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RE: The next huge problem for ethereum looms large
You talk as if the Ethereum Foundation is riding through travelled roads, when this is the wild wild west; uncharted territory. Blockchain tech / Ethereum is new and revolutionary, of course they're gonna have some bumps in the road and not get everything right.
To suggest they don't understand human behavior due to being "young, inexperienced, and egomaniacs" is quite the statement, considering no one on this planet has complete and 100% accurate knowledge on human behavior in order to perfectly model incentives in action.
I am simply saying that they act without thinking things through. I'm not expecting 100% accurate knowledge of anything in particular. I am however very critical of: Creating a DAO in a hasty and sloppy manner, misleading people repeatedly about its security, discarding the principle of "code is law" without thinking through the implications there, rushing a soft fork without doing any security analysis (luckily an outsider pointed out its fatal flaw), rushing a hard fork under the most pretentious facade of consensus imaginable, presuming that less than 10% of holders voting in favour of the fork would be perceived as consensus and would get everyone else to fold their tents and go home, and, especially in this article, assuming that they will dictate what the solution is going to be to the difficulty bomb - a solution that rewards large stakeholders like the developers with rewards for doing no work.
Im pro-HF but I gotta say... ^ is making a lot of sense.
afaik the dao is seprate from eth correct? Its just another company that created and did it on their own. They fucked that up not the Eth devs as much as I understood it. Now I fully agree with the fork and think it should have happened. We would be in a much worse position if eth did not fork. How would it be viewed by the general public? They would say wow a hacker stole 12 or 7% of all ether which could have been prevent and they let it happen. Nobody from the general public in my opinion would invest in the currency then. But I know they completely ignored their own rules stating that whatever the code says its the law with the dao contract, and there are good agurments against mine, but I feel that forking was the right decision and was all for it.
You bring up all valid points. To play devils advocate:
The Ethereum Foundation didn't create theDAO, though I agree they were too involved.
I'd say "code is law" is still in effect. Sure, this was broken with the HF, but going forward, I doubt we'll have the same opportunity to play this card again. I see the HF as really only being possible at this point in time where specific variables aligned to make it a reality. A precedent might have technically been set, but since future attacks will have completely different variables, I don't think that argument holds any weight.
I agree that the forks were rushed, but there was a valid time limit in place, being the ETA until the attacker could withdraw the siphoned DAO tokens for ETH. Given that time limit, I think they did a great job. Concerning the lack of consensus, I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect a majority of holders to vote. I don't know of a case where a blockchain was able to get a majority of holders to vote on anything. This is a governance issue that has yet to be solved. I guess the real vote is happening now on the free markets with ETC vs. ETH.