Re:The DAO, the Hack, the Soft Fork and the Hard Fork
by shawnz on Friday July 21, 2017 @01:01PM
(#14822057)
> Once hacker gets your money out of the hacked contract, no hard fork is feasible.
Why wouldn't it be feasible? Have all users update to a version of the client which artificially corrects for the balances of the hacked wallets. Isn't anything possible with a hard fork?
Re:The DAO, the Hack, the Soft Fork and the Hard Fork
by ProblemFactory on Friday July 21, 2017 @01:18PM
(#14822185)
Anything is possible, but it gets much harder once the money is in circulation. If the hacker has time to buy socks & soap with the stolen funds, and convert some of it to USD on an exchange - then the soap merchant and exchange will not want their wallets "corrected".
Sorting out who should get their money returned and who gets to keep it would be infeasible.
Conceptually, they would, it's just that DAO was an exceptional case.
a) The amount was really large. b) Ethereum ecosystem wasn't mature enough (and yesterday's event proved that they can take a hit like that and survive). c) DAO had a 30 day lockdown of the hacker's fund, this is something which allowed for a hard fork to be possible.
The last is really important. Once hacker gets your money out of the hacked contract, no hard fork is feasible. The DAO essentially created a situation where it was impossible for hacker to get the money, nor for the white hat hackers to get the money. Both could have created a script, where hacker would move his funds to a new child contract, and the WHG would follow him to the child contract (thus essentially rendering him unable to get his money out).