The Ethereum Community Debates Soft Fork to Blacklist Funds in Wake of $50M DAO Heist

The Ethereum community has a lot to decide lately as the network has been preparing for an upcoming soft fork expected to start roughly around June 30. According to Etherchain.org pools who have implemented the soft fork are showing consensus for the procedure. With the Ethereum community planning on the next step another revelation from Hacking, Distributed shows the soft fork may be vulnerable to DoSing. Is a Blacklisting Soft Fork a Good Idea? Some Say No. In an editorial written by Tjaden Hess and additional research done by River Keefer, and Emin Gün Sirer the Hacking, Distributed....

The number of options available to the ethereum development community as it searches for a way to recover investor funds lost when The DAO was compromised is dwindling with news that a vulnerability in one of the more prominent solutions has been discovered. As it turns out, a soft fork that would have sought to blacklist the ether address that holds the confiscated funds, preventing it from conducting any transactions, actually exposes a previously undetected attack vector. In a post on the Ethereum Foundation blog, developer Felix Lange explains that the exploit would slow down mining....

The soft fork proposed to fix the sticky situation The DAO has dragged the Ethereum community into is here, and is a perhaps disproportionately drastic to the problem. The proposed solution to the DAO attack is to freeze all funds in the contract by blacklisting the hashes that correspond to the stored Ether. Want to withdraw funds from the DAO or “split” from the failed experiment? Be prepared to do so on an alternate Blockchain. Soft Fork Praised Within, Decried by Ethereum ‘Outsiders’. The interesting facet of this development is the recent update to the blacklisting methodology being....

The ethereum community is inching closer to blacklisting funds taken from The DAO. Software patches were released late last week that, if accepted by a majority of miners, would place a hold on funds siphoned from The DAO earlier this month. Specifically, the patch would make it so that miners running the new software won’t be able to accept transactions from blacklisted addresses affiliated with the troubled fund. The patch works by giving miners the opportunity to flag that they support the soft fork, and then use their clients to lower a metric called the 'block gas limit', which puts a....

With $250 million on the line, Ethereum is moving at lightspeed as the latest unsybilable miner voting shows they almost unanimously back the fork, with more than 90% in favor. Gavin Wood, founder of Ethcore, the company that develops Parity, one of Ethereum’s clients, confirmed the soft-fork has been merged stating: “[T]he development branch of the Parity codebase now includes some functionality to allow miners to block certain transactions.” The softfork is still waiting to be merged in Go, the Ethereum client used by most users. Jeffrey Wilcke, an ethereum founder and lead developer of....