated into Chinese, or it least it was until Vlad took the stage. On cue I see a Chinese girl take her headset off, the translators had no chance on this talk. “I need a presentation about this presentation” someone else says. Two competing models, unveiled publicly in front of the community. The better model will win in the end.
I meet a guy from Germany who runs one of the biggest Ethereum mining rigs. He shows me a picture of his setup on his phone. I’m blown away by the scope of it. A massive farm of servers all working 24/7 to solve esoteric math problems to ensure that new transactions get mined into the Ethereum blockchain promptly. “How much electricity does that use?” Someone asks him. “A couple million dollars a month” he answers. But it’s still profitable, very profitable, because the Ether it produces is worth so much. He goes to Vitalik “You know, you better make sure that Casper is well tested before switching over. It needs a lot of testing.” He’s half-joking, but there’s a vague semblance of hostility in there. The longer it takes for the Casper fork to go live, the more money the miners will make. Moving to a proof-of-stake model renders their massive hardware farms irrelevant. Every month that goes by before Casper goes live has a multi-million dollar impact for miners running the network. No pressure or anything.
Alex Van De Sande unveils the next version of the Mist browser. It’s the most impressive product that’s demoed at DevCon. Mist is a next generation web browser that runs on top of the open source Chromium engine powering Google Chrome. It lets you browse the internet just like any web browser does, but it also hooks into your Ethereum wallet, meaning you can trivially pay for any kind of content as you’re browsing. No credit card needed, no bank account needed, no obnoxious sign-up forms. It will unlock an entire new class of digital business models.
Juan Benet unveils Filecoin. A cryptocurrency built on top of Ethereum that will pay users to store files, creating a distributed version of Amazon S3 for the world to use. A BitTorrent protocol on steroids. Juan announces that the team thought long and hard about how to build it, but eventually decided to build on top of Ethereum due to the incredible community emerging around it. The crowd goes wild.
I go to lunch with a couple of millionaires. They call themselves the next generation of “Oil Tycoons”. Crypto ballers who were savvy enough to buy up massive amounts of Ether during it’s initial offering to the public. Ether has increased in price substantially since it’s launch, something like 40x. Traditional investments don’t return 40x the money that you put into it 18 months later, but Ethereum just did. Again, crypto is insane.
And all this is barely even scratching the surface. You see a new UI for the Parity client, academic papers on formal verification of smart contracts, mobile apps that connect to the Ethereum network, and beyond. There’s a black hole of interesting topics to understand in the blockchain space. A friend tells me about the term “chronocracy”. The way you can have a “plutocracy” or a “meritocracy” a “chronocracy” is an ecosystem where your status is defined by how much time you have put into it. There’s so much to know about how the low level protocols work, about how the current financial system works, that the status hierarchy at DevCon is a proxy of who has put in the most time to understand it all.
You can’t talk honestly about the insane world of cryptocurrency without also acknowledging that the whole thing has a bit of a dotcom era vibe to it. I get the impression that companies are throwing a decade of best practices out the window because they used the word “blockchain” in their sales pitch. Over the past ten years Silicon Valley has evolved somewhat of a repeatable model for building successful technical ventures. A couple of smart founders, even if they’re just broke kids living in their offices, build a prototype of an innovative product that solves a simple problem they have. They hack on it until they start making money from it, realize that they’re onto something bigger than they ever imagined, get investors on board that believe in their vision and scale their companies from there.
Blockchain does it backwards, you have companies with 15 people and $10 million in funding that can’t even explain what they’re building. You see companies throwing parties before they’ve even launched their product, or talk about disrupting massive industries before they’ve even proven they can execute on a simple task. Founders who would get laughed out of the room in today’s startup climate are somehow swindling investors out of their money again because blockchain.
One company holds large amounts of Ether and builds open-source tooling for the Ethereum ecosystem. Normally open-source tooling is hard to monetize, but if the open source tools lead to better adoption among developers, and thus more people building on Ethereum, then the price of Ether will go up, and the company will make money. It’s a business model I’ve never seen before, but maybe it’s just crazy enough to work. Welcome to crypto.
I meet someone who is right out of college and a contributor to the core code base of the Solidity compiler. I mentioned that Ethereum is a shared spreadsheet with formulas. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is what runs the code in these “formulas” which are normally referred to as smart contracts. The most popular way to write smart contracts is in a programming language called Solidity, but that Solidity code has to be compiled down to EVM bytecode before it can be executed, that’s where this compiler comes in. “If you asked me a year ago I never thought that I’d be writing compilers today” he tells me. It’s incredible someone could pick it up so quickly, but also a little disquieting. Can a bunch of millennials with little real world experience really hack together something that will eventually displace the U.S. dollar? He works for a company that sells smart contracts to Big 4 consulting firms. They’re one of the only companies in the entire blockchain space that actually makes money.
Even with the flashing red warning signs everywhere you look, it doesn’t diminish the point that people are right to be excited about this. The stewards of many large centralized technology products have begun to hit a plateau, and are failing to push us forward. I don’t want to simply settle for the world they’ve constructed when there are obvious ways to improve upon it. I just have this underlying feeling that something bigger is around the corner. You can see it everywhere if you pay attention.
