Ethereum Soft Fork Voting and DAO Attacker Blacklist

Rage Comment : In response to the loss of funds in the DAO attack, the Ethereum community has been discussing the best solution to fundamentally solve the problem while providing a buffer solution. Among them, soft fork seems to be the best option at present, but it is also quite controversial. The final implementation requires miners to vote. The plan combines a blacklist to allow miners to refuse to trade with it through newly released software; and uses soft forks to limit the tokens required to run the code in blockchain transactions. At present, many mining pools have adopted the soft fork solution, and this trend may become mainstream in the future.

Translation: Annie_Xu

The Ethereum community is gradually completing the list of DAO lost funds.

A software patch was released late last week that, with the approval of a majority of miners, can rein in the funds previously siphoned from the DAO. Specifically, miners can run the software to refuse to transact with addresses listed on the blacklist.

The patch works by allowing miners to support soft forks and then use clients to lower the "block gas limit" (the currency required to pay for the number of code steps in a blockchain transaction is called gas) to limit the maximum amount of gas in a block.

Miners competing to generate new transaction blocks on the network can modify their own block gas limits, but certain special-case mechanisms allow for miner-focused voting on Ethereum.

As long as the network reaches 1.8 million blocks and the gas limit for each block of the overall network is 4 million, the soft fork will be activated.

The Ethereum Foundation blog post stated that the soft fork solution is currently the least controversial.

“While many people are suggesting a hard fork right away, they don’t understand the consequences of doing so. An alternative is to use a soft fork, where miners can suspend certain transactions and try to recover funds without significantly affecting the Ethereum protocol.”

The DAO was a project built on Ethereum that raised more than $150 million in Ether before the system collapsed. Its goal was to become a smart contract-based financing tool to fund project initiatives on the Ethereum platform.

The project raised ether through a crowdfunding campaign by publicly selling tokens representing voting rights for the initiative.

However, a certain snippet of smart contract code caused problems with the funds, and the Ethereum community began to work hard to stop the perpetrators behind it. Ethereum developers used the same method as the attacker to recover the funds.

And a few days before the patch was released last Friday, Ethereum developers began discussing possible solutions.

Likelihood of Success

The patch release was seen as a referendum on whether to fork Ethereum to prevent the DAO attack. After the attack, stakeholders were divided on whether to modify the network.

Relevant survey data shows that many mining pools (increasing computing power to increase the mining capacity of the next block) have made adjustments, and if this trend continues, soft forks will become mainstream starting on June 30. Some mining pools in the Ethereum ecosystem have begun voting to decide whether to adopt this controversial approach.

The core problem is that DAO token holders who are used to entering subsystems using smart contract code will find that there is no way out there either.

However, the blog post states that other forks will be used to free up these accounts in the future.