The proposed Ethereum Soft fork to prevent the DAO hacker from moving the stolen funds has been adopted by all the major mining pools. The latest update released by the Ethereum foundation included the necessary protocol rules to essentially nullify the efforts of the mysterious DAO hacker.
After a hacking incident left The DAO’s Smart Contract dry of funds (a theft of more than 3.6 million ETH), the community and the Ethereum Foundation sought to gather support for a Soft Fork, the goal was to stop the hacker from draining the ‘bounty’ he collected (more than $50 million at the current ether price) after the 27-days grace period imposed by the DAO’s own code expired.
DwarfPool, one of the biggest Ethereum mining pools, enabled on June 22 a feature to allow miners to vote on the Soft Fork proposal. With about 22% of participation, more than 88% voted YES for the Soft Fork.
For the Fork to take place, the blocks gas limits must fall below the 4 million mark before the block #1800000 gets mined. Right now the network is ready to accept the fork as soon as the previously mentioned block is processed by the lucky miner. According to the data provided by etherchain the gas limit is well under the 4 million limit:
The story of the DAO hack is filled with drama, controversy, and debate. The attack perpetrated on July 17 was swift and brutal, an emergency security meeting of Ethereum foundation members, Exchange platforms and researchers was held to assess and control the damages of the attack. This resulted in a personal statement from Vitalik Buterin, who asked the community to support a Soft Fork to prevent the hacker from moving the funds and to give the community time to react or counterattack.
Another solution proposed by Buterin and others was a clean simple Hard Fork to disown the account holding 3.6 million ether of its coin balance, and moving the money into another secure account. This proposition was heavily criticized by crypto-anarchists and other strong opinionated members of the community.
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That’s the way to go forward! Hoping the hard fork or other effective solution to be implemented soon so this tragic episode will be over.
I think the soft fork is enough. I invested 100 ETH (10,000 DAO tokens). My feeling is this, if I get back 70 ETH (or close to that), and the value of ETH goes up such that the 70 ETH ~today~ is worth more than what I originally paid for the 100 ETH, then it’s not a total loss. Would I be better off with 100ETH? Sure… but, I don’t think it will be good for Ethereum in the long run on – we don’t need to hear the Bitcoin purists bitch about how Ethereum is not a trustless/decentralized network. This was a bump in the road, and serious learning experience, and nothing even remotely close to MtGox due to the actions that have happened since the hack.
The hacker gets NOTHING. People suggest the hacker made millions shorting Ether…. which is silly, because you need to have a lot of funds to make such a large short in the first place. Did the hacker make some money… I am sure, but he is pounding sand knowing he won’t ever see the 3.6 million Ether.
How can a vote of only 22% of the population give a result?
Same way 15% of the population can elect a president.
Attack was on June 17th not July. Typo 😉
The integrity of ETH blockchain is forever compromised.
88% did not vote means there something seriously wrong with the method of voting.
The election system is purposefully broken to get a desired result?
There was no hacker, there was a beneficiary of a loop hole in a contract that many many people failed to test properly.
Or that people didn’t care enough to vote.