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RE: Ethereum’s Not-so-Smart Contracts
The problem wasn't Ethereum or The Dao it was an exploit in a contract. That and greed. Really it could have gone the other way and just been fixed. The only problem some people are evil.
The contract is code. Ethereum executed perfectly and did exactly what the code said to do. This is the problem. Now ethereum is being changed even though it functioned perfectly. The problem is that regardless of how perfect ethereum is, coders of smart contracts will never be perfect.
The problem is centralized trust is masked by puritan idealists. Puritan idealists will say smart contracts are trustless and we should trust the math but if you can't understand what the code is doing because the code is obfuscated then you can only trust the programmers rather than the code.
Turing complete smart contracts by design require ultimate trust in the programmers who write it, the auditors who check it, and the curators who stamp approval. All of the security checks and trust in the core developers failed and if it could fail for The DAO it could fail for future smart contracts of Ethereum itself.
The main thing to do is to restore trust. The community which cannot trust the developers is failed. At the same time maybe we will never be able to trust Turing complete smart contracts running on Ethereum and in that case other projects must be considered.
Ethereum isn't being changed. It will be the same as before.
It won't. Making a hard-fork and a "chargeback" makes it centralized and trustless. Next time they will do another hard-fork and rewind normal transactions?
It's going to be amazing if they have to roll back now and 'turn back time.' That almost defeats the purpose of a blockchain, doesn't it?
It's already centralized around complete trust in developers. You can't know what any smart contract is going to do prior to running it because it's Turing complete. Bugs can be obfuscated and this could be the tip of the iceberg for what we might find in the future.
I also want to say that the bug we see here doesn't just apply to TheDAO. It's a general bug which will apply to many smart contracts which use the code base of TheDAO.
As far as the purpose of a blockchain goes, it only has a purpose if the community can use it as a central point of trust. If the community doesn't trust a particular chain then the community should always have the right to abandon the untrusted chain to move to the chain they trust. Ethereum is not a cryptocurrency if we remember right so it's all about the smart contracts and Ether only exists to support the smart contracts.
I don't think the community will trust Ethereum smart contracts ever again if trust is not restored. If it means going to a hard fork then that will be fine if it maintains the community but if the community is gone then Ethereum will have no users and no one will give money to smart contracts because no one will trust them enough or the developers.
A truly greedy person would have siphoned off just enough to where it wouldn't be detected. Whoever exposed the DAO bug had a benevolent heart.
Or maybe they wanted to destroy Ethereum. Did they really think they'd be able to spend it? And by doing this it puts every smart contract project in jeopardy and trust in all developers of smart contracts in question.
How do you prove a developer or group of developers aren't deliberately obfuscating the code to sneak backdoors or bugs in it? I don't think this issue is over. Wait and see...
Next time some developers ask you to feed their smart contract with ETH you'll put a lot less money in it or perhaps you wont bother at all. I mean if you can't prove for sure you can trust the developer or the smart contract then how do you know it's not a donation to anonymous hackers somewhere and that the programmers aren't the hackers?