This is absolutely untrue. Charles Hoskinson left the Ethereum Foundation in June 2014. The DAO hack occurred in June 2016.
He left because he wanted the Ethereum Foundation to be a for-profit while the rest of founders were looking to make it a non-profit foundation. This is by his own account, the other side of the story doesn't look as good for him but I have no idea what happened so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO.
> If it had been anybody else, they would have lost the money
This is idle speculation, and I personally don't think that's true.
> Apparently the DAO is dead, but they seem to have kept the money.
I don't know who you mean by "They" but neither the creators of the DAO, nor the Ethereum foundation has kept any money that was lost in this unfortunate incident. If you're going to accuse people of things please provide citations with evidence.
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.
> It's true some employees at the ethereum foundation had personal money invested in the DAO. Vitalik himself had a small amount invested as well. However, the Ethereum Foundation was not involved with the DAO.
The Foundation itself may not have been invested, but many of the members and core contributors were (Gavin Wood, core contributor of the Rust implementation, was rumored to have over $100k in DAO tokens).
> neither the creators of the DAO, nor the Ethereum foundation has kept any money that was lost in this unfortunate incident.
The hard fork, by definition, allowed everyone to keep what would have been lost.
And it wasn't an "unfortunate incident", it was a publicly stated inevitability, advertised not only by the platform (with the words "unstoppable code" on the home page) but by the authors of the DAO themselves ("Any and all explanatory terms or descriptions are merely offered for educational purposes and do not supercede or modify the express terms of The DAO’s code set forth on the blockchain;").
I didn't agree with the fork, and I choose to follow the majority of miners anyway because I still believe in Ethereum, but quit trying to rewrite history.
I think the DAO hack is misrepresented in the crypto community lore. The network simply decided to follow the main developers and those that did not, kept with what is now ETH classic. A hard fork can happen in absolutely _all_ cryptocurrencies, and I see it as a feature rather than a bug.
The DAO was officially introduced by slock.it with "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, but now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore, it seems.
The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and for stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").
Too bad this theft did not affect the founders of Ethereum like the DAO exploit did. Otherwise, they would have found a way to reverse this and get people their money back from the hacker, even if it meant changing the protocol and upgrading existing binaries.
>In June 2016, users exploited a vulnerability in The DAO code to enable them to siphon off one-third of The DAO's funds to a subsidiary account. On 20 July 2016 01:20:40 PM +UTC at Block 1920000, the Ethereum community decided to hard-fork the Ethereum blockchain to restore virtually all funds to the original contract.[10] This was controversial, and led to a fork in Ethereum, where the original unforked blockchain was maintained as Ethereum Classic, thus splitting the Ethereum blockchain into two branches, each with its own cryptocurrency.
The Ethereum DAO event wasn't a rug pull. It was a bug.
There was a fork, which is a wonderful feature of blockchains. The original fork with the DAO hack still in place still exists: https://ethereumclassic.org/
Use that if you like. But clearly the community as a whole decided to repair the damage and move on. A fork like that would be too costly to pull off today. In addition, the maturity and growth of audit firms such as OpenZeppelin, have led to more secure DAOs, etc.
But by all means, use ETC if purism matters to you. Crypto is a free, open source movement.
>Ethereum is a good example of this. It's leaders are seen as infallible and omnipresent.
I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I.e. I'm very involved in one of the communities that you refer to. We see Ethereum as a very messy, crazy project with fallible leaders. I don't think that the DAO was handled especially gracefully, either in the lead-up to the hack or afterwards with the fork. We've had meetups [1][2] where speakers were very critical of the leadership.
In other words, for the case of our community, we see the developers of the clients and other employees of the foundation (i.e. the leadership) as fallible.
>by Charles Hoskinson, who is co-creator of Ethereum as well as Cardano and other associated notable works.
As it happens, he's also the creator or Ethereum Classic, a hard fork of Ethereum, not unlike what Bcash is to Bitcoin (i.e. an attempt at co-opting the brand and capturing value by confusing newcomers).
Apparently he tried to inflate the ETC coin supply by 20% and give the new coins to his company IOHK, which of course didn't sit well with the ETC community:
The Ethereum Classic chain changed later in a hardfork. While this was a 'cleanup' job to remove empty accounts belonging to the DAO hacker, it was done without using his private key and puts lie to the claim that the ETC chain is 'immutable'.
He left because he wanted the Ethereum Foundation to be a for-profit while the rest of founders were looking to make it a non-profit foundation. This is by his own account, the other side of the story doesn't look as good for him but I have no idea what happened so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
reply