I’ve been making coding screencasts on youtube recently and just eclipsed the 1,000 views / day threshold where you can start to think about making a bit of money from it. The monetization options youtube presents to content creators are outright pathetic. You can put ads on your videos, but if a user skips it you don’t get paid. If a user has Adblock you don’t get paid. And ads are a terrible way to monetize video content anyway. You can try to charge for the content directly, but youtube reserves the right to alter the amount you are charging at any time. No joke you don’t even have the right to choose how much to charge for the content you’re making on their platform. A much better model would be to have users pay content creators directly, even with tiny transaction values. This isn’t possible with our current financial system where purchases of digital content for less than $3 are not only outside the social zeitgeist but also not feasible for most credit card processors. But with Ethereum, sending small amounts of money directly to people who warrant it is exactly the point. On an Ethereum enabled video platform you could send a penny to the content creator every time you view more than x minutes of content. It’s a fundamentally better model for video content than the one youtube offers.
Twitter put the final nail in it’s coffin when it made the decision to permanently ban Milo Yiannopoulos — a popular conservative personality — from it’s platform without explanation. When social networks that once marketed themselves as a public utility for free speech start banning accounts for wrong-speech, sanitizing their content in an effort to become more “advertiser friendly” it marks the beginning of the end. Whatever replaces Twitter will use blockchain technology to prevent censorship and hopefully create a better public interface to your identity than the one Twitter has proven itself capable of providing.
The Apple App Store has failed us as well. Monetizing mobile apps is brutally hard for developers, and the entire consumer mobile application space has ground to a halt. Instead of needing to raise tons of money, needing to scale to a massive user base, or needing to force obnoxious ads on your users to be viable, it would be a much better model if a user that opens your app x times in a month automatically sends a dollar to the developer who made it. Then developers could optimize for a pleasant experience instead of an adversarial one. There’s nothing forcing us to live under a centralized entity tithing 30% of revenue and setting constricting rules on monetization options other than our own lack of ambition. We can do better than this.
Seed-stage funding for nascent startups is a pool of perverse incentives right now, but cryptocurrencies can provide a better approach. An Ethereum startup, Augur, raised $5 million in a pre-sale of reputation tokens that can be used to generate revenue for users that manually resolve bets on the prediction market that it’s building. The idea of selling digital assets directly to your users without the need for venture capital to bootstrap online ventures is very powerful. This will undoubtably become a popular way for companies to construct their ecosystems in the future.
And this isn’t even mentioning the centralized institutions whose monetary systems are failing us as well. I can’t pretend to understand the first thing about global finance, but there’s plenty of conversation at the conference about how Social Security is fucked, about the financial systems of Venezuela, Greece, and Syria, how the Euro is in trouble, and how digital currencies can come to the aid of many who global finance has wronged.
There is understandably a lot of skepticism about Ethereum and cryptocurrencies. 95% of cryptocurrencies are pump-and-dump schemes, and Ethereum is constantly berated by the greater community for choosing to hard-fork it’s software back in June to revert a transaction that hacked 14% of the net worth of the ecosystem from a poorly coded smart contract. It was a controversial decision that intentionally betrayed the techno-libertarian idealism that fueled Ethereum’s creation by manually reverting a computationally valid transaction.
There are people I know who work in finance who can’t reconcile any optimism about the future of blockchain with the volatility of the currencies, exchanges being hacked, and the irrational hype around some of the companies in the space. I understand their skepticism, but I disagree with their assessment.
Until you see it for yourself, it’s hard to truly grasp the scope of what is being built. If Ethereum works it will fundamentally change society, and not just the one in the US, Ethereum is a global project. For all the discourse about “Silicon Valley internet money” I think people miss that this has little to do with Silicon Valley, it’s a worldwide effort. The idea of international digital money having value sounds crazy on the surface, but is it any crazier than gold having a 8 trillion dollar market cap? Some metal that looks pretty and sits in a vault somewhere? These digital tokens can actually power applications, churn out arbitrary computation that can power all sorts of novelty. I would honestly rather have the digital asset than a piece of metal. At some point, our monetary system evolved from paper money to credit cards. I can only imagine the hostility when credit cards were introduced. “Plastic cards representing money that lives on a computer? Are you crazy?” But somehow it works. Is cryptocurrency really any crazier?
Ultimately though, my optimism about Ethereum comes from an underlying belief that I have about software. That it’s not about the code, it’s about the people. And the 700 people that flew halfway around the world to present their visions for the future of the internet are not the people that I want to bet against. For a week, the Hyatt on the Bund is the most interesting place to be in Shanghai. A crazy mix of techno-libertarian idealism, serious software development credentials, money, energy, and complete vitriol from the non-believers. And despite the hate, Ethereum moves forward, obsessed with the idea of a more decentralized web. Bet against it at your own peril.

