Coinbase Co-Founder Warns of Ethereum Hard Fork

Rage Comment : Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam said that he does not want Ethereum developers to change the blockchain platform code. Ethereum is still in the early stages of development. The DAO incident can be used as a lesson for future smart contract writing. If every error is solved by forking, it will have a great impact on the reputation of DAO. There are two ways to solve this problem: hard fork (return to before the attack) and soft fork (update the Ethereum protocol version).

Translation: Nicole

Digital currency exchange operator Coinbase has also been involved in the ongoing crisis of The DAO, where tens of millions of dollars of user funds were recently stolen by an unknown individual or group through a code vulnerability.

In a statement to CoinDesk, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam said he hopes ethereum developers won’t change the blockchain platform’s code, even though such changes to the protocol’s rules could protect user funds. With these comments, Coinbase is standing in solidarity with the ethereum platform and ether, the native digital currency that was added to the GDAX exchange in May.

During the speech, Ehrsam reiterated his past public statements on the matter, but found that the Ethereum platform is still in its infancy, and therefore, The DAO incident should be seen as a learning experience and a "reality check."

Fred Ehrsam

Ehrsam told CoinDesk:

“We should take advantage of these errors because people may write some buggy contracts in the future, and we can’t fork every time there is an error.”

Despite the uproar over the DAO incident, Ehrsam believes the strength of the Ethereum development community and the ether market remains unchanged.

He said:

“It just means it’s hard to write secure smart contracts.”

Such comments come amid debate in the ethereum community over the strategies that should be adopted to protect user investments, now that The DAO has compromised.

Options to resolve the matter include a hard fork and a soft fork, the latter of which would update the Ethereum protocol version so that funds in any contracts related to The DAO would be deemed invalid.

Alternatively, the development community can choose to hard fork and reverse the attacker's intrusion. However, the cost of doing so is that developers abuse their power to change the decentralized network.