“I find this incredibly troublesome and it sets an insanely dangerous precedent. Today we are bailing out friends who made a bad decision to participate in a poorly written contract, tomorrow every oppressive state in the world will be wanting their list of transactions and contracts blacklisted. Either we accept turing-complete contracts with their consequences, or we admit the Ethereum platform is a failed experiment and the concept of purely mathematical smart contracts is simply a fantasy that cannot work in the real world without the support of the current legal system. The later would be a real shame. I personally don't support compromising any network with a hardfork to recover my friends lost value. It's irresponsible and dangerous.”

mk:

As time goes on, hardforking or softforking for individual cases is going to become increasingly difficult. Bitcoin has done it in the past, but probably won't going forward.

From a point of principle, I don't think token holders of The DAO deserve special treatment. However, there is little doubt that the network in general will do better to put this behind them, and a fork is the best way to do that. I'd be perfectly happy if the stolen eth was sent to an irretrievable address.

These are still very early days. Ethereum hasn't yet implemented a number of scheduled hardforks. Embarrassing learning experiences and forks now aren't going to destroy faith in the network.

Mich of the fault lies with slock.it. They rushed forward irresponsibly. However, many of the devs are DAO curators., including Buterin. They did not push back and advise more caution.

posted 2861 days ago