There is one more Ethereum hard fork.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/10/13/announcement-imminent-hard-fork-eip150-gas-cost-changes/

Announcement of imminent hard fork for EIP150 gas cost changes

Posted by Martin Swende on October 13th, 2016.
During the last couple of weeks, the Ethereum network has been the target of a sustained attack. The attacker(s) have been very crafty in locating vulnerabilities in the client implementations as well as the protocol specification.

While the recent patches have led to an overall increased resiliency in the client implementations, the attacks have also demonstrated that a lower-level change to the EVM pricing model is needed.

For many users, the most visible consequence is probably that they are having difficulties getting transactions included in blocks, and full nodes are facing memory limitations in managing the bloated state.

This is our strategy to address these issues:

As a temporary measure to minimize the effects of the most recent attack, we recommend all miners to lower the gaslimit to 500K gas.
A hard-fork based on EIP 150 version 1c will be put into effect at block 2457000 [see below]. This will reprice certain operations to correspond better to the underlying computational complexity.
A second hard-fork will follow shortly after, aimed at reverting the current “state-bloat” introduced by the attacks. This second fork will serve to remove accounts which are empty; lacking code, balance, storage and nonce == 0.
We have implemented the changes required in the clients and are currently extending and adding tests in an effort to prevent the introduction of consensus-breaking vulnerabilities.

And as a reminder, the Ethereum Bug Bounty is open and includes the new hardfork-implementations.

EDIT: Fork block has been moved to 2463000 in order to accommodate even more testing.

The hard fork has finished.

https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/ethereum-gas-reprice-hard-fork-was-a-success/

Summary

The Gas Reprice hard fork successfully stopped all the previous attacks since the start of Devcon2.

Update 14:26 Oct 19 2016 – The attacker is now conducting a new set of smaller impact attacks using another an underpriced EXP opcode and a BALANCE operation that need some cache improvements – see the updated section at the bottom of this page to see the impact on the block processing. The next planned hard fork will address these new attack vectors – see ATTENTION MINERS: Recommending miners lower the gas limit target to 2 million. What a dynamic and responsive Ethereum ecosystem this is!


The Attacks

The Ethereum blockchain has been undergoing a attack since the start of the Devcon2 conference a few weeks ago (beginning Sep 19 2016).

The first attack started on block 2,283,416 at 01:04:56 Sep 19 Shanghai time and targeted the go-ethereum geth clients, causing a memory error and shutting down these nodes across the network. Luckily the Ethereum network has separately implemented node clients written in Rust (Parity) and Java (EthereumJ) – these clients did not suffer from the same memory bug and kept the network up and running. The Ethereum developers in Shanghai had to get up early before the start of the conference and shortly after released a version of geth with the memory bug fixed. This ended up delaying the start of the conference by half an hour.

My 125 Mhs solo miner stopped working for the week while I was in Shanghai as I had not set up a VPN connection to my node due to security reasons.

Soon after the first attack, the attacker then regularly sent spam transactions (see here and here) to slow down the Ethereum network. Using cheaply priced opcodes (Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction codes), the attacker sent transactions that caused heavy computational and disk input/output loads on the Ethereum nodes. This was later followed by spam transactions that created many empty accounts on the blockchain, causing a “state-bloat” on the blockchain.

Worst affected users seem to be those trying to run a full sync of the Ethereum blockchain on machines with limited memory and running on a hard disk drive (HDD) instead of a solid state drive (SSD). See Is something wrong with the network right now?, sync isn’t working for 0.8.5 been trying for days and 5th time downloading Blockchain 15 days for example.

Non-spam transactions were failing as quite a number of mining pools decided not to process transactions as these would slow down their mining node operations, and the non-spam transactions were getting lost in the ether.


The Hard Forks

The Ethereum Foundation announced two hard forks to stop the spam transaction attacks. As listed in the previous link, you have to install the latest Ethereum node clients containing the hard fork code – geth 1.4.18, Parity 1.3.8, EthereumJ 1.3.6 and Ethereum Wallet 0.8.6 (remember never to trust links to the node clients from unofficial sites). If you have run an earlier version of the node client after the first Gas Repricing hard fork (see below), you will have to re-sync your blockchain data from scratch.


