It’s been a rough week for Ethereum, the DAO and plutus (who I assume was planning to launch their crowd sale this week)

There’s been constant debate across Slack, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter about the possibility of a fork so I thought I fair to give my two cents.

Full disclosure: Hodling Eth, have DAO tokens

There are three main options on the table currently doing nothing and allowing ethereum to continue on its path after the attacker takes 15% of total supply of eth, a hard fork that would mean all DAO token holders would be fully reimbursed and a soft fork to burn all the eth allowing the DAO to be water under the bridge. All three of these options will be considered and commented on in this blog.

Doing nothing – Code is law

The first option is to allow the attacker to keep the stolen eth, although clearly there are moral arguments to opposed allowing a thief to keep what he stole there are also philosophical arguments that ‘we’ as a community should keep Ethereum as pure as possible and allowing smart contracts that are written poorly to be drain is the right thing to do.
This is the direction that I would argue that Bitcoin community are taking, that the code was written poorly and this is the punishment, we cannot go around and fork every time something bad happens and it’s the investors fault for not doing due diligence if they lost money.
Though this is exactly the direction (I’d argue) we don’t want to be heading, something that makes Ethereum stand out is that it has governance, we have the ability to change and we should use it.

Hard fork – Slock.it don’t lose their life savings

The second option is a hard fork, that all DAO token holders get their money back, this is the option that is arguably in my as a DAO holders best interest. The attack is undone and all my Ether gets returned, although there is up cry within the community that this type of behaviour shouldn’t be encouraged, if the DAO had made us all rich no one would be asking for a Ether refund yet when sh*t hit the fan we get to claim money back? This is surely not how an investment works. Although I understand the reasoning behind those that want their funds back there is also a strong argument that we cannot refund every hack or attack anytime we want, which leads me to the third option.

Soft fork – Water under the bridge, burn it all

The final option is a soft fork, that being that all Ether that was placed into the DAO is burnt and unrecoverable. This would mean the attacker loses what he stole but all investors of the DAO lose everything, as a DAO token holder this probably isn’t in my best interest but I’d argue as a Ether holder this is in my best interest, this would mean the attacker wouldn’t get the 15% supply of all Eth so there isn’t the issue of a malicious person holding a huge amount of Ether going into proof of stake and that DAO token holders lose their investment. This would be a very expensive lesson for token holders but would illustrate that security needs to be taken a whole lot more seriously, and that putting more than $10 million dollars (to quote VB) in a smart contract is idiotic.

The Ethereum ecosystem as a whole – That’s what’s important

Arguments that ask for nothing to be done don’t consider the implications of a malicious attacker holding a HUGE amount of Eth. Arguments that ask for a hard fork are clearly self-interested and a hard fork would set a scary president. But the ability to soft fork and stop the attacker getting access to the funds while still teaching an important lesson is what will show the world the Ethereum is ready for adoption. This should be the take away message, unlike other cryptos we have governance, we have the ability to condemn attacks, hacks and malicious behaviour. This is what the main stream want, this is what happens in real life and this blog has hopefully argued the same.