Soft Forks, White Hats, and SEC Oh My!

The mess surrounding the DAO attack is not over. The majority of the Ethereum community seems to be leaning towards a soft fork in the wake of the disaster that happened with a third party application. Some are not happy with this decision, but it seemed to be favored among most with both the DAO and ETH markets doing very well over the past 24 hours.

The DAO attack has become one of the most talked about cryptocurrency incidents in quite some time. The soft fork plan may be followed up with a hard fork but as of now the soft implementation is what has the most consensus at the moment with miners. Operation “DAO Rescue Hotfix” has been added to Github discussing the code and subsequent procedures. Alongside this yesterday, a ‘White Hat’ draining of the DAO funds took place by members of the DAO and Ethereum community. This act alone has seemed to add the most confidence in markets as they started rising after this announcement. The Github statement reads as follows:

“For those who are not migrated to 1.3.0-RC this is 1.2 release with the critical Ethereum soft-fork update aimed to rescue stolen DAO funds. The motivation, offering the network to overcome significant submitted crime of stealing 3.6M ether.The proposed solution is to freeze all the transactions trying to move any funds from the DAO or the child DAOs. The rescue fix is still for the miners to vote about , they have to lower the gas limit value for that fix to be activated.”

Many people in the Ethereum and cryptocurrency community have been quite vocal about the attempt to “blacklist” and safeguarding the DAO project in general. The voting happening on Ethpool.org shows a significant majority supporting a soft fork to the Ethereum client. However as voting has progressed the “NO” section of the vote and has increased to close to a quarter of the total.

https://twitter.com/stephantual/status/745322581620834304

Throughout most of this debacle, people have been playing the blame game, pointing fingers and asking others to apologize. This is to be expected when there is a $160 million dollar project on the line with a wide array of investors. Now to top it all off the blame game has been taken further with someone contacting the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and complaining about the incident. The contact with SEC isn’t officially confirmed as it was yet another Pastebin leak to the public which may not be factual at all and could easily be someone rustling jimmies. However, the author writes, “we urge the community to reach out to both the above-mentioned authorities, as well as their own national regulators to explore possible measures to protect investors and to establish liability for fraudulent investment schemes.” The author writes they are tired of the “wild west” mentality within the industry and states:

“Dear SEC Investigators, Someone close to me lost over $10000 in a cybercurrency like investment fund that was allegedly hacked for $50m shortly after. Most importantly, this investment was touted as safe and secure by its inventors, and now it is the opposite.”

Right now both the DAO community and Ethereum camp seems optimistic as the days continue and plans to fix this mess materialize. Talks of a counter-attack are also being discussed, and this has made people more confident. Currently, at the time of this writing, the Ether market is in an upward motion in value at roughly $14 USD per ETH. The DAO market is also doing way better than before resting at ten cents per token and has been on a positive upswing as well looking at the charts. Live Bitcoin News will keep our readers up to date on the next steps forward with both the Ethereum and DAO teams and community. What takes place will surely set precedence in the cryptocurrency community and prove if issues like these can be solved.

Source: Github, Pastebin, Twitter, Medium blog, Ethpool.org

Images: Twitter, and Crypto-graphics.com