The First Hard Fork – Gas Repricing

The first EIP 150 Long-term gas cost changes for IO-heavy operations to mitigate transaction spam attacks hard fork successfully activated at block 2,463,000 at Oct-18-2016 01:19:31 PM +UTC to reprice the gas for some of the opcodes. This raises the cost for the attacker to send their spam transactions.


The Attacks Have Stopped

The attackers transactions started failing (source) immediately after the hard fork. This account spend 9 – 3.899521491 = 5.100478509 ethers (~ USD 64.10) to send 1,183 spam transactions to the network.

https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/1

All Core Devs Meeting 8 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: 10/28/2016 1:00PM UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

Agenda

Please provide comments for proposed agenda topics or corrections to agenda topics.

1. Upcoming HF to clear out state + potentially other changes.

Clearing out state
EIP 158 by (@vbuterin)
EIP 161 by (@gavofyork)
EXP Cost Increase
EIP 160 by (@vbuterin)
Replay attack protection
Do we want it in the upcoming HF, Metropolis, or not at all?
EIP 134 by @aakilfernandes
EIP 155 by @vbuterin
"high order bits nonce scheme" coded here by @obscuren
Time/Date of HF.
2. EIP/ERC GitHub Organization

Improvement Discussion
EIP 148 by @axic

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/11/18/hard-fork-no-4-spurious-dragon/

Hard Fork No. 4: Spurious Dragon

Posted by Hudson Jameson on November 18th, 2016.
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2,675,000, which will likely occur between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 22, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. The Morden test network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 1,885,000.

As a user, what do I need to do?

Download the latest version of your Ethereum client:

Latest version of Ethereum Wallet/Mist (v0.8.7)
Latest geth client (v1.5.2)
Latest Parity client (v1.4.4)
Latest ruby-ethereum client (v0.11.0)
What happens if I do not update my client?

If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated for the upcoming hard fork, your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the fork occurs. You will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules and you will be unable to send ether or operate on the post-fork Ethereum network.

Importantly, if your client is not updated, it also means that any transactions you make will still be susceptible to replay attacks.

What if I am using a web or mobile Ethereum wallet like MyEtherWallet or Jaxx?

Ethereum websites and mobile applications that allow you to store ether and/or make transactions are running their own Ethereum client infrastructure to facilitate their services. Generally, you do not need to do anything if you use a third party web based or mobile Ethereum wallet. However, you should still check with your web or mobile Ethereum wallet provider to see what actions they are taking to update for the hard fork and if they are asking their users to take other steps.

In particular, you should ensure that transactions are generated with the new replay-protected EIP 155 scheme.

What do I do if my Ethereum client is having trouble syncing to the blockchain?

Make sure you have downloaded the latest version of your Ethereum client.

If you are using Geth or Mist, refer to this Ethereum StackExchange thread.
If you are using Parity, refer to this section of the Parity wiki.
Why are we proposing to hard fork the network?

“Spurious Dragon” is the second hard fork of the two-round hard fork response to the DoS attacks on the Ethereum network in September and October. The previous hard fork (a.k.a “Tangerine Whistle”) addressed immediate network health issues due to the attacks. The upcoming hard fork addresses important but less pressing matters such as further tuning opcode pricing to prevent future attacks on the network, enabling “debloat” of the blockchain state, and adding replay attack protection.

What changes are a part of this hard fork?

The following Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) describe the protocol changes implemented in this hard fork.

EIP 155: Replay attack protection – prevents transactions from one Ethereum chain from being rebroadcasted on an alternative chain. For example: If you send 150 test ether to someone from the Morden testnet, that same transaction cannot be replayed on the main Ethereum chain. Important note: EIP 155 is backwards compatible, so transactions generated with the “pre-Spurious-Dragon” format will still be accepted. However, to ensure you are protected against replay attacks, you will still need to use a wallet solution that implements EIP 155.
Be aware that this backwards compatibility also means that transactions created from alternative Ethereum based blockchains that have not implemented EIP 155 (such as Ethereum Classic) can still be replayed on the main Ethereum chain.
EIP 160: EXP cost increase – adjusts the price of `EXP` opcode so it balances the price of `EXP` with the computational complexity of the operation, essentially making it more difficult to slow down the network via computationally expensive contract operations.
EIP 161: State trie clearing – makes it possible to remove a large number of empty accounts that were put in the state at very low cost as a result of earlier DoS attacks. With this EIP, ’empty’ accounts are removed from the state whenever ‘touched’ by another transaction. Removal of the empty accounts greatly reduces blockchain state size, which will provide client optimizations such as faster sync times. The actual removal process will begin after the fork by systematically performing `CALL` to the empty accounts that were created by the attacks.
EIP 170: Contract code size limit – changes the maximum code size that a contract on the blockchain can have. This update prevents an attack scenario where large pieces of account code can be accessed repeatedly at a fixed gas cost. The maximum size has been set to 24576 bytes, which is larger than any currently deployed contract.