A recent tweet by Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase on the upcoming Etheruem hard fork hasn’t been received well by the cryptocurrency community.
Brian Armstrong, on his twitter channel, wrote — “If Ethereum pulls off this hard fork, very positive signal for them as a team. Shows they can listen to community, execute in time of crisis,” referring to the recent decision by the Ethereum Foundation to execute a hard fork to retrieve $60 million worth of DAOs that were siphoned off by an unknown developer. Armstrong was able to manage that by taking advantage of a critical flaw in the Ethereum/DAO network. But for many, his tweet has made him sound uninformed and clueless about what is happening with Ethereum.
Community members have taken to Reddit to criticize his Twitter statement. It is not just Brian Armstrong who is at the receiving end of the community’s ire, even Ethereum network is facing heat for its decision to hard fork the network as many Ethereum users are not convinced by the actions of the network and they fear that such an action may lead to Ethereum abandoning its principles and eventually fall out of favor in the cryptocurrency community.
Creating a hard fork on the Ethereum protocol will mean that the developers of Ethereum network will be forcibly taking decisions on behalf of the community, without them having a say in it. It is understandable that some people in the community may end up losing their money if the network doesn’t retrieve it, but many of those people had initially invested in DAO because they believed in the integrity of Ethereum protocol. Many believe that the hard fork on Ethereum will lead the protocol one step closer to centralization.
Also, Brian Armstrong’s comment seems to completely disagree with the opinions voiced by Fred Ehrsam, the other co-founder of Coinbase and Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, who all believe that it is better to learn from the mistakes than trying to fix it by force to end up breaking the whole system instead.
Few Ethereum mining pools have also conducted surveys to gauge the opinion of miners, to find out that there are many who are against the upcoming hard fork. In addition, a hard fork at the moment can kill Ethereum as businesses wouldn’t want to automate their operations using smart contracts that can stop working overnight if the developers decide to create a hard fork out of the blue.
Ethereum is in a catch-22 situation at the moment as the Ethereum Foundation and developers find themselves vulnerable to legal action if someone decides to file a lawsuit against them, claiming compensation. We don’t have to wait for long to know the outcome of the DAO debacle.
Ref: Reddit | Twitter | QZ |Image: NewsBTC
