There still seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the outcome of the Ethereum hard fork. The majority of the focus has been on ensuring The DAO investors will be reimbursed after a hacker exploit a code bug allowing him to drain tens of millions of dollars from the project. Creating an “alternative reality” to pretend this never happened is removing the “trustless” factor from “decentralized trustless ecosystem” for Ethereum.
Ethereum Is No Longer Trustless By Default
When looking at what the Ethereum hard fork has done from a rational perspective, the repercussions will be quite severe. The Ethereum developers took it upon themselves to ensure a hard fork would take place. Granted, there was an option for the community to vote “yes” or “no”. But since no one knows how many people voted – and how many of those votes are even real – the hard fork was executed either way.
At its core, the Ethereum hard fork creates a different reality in which The DAO was never attacked due a bug in its source code. While it is somewhat understandable to reimburse investors, that should have been done out of the Slock.it team’s money, and not at the cost of making Ethereum no longer trustless. Issues like these will arise when using immature technology and throwing bags of money at it, unfortunately.
What this hard fork comes down to is politics. One of the side effects of politics is creating an ecosystem where the term “trustless” has no place. Regardless of which semantics people want to use to describe the situation, the Ethereum developers took a decision that will stain the reputation of this cryptocurrency forever.
While the majority of the investors will not care about this all that much, the community should. When all of The DAO funds has been sorted out, roughly US$6.5m will be left over in funds that need to be distributed. A group of trustees will be responsible for ensuring this fund ends up where it needs to be. Trustees in a trustless decentralized cryptocurrency? A very odd combination indeed.
Despite the hard fork, a lot of innocent people ended up losing money, yet for some reason, the big investors managed to recover just about all of their funds. No one can honestly claim Ethereum is a trustless ecosystem at this point, unless they want to fool themselves. Interesting times are ahead for this project, but they will lose some support along the way for sure.
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