Remember that when they say it's a suggestion, it's truly a suggestion. If a majority of the miners refuse to accept the update, then what anyone at the Ethereum foundation wants them to do is irrelevant.

There is definitely a lot of social pressure to consider here, but there is still no central switch. I'm generally not a huge fan of cryptocurrency (as currencies that is, I love the tech), but I fail to understand why so many people who are oppose this move so rabidly. They're in the same situation with respect to forking that they were yesterday: whatever 51% of the community decides to do will happen.

Rubbish, this is as centralised as you can get. Of course it will go through, because the alternative will cause forks and chaos. Miners have little to no choice but accept this decision from on high.

By the same standard, any theoretically forkable open source project with an even slightly non-isotropic community surrounding it is "as centralized as you can get". What exactly is decentralized then?

A lot of social pressure is probably an understatement. slock.it are implying that people who oppose the hard fork are likely to be the attacker and asking people to contact them with information about the identity of anyone who organizes opposition to it: https://twitter.com/christopherhesh/status/74379447973649612...

Yeah, but that's slock.it (not the Ethereum foundation) who were the same ones who found a similar bug in their code elsewhere are just plastered over it while claiming that there was no risk. They have a history of being cocksure about their programming, and didn't even think to take a quick look at the rest of their code. It's unsurprising that they're being scuzzy about this too, and I think the Ethereum community is pretty fed up with them at this point :P

You're right, this can't happen every time.

If users truly want to embrace the decentralization then I see issues with the Ethereum maintainers doing very centralized and specific fixes to solve individual problems.

DAO != ETH, but I see how this is an act of self-preservation due to the amount of stakes the maintainers have themselves in ETH.

How easy is to tell if you're getting tainted coins? Just the mention of this sort of hard fork means anyone who is exchanging coins for USD or BTC is at risk of being stuck with a hot potato, with impacts on convertibility and confidence in the whole system.

The stolen coins are unspendable for the time being due to the design of the contract.

because... ?

Sounds someone already got stuck with the hot potato. Was it definitely the hacker? if so, how did the contract's design make the coins unspendable? sounds like it would have been an odd contract to enter into.

Sounds like the powers that be have said, 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.' If you're going to do this sort of thing, you need a transparent policy describing the circumstances under which you're going to do that and who will make that decision.

It's almost as if complex contracts need to come under a system of laws and an adjudication process. Otherwise might is right (in this case might being all profit to the superior hackers, or to the people who can make the decision to repudiate the letter of the contract)

There's a lot of people who disagree with the hard fork idea and instead only want miners and clients to soft fork boycott the stolen coins.

What will happen depends on the collective decision of the community which is still being actively hashed out.

If the DAO is "too big to fail", are Vitalik and the core dev team the equivalent of a "lender of last resort"[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort

I don't think they're going to roll back transactions but rather build in the functionality to "give token holders the ability to recover their ether".

And how are they going to do that?

By changing the rules and bailing out a 'too big to fail' entity.

At least this way, with no full-scale rollback, other people's transactions won't be affected.