Ethereum worked very well with the DAO...for the hacker that stole several million and that forced them to fork.
I will never trust a system where they can decide arbitrarily to void all the transactions that everyone made after several days.
Is that slitting hairs? The DAO was hacked early on. The DAO's hack was due to specific functions related to Ethereum. The inherit ability to program smart contract makes it open to attacks. I like the idea of the Ethereum but given a choice I will always pick bitcoin for security.
I like how they frame the DAO hack as an opportunity for growth rather than a gross display of incompetence followed by a breaking of the original promise of immutability of the platform, which is what it was.
I think Ethereum undermined their whole reason for existence when they did a fork in response to a valid contract because enough people did not like the results.
The fact that they called it a hack when it explicitly followed the Ethereum guidelines calls into doubt the sincerity of the people behind Ethereum.
If people want to actually have malleable contracts in the case of fraud, the courts provide a much more accountable process that has had centuries of fine tuning.
To be clear, that attack (also the The DAO event that caused the ethereum fork) was a hack. It was a bug in the contract that got exploited. And that's a risk too.
But even if a DAO does everything right, technically, they're still subject to the problem of having to trust entities in the real world (e.g. "whoever on the Blender foundation gave them the address to pay") to behave the way they promise (e.g. "actually hand them an address under the control of the Blender Foundation"). It's trivially easy in this world to just cheat.
And in the real world, with real people on both sides of the transaction, that's addressed in the courts. And it works, and fraud as a proportion of our economy is quite small. But that protection doesn't extend to anonymous smart contracts.
After the DAO hack I think Ethereum pretty much failed at being an immutable blockchain, which proves it doesn't work at all, and I think Vitalik is kidding himself with this.
'The Merge' is just smoke and mirrors really and doesn't solve anything like the gas fees which is an overdue problem in Ethereum.
I stopped supporting Ethereum when they abandoned code is law, and arbitrarily rewrote the rules to protect against the DAO hack.
It's fine to protect against theft, but it's not fine when it's only enforced arbitrarily and only when the core developers themselves are affected.
This is the whole premise behind the irreversibility of cryptocurrencies, that the only fair thing is to never do it, and when you abandon that why not go all the way to a centralized database?
Ethereum is therefore not fit to be a currency, and should be treated as a world computer experiment.
> -Ethereum broke trust and "code is law" when self-interested parties were able to rewrite history. Transaction malleability is a terrible property for a "store of value." It leaves the currency open to government interference, manipulation, etc.
Rebuttal:
a) This isn't a technological feature/fault of Ethereum. What you really mean to say is that
1) Ethereum foundation broke trust by supporting a fork
2) Most Ethereum users chose to go with the fork.
Technically you can be with ETC (the unforked version of ETH).
b) Bitcoin can be forked too, there is nothing technological safeguard in there in it for it to be not forked, because it's literally impossible to build a technology which can't be forked(unless enforced by the govt).
c) The DAO fork was made possible by a bunch of factors:
1. The money the hacker stole was locked in a contract where he couldn't touch it for 30 days. This bought Ethereum foundation time to do something about it. If Polo gets hacked tomorrow, there is nothing Ethereum foundation can do anything about.
2. ETH is based on accounts model, rather than bitcoin's UTXO model. This means Bitcoin can't go with a fork even if they wanted to even if somehow DAO was implemented in an n-lock transaction for 30 days.
d) Ethereum gets crap for breaking "trust" when as a bitcoin holder I would have totally supported a fork to prevent MtGox or Bitfinix's funds being recovered from the thieves.
The fundamental question which everybody who is pondering over this argument on Ethereum needs to answer is this, "If you're using technology X, and a certain malicious entity/bug has affected a significant majority of the other users of technology X,then would you be willing to make attempts to thwart the actions of the malicious users."
Ethereum people showed that they would prefer such an action. Bitcoiners who don't have any stake in this, love to criticize Ethereumers for this.
Don't worry. If anything goes wrong (like a hacker stealing everybody's coins), they can just rollback the transaction. That's not a new thing for ethereum, to just rollback transactions. Lol.
For the uninitiated read about the dao hack and the debate that ensued. Basically, they just rolled back the transaction, just like a bank.
The DAO was hacked by an unknown attacker who stole Ether worth around $50 million dollars at the time. After much debate, the Ethereum community voted and decided to retrieve the stolen funds by executing what’s known as a hard fork or a change in code.
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