
Crisis based forking can pierce the Decentralized Veil of Ethereum - pelle
https://blog.stakeventures.com/articles/piercing-ethereums-veil
======
wmf
Perhaps a relevant question is whether this is caused by a bug in Ethereum
itself or just someone using Ethereum wrong. The Bitcoin developers have
rolled back transactions that were caused by a bug in Bitcoin itself but they
do not intervene in the many cases of user error.

Arguably, Solidity makes it so hard to write secure contracts that it is
negligent. If the Ethereum team decides to take responsibility for The DAO, I
hope they fix Solidity once and for all, not just bail out this one contract.

~~~
eximius
From what I've read, it is a bug in the DAO contract. Someone is recursively
calling some `split` function which has the side effect of draining eth out.

------
onestone
FUD article. No (soft/hard) fork will happen without community consensus.
Decentralization is not violated.

~~~
JeremyBanks
As someone who hadn't followed closely: the consensus is among miners, right?
The network is still PoW, not PoS?

So it's not a consensus based on DAO shares or ETH holdings, which represent
the broader community, but rather based on GPU power, representing a small
number of groups?

~~~
onestone
Yes, a soft fork means consensus (majority) among miners. The developers (of
Geth, Parity, cpp-ethereum, etc.) can propose the changes, but it's up to the
miners whether to adopt them.

Note that the Ethereum mining community is considerably more decentralized
than e.g. Bitcoin.

~~~
mikeyouse
Unless I'm reading this incorrectly, two mining pools control over 50% of the
hash rate:

[https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners](https://etherchain.org/statistics/miners)

2/3 of the hashrate from three pools doesn't seem very decentralized.

------
mixedmetrics
This bailout has some similarities to the financial crisis. Of course ethereum
doesn't seem to need the DAO to function. Bailing the DAO investors out voids
a valuable lesson.

