Bitcoin Core development team first talks about Ethereum fork plan: This is a major mistake

The DAO incident has happened for nearly half a month, but its influence has not diminished at all. The attacker used the "recursive call" vulnerability of the smart contract to transfer DAO funds. The Ethereum community is still struggling to find a solution. Soon miners will vote on the hard fork plan. Once passed, most Ethereum clients will update the hard fork code to recover investors' losses.

The Ethereum community originally planned to execute a soft fork, but had to abandon it due to a temporary vulnerability.

Ethereum's fork plan seems to have completely deviated from its original intention. Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd said in a recent blog post: Ethereum's attitude has changed from 'DAO is unstoppable code' to 'If we screw up, we fork'. We should pay attention to this change.

The DAO community website states: DAO is born as an unchangeable and unstoppable computer code, run entirely by its members, and creates DAO tokens by consuming Ether. However, it now seems that the Ethereum community seems to prefer social consensus rather than code. For the Bitcoin community, Ethereum seems to have become a combination of Bitcoin and PayPal. Because the Ethereum system still relies on decentralized consensus, but in certain specific circumstances, its funds can be manipulated arbitrarily.

In the view of the Ethcore development team, even if the blockchain records cannot be changed, users still have the right to control the state of the network. A decentralized consensus network is a P2P network, a pre-set blockchain database where each member has the right to express their personal opinions and build consensus through the personal interests of the members.

We cannot yet conclude whether the Ethereum community’s decision on the DAO incident was right or wrong. But we know that blockchain can only exist if it is generally accepted by the community. This consensus network is more powerful than computer code.

What does the Bitcoin Core development team think?

The Bitcoin community generally believes that it is a major mistake to recover the DAO's financial losses through a fork. The Bitcoin community has suffered a lot of financial losses many times in the past (the most famous is the "Mentougou" incident), but has never chosen to fork.

Coingecko reached out to several Bitcoin Core developers and asked them about their thoughts on the Ethereum fork proposal. Alex Morcos commented on Ethcore’s social consensus view.

The success of a cryptocurrency depends largely on the model of social consensus. The specific manifestation of this model is difficult to express in words, but the Bitcoin community is also working hard to improve this model. How to establish the right social model? At least the Bitcoin community believes that the Ethereum hard fork will set a wrong precedent.

Peter Todd also shared his thoughts on Ethereum forks: Forking plans are definitely a bad idea, believe me I have made that very clear in my previous blogs. Isn't it ironic? Bitcoin and Ethereum are both decentralized systems, and forking involves certain political factors, which is completely centralized.

There are similar ideas outside the development community. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam once said that Ethereum will eventually surpass Bitcoin. But after the DAO incident, he said: Ethereum must learn to admit mistakes. I believe that in the future, some smart contracts may also have loopholes. You can't fork every time to avoid mistakes.

How to prevent the DAO incident from happening again?

The way to prevent similar incidents like DAO from happening again is to provide better privacy protection for blockchain. At this year's MIT Bitcoin Expo, Andrew Poelstra, a cryptographer from Blockstream, explained the need to improve blockchain privacy, such as confidential transactions, to prevent mining centralization problems. As long as miners do not know the participants in the transaction and the source and destination of the transaction, the probability of rollback and transaction review will be reduced.

In addition, although smart contracts are easy to design, they are difficult to create and maintain securely. Balaji Srinivasan, CEO of 21 Inc, believes that it will take a lot of time for smart contract systems to mature. Ethereum has only been established for less than a year, so we cannot hastily sentence smart contracts to death. Perhaps the DAO crowdsale amount grew too fast and blinded the community.

Reflections on the DAO Incident

The DAO was the first big fish to emerge from the small pond of Ethereum. The long-term impact of the DAO incident remains to be seen.

Ethereum is still in its early stages of development, and everything can start over again, but the community should definitely view the DAO incident as a lesson for the development of Ethereum and smart contracts. Investors invested more than $100 million in Ethereum in an experimental project because they believed in its security. In the short term, the next similar project will not appear so soon, at least not on such a large scale. Ethereum will have to go through many years of sedimentation before it can fully gain the respect of the outside world. Similarly, the Bitcoin community has also worked hard for a long time to gain this respect. In addition, if the smart contracts created by Ethereum want to gain recognition from the outside world, they still need to wait patiently.