I note that initially the Daotacker empathetically offered to stop at 33% drainage of the DAO; thus only a 33% haircut for the fools who invested in this hairbrained idea to pool $168m.
His one stipulation was that there be no forks and so he would be allowed to keep his bounty in exchange for availing of the feature in the smart contract.
The Ethereum community not satisfied with the -33% spanking, tried to fight back by proposing forks and preparing a whitehat counter attack. With the popular support of the forks advancing in violation of his empathetic offer, the daotacker resumed his attacks by offering miners what appears to be a share in the spoils of the remaining 67% of the formerly undrained DAO tokens.
The whitehat group seized this as an excuse to launch their counter-splitting-attack.
The daotacker responded by splitting the whitehat's splits to drain them anew.
The Ethereum community has by now walked themselves into a corner with the only options being:
- a perhaps inexorable hacking fight over the split coins
- allowing the daotacker to take 100% of the DAO tokens (convertible to ETH at 0.1 par)
- or forking Ethereum
So now instead of taking a -33% haircut and being able to live on, it appears Ethereum can only die (perhaps a slow and torturous terminal decline). It either dies by losing 100% of the DAO tokens or by forking. If they fork, some fanboiz will remain, but enough of the CC community will hate Ethereum so much that it will suffer being persistently maligned. If they instead allow the daotacker to take the 100% of the DAO tokens, there will be likely class action lawsuits and/because the fanboiz will be emaciated.
If they had only taken the -33% haircut instead of doubling-down on self-belief. But the class action lawsuits were likely perceived to be on the horizon.
Or if they had never launched this delusional smart contakes in the first place.
On top of this, the daotacker
might possibly be employing shorts and price swings to bankrupt the alleged permabull manipulators of the Ethereum price.
Yes the attacker is on the move again right now. He donated some ether into the DAO and joined both whitehat splits. We drained the ETH he donated as fast as we could but he got what he wanted.
An attacker in now part of split 78 and he can now do the split attack again in that white hat DAOs.
Analogous to the unbounded recursion of Turing-complete scripting, the splitting can be recursed. Are we surprised.
Until it's fixed. Surprised this has to be repeated.
Looks like the only fix is going to be a fork.
If you fork it, some of us will no longer be willing to support Ethereum and we will actively develop a competing project.
I don't want to get into a debate about first mover, size of market, etc.. I understand already the points you would make. I am just making you aware that forking, will also fork your supporters. Please be aware of the cost.