TheDAO attacker savvily found an exploit and has used it to squirrel away 3% of all total ETH from TheDAO. The Ethereum community has responded swiftly in laying out options, much heated debate has already occurred, and an endless amount of FUD and panic and trolling has commenced. Ethcore posted a thoughtful appeal to the community asking what the community want to do. Isn't there a simple market solution that is consistent with a decentralized consensus based system?
Proposal: Soft Fork to Disable Attacker, TheDAO Pays The Attacker a Bounty
- The Ethereum community soft forks (hard?) to allow the attacker to only be able to return his ETH to TheDAO.
- TheDAO offers the attacker a modest portion of his theft to do just that.
- TheDAO then decides whether to liquidate or to keep going.
This is a blueprint for the Ethereum ecosystem as a community to solve what is an Ethereum ecosystem problem. This should be good for everyone. The attacker as it stands now will not be able to extract any value from his impressive feat. ETH holders stand to see the value of their ETH crater more than 30% it already has and see all the naysayers trumpet that Ethereum can't work and is dangerous. DTHs stand to see a liquidation of TheDAO at 70 cents in ETH terms, compounded by the potential further drop in ETH/USD or ETH/BTC depending on how you measure it.
If the largest DAO craters, all you non-TheDAO ETH aren't worth as much.
I've read many arguments against any kind of fork whatsoever. They are ideologically sound but lack any pragmatism. If the goal is to be pure and right and doomed, then no forks should happen here. The reality is that the Ethereum ecosystem will suffer in the long term if everyone who participated in TheDAO is burnt and TheDAO melts down. The Ethereum ecosystem depends on dApps being a thing and on fundraising for those dApps. A meltdown for TheDAO will burn people who put the most funding into dApps and make them and everyone else avoid investing in any DAOs going forward. This will cede ground from Ethereum to other platforms. If the largest DAO craters, all your ETH aren't worth much at all. If you doubt this, note the correlation of ETH price to DAO token price.
ETH's Value is The Ethereum Community's Constructive Collaborative Nature
The Ethereum community makes ETH valuable by making it useful and pragmatic. This pragmatic, adaptive ethos has enabled massive amounts of ambition and also the mistakes that ensue. But those mistakes are progress and that ambition is valuable. Ambition differentiates Ethereum and has resulted in a very exciting and rewarding 1st live year. Finding a community and market solution to the biggest problem Ethereum has faced is what we should do now.
Dear Attacker
Put a Proposal to TheDAO on how you want to proceed. Otherwise the community will likely give you nothing. You deserve compensation for your creativity. But note that you have a reflexive impact on how much value you can actually get away with. The more ETH you ask for, the less they will be worth on the other side, if worth anything at all. And the more likely the community will be to give you nothing at all.
Well-said, eeks. You even have the support of 'a founding ethereum member' (https://distributed-autonomous-society.quora.com/A-Lesson-in-Humility?filter&nsrc=2&snid3=151396221)
I just came across that myself and was going to mention it, good catch!
The real question is this... Why is it only paying $22.09 after scoring an inbound link like that? Something isn't right with that.
Really interesting perspective. I love the "eth's value is the ethereum community's constructive collaborative nature" comment. This can be applied to any community. Those that collaborate more effectively than others will survive. The Darwinian evolution of blockchain networks is fiercely underway.
Hmm the Shapeshift.io shcool of pay the attacker huh.
Community can always just hard fork him into non-existence if he doesn't play ball and the community has the will.
This is equivalent to extortion/ransom. No such agreement would be enforceable, and honoring it would set a bad precedent.
Honoring it would set a great precedence for future massive contracts to not be completely destroyed by attackers.
What makes you think he or she wouldn't run off with that money too?
Etherium has Turing completeness, they can sign a contract... preferably without bugs this time.
There is also the possibility that the attacker considers Ethereum a "shitcoin" and wants it to die. I heard someone claiming to be the attacker came into slack and said just that and is offering miners a rather large bounty to not accept the soft fork. I don't know if anyone can verify if it was the attacker or not, from what I've heard he really doesn't have a way to prove it, but I don't know about that. If this is true and the miners accept his bribe, he gets a much larger bounty.