“Good and bad go hand in hand”: The DAO blockchain developers in 2016

Rage Comment : The author of this article is the founder of Slock.it, the code provider of Ethereum The DAO project. He participated in the entire process from the initiation of the project to its final failure and witnessed the hardships and efforts of the developer community. Therefore, he has a deep and personal understanding of this new form of organization. Therefore, he fully recognizes this model and said that he has started a new project. He will continue to be committed to the realization of a decentralized shared economy.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Looking back on this year, I have to say that it has been very difficult.

There’s been a lot of talk this year about companies and their contribution to the blockchain industry, so I wanted to give some perspective on where we are in the Ethereum world; not from a neutral outsider’s perspective of course, but from our inside (“biased”) perspective.

Earlier this year, Slock.it worked hard to realize the decentralized sharing economy and developed the Ethereum Smart Home Server using Samsung hardware and Ubuntu Core.

It's an exciting time and we're making some progress.

However, when we started raising funds, the situation changed. Instead of doing a centralized token presale or the typical venture capital fundraising method, we decided to build a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

So The DAO was created, and it got a lot of attention, coverage, and discussion. It was amazing, and I think it demonstrated the broad appeal of true decentralized autonomous organizations.

It made many mainstream media start to pay attention to blockchain technology, especially the Ethereum blockchain. However, we all know what happened next. The software vulnerability of the smart contract led to the failure of the project, and the specific solution also caused controversy.

The Ethereum community has never had to face this kind of challenge before. However, we have 28 days to find a solution, which is really a blessing in disguise (after 28 days, it will be useless to decide on a hard fork).

It not only challenges the governance of Ethereum, but also raises questions about the governance of blockchain itself.

By Christoph Jentzsch

Lessons Learned

So what is the governance mechanism of Ethereum? Now we are about to find out.

At its core, Ethereum is a protocol that brings together completely different people and interest groups, including the Ethereum Foundation, miners, exchanges, loosely connected development teams, developers, users, and pure speculators.

According to the Ethereum protocol type, it is a proof-of-work blockchain; according to the governance terms, it is limited to "what people choose to run". Of course, it is not that simple. Only a few people have mastered the technology to develop clients and make secure modifications.

And its network effect is huge. However, developers are still willing to listen to the wishes of the community and users, contribute their expertise, and then provide options.

I think the Ethereum client developers are doing a great job and are doing an admirable job of completing challenging tasks.

After a lot of controversy, most people supported updating the client and performing a hard fork, and despite the tight timeline, it went smoothly. In the end, a group supporting the original blockchain emerged, proving that every user has the right to choose which blockchain to support.

Some people mistakenly believe that this is a centralized decision made by a small number of elites who arbitrarily modified the protocol.

As someone who was involved in the advocacy and explanation of the hard fork with many different groups at the time, I can tell you that I have never witnessed a more difficult decision-making process than this one.

Centralized systems are efficient at making decisions, but what we do is precisely connect the community and all its elements; we benefit greatly from that.

I hope we can improve Ethereum’s governance mechanisms, and we are currently discussing a number of initiatives, including controlling protocol parameters through smart contracts and using shareholder votes to activate hard forks and deprecate the original chain.

This year, a less controversial hard fork was conducted to protect against DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service attacks). In the process, Ethereum demonstrated its ability to cope with different attacks, and The DAO also made people aware of the limitations of blockchain.

Evolving

2016 is about to pass, and the Ethereum ecosystem has become even stronger.

Devcon2, Ethereum’s annual developer conference, was a showcase of the developer community’s capabilities, determination, and technology, which was impressive. I am very happy to see that this community is constantly improving smart contract security, developer tools, decentralized application infrastructure (dapp), clients, and protocols.

Although The DAO is over, the DAO concept is not dead. We want to continue developing and testing it. So we started a new project, Charity DAO. We hope to pour the lessons learned so far into this project and work on improving charity.

In the future, Slock.it will continue to work on projects that help realize the decentralized sharing economy, such as Share&Charge, which was recently mentioned by the German government. We have launched a new project with Innogy to jointly build shared peer-to-peer electric vehicle charging stations.

In short, I’m very much looking forward to what 2017 has in store.

We hope to develop as many substantive applications as possible on the Ethereum public chain so that people can directly sell, rent and share. I personally look forward to actual products and services that can use the Ethereum public chain.

With these goals in mind, the lessons we’ve learned, and the continued development of decentralized applications, I believe we’ll see Ethereum Web 3.0 continue to improve and mature in 2017.