Ethereum Community Performs Hard Fork
Around half past four on Wednesday afternoon, a Chinese Ethereum miner BW.com dug the first block on the new Ethereum blockchain. With that, the hard fork was a fact. The fork will allow investors in the troubled fund The DAO to get their ether back.
More than 85 percent of the miners in the network immediately opted for the hard fork. Then, in the new contract called WithdrawDAO, the original owners of the ether were able to get their ether back. In total there was 11.58 million ether in that contract of which about 5.7 million is now left. The rest is back to the original owners.
The hard fork has been controversial because it shows that a blockchain is not as immutable as is sometimes claimed. If there is enough agreement, certain transactions are reversible, which could have consequences for the adoption of blockchains as shared databases in the public domain.
The DAO was an “autonomous investment fund” that functioned as a “smart contract” on the Ethereum blockchain. More than ten thousand individuals invested about twelve million ether, the crypto currency of the Ethereum blockchain, in the fund. Due to a flaw in the fund’s code, not Ethereum’s code, a “Dark Hat Hacker” skimmed off some 3.5 million ether on June 17, then equivalent to about $50 million. Due to a rule in The DAO’s smart contract, the hacker would not be able to get on the air until July 27.
Subsequently, White Hat Hackers skimmed the rest of The DAO’s fund to another location and devised a “soft-fork” of the Ethereum blockchain that would freeze Dark Hat’s funds forever. . Unfortunately, another mistake there turned out to be a spanner in the works and that would lead to an eternal cat-and-mouse game between the White and Dark Hats.
The latter would be a very undesirable situation with such a large amount of ether according to most of the community. Through a voting round where the miners, or the operators of machines that mine ether, had to decide whether there would be a hard fork or not. Those who voted voted in favour, although the total number is debated. After the vote came the option to choose the original version or the fork in the mining software and wallet client.