After the Tether hack and unilateral temporary Omni Core hard-fork by Tether devs to lock-up the stolen funds, seems like Omni is considering rolling out an update that will allow Tether to reclaim the stolen funds.
I don’t want to spread FUD, and the details are still scarce, but as things stand this development is troubling for me, and I expect also troubling for most people who are ideologically aligned with the SAFE network project, especially since MaidSafeCoin relies on the Omni layer.
It’s one of those distractions I’m sure the team could do without at this stage, but I think it’s important that as a community we can agree on our position on this matter and what we can do about it, if anything.
I should add that I totally agree with Emin Gun Sirer’s opinion on this matter.
I agree with the fork as long as my maid and everyones funds of who didn’t steel anything are untouched. If only the fraudsters are affected then surely it’s just going after the bad guys and is 100% legit.
But who decides on who is a bad guy? Are wikileaks bad guys? What about Julian Assange and Edward Snowden? Do you agree that their accounts should be frozen?
If you do not think this kind of censorship and reversal of financial transactions is a slippery slope then why are you interest in a decentralized platform like the SAFE network, where this kind of centralized control should not be possible? Why not just trust a central authority to deal with bad guys? You already have them, they are regulated financial institutions.
Hopefully they don’t screw SAFE over a 2nd time for ‘laughs’ on their way out. If Tether leaves I smell a burn tax a-comin on how many million MAID again? Not FUDing, I just genuinely wouldn’t even trust this mob to change the dunny roll…
Edit: I should add there are ways around any potential issues I know, just these incidents really grind my gears.
I have no problem with decentralised community action against an attacker or thief when the decentralised community decides who the ‘bad guy’ is. For example, the ETH hard fork to recover DAO funds needed wide community consensus, and therefore could not have been forced by an attacker (e.g. government that’s not aligned to the community in its thinking).
I think we need to know more before we can make a judgement.
If this action needed many different people from all around the world to coordinate their actions to get this result, then it may be no problem at all, and demonstrate resilience in the face of a threat.
But if it’s a small number of people who can just decide to freeze any Omni assets between themselves, it could be very worrying indeed.
This sort of thing is what Professional Indemnity insurance is for. If the code has bugs in it that cause some sort of disaster, the insurance pays out.
Ofc, out in the crypto wild west, who knows how responsible the companies backing these projects are and what sort of cover they have attained. It would seem quite reasonable for a class action suit to be taken against purveyors of code that loses their investors lots of money though and this is why insurance is needed.
Whether any insurance company would cover these sort of projects with a barge pole is another thing. Whether any legal team will test who can be sued and for what is another. One thing is for sure - as the numbers get bigger, this sort of thing will get tested sooner or later.
Blockchains are not completely immutable. Not doing a hardfork today does NOT in any way guarantee that it won’t be done in the future. If a centralized company can decide to do a hardfork, it means they can be forced to do a hardfork. If no centralized actor can do a hardfork, the community can, whether or not a hardfork will be performed will then be up to the community, just the decision might be more decentralized that it would be in a centralized platform.
Avoiding hardforks of a blockchain to try to create an illusion that such hardforks can not occur in the future doesn’t do any good. A blockchain is not an autonomous data network after all.
I guess what this shows though is that OMNI is quite centralized and it seems they can do hardforks with or without the community.
I also argue against ERC20 on the Ethereum blockchain for one simple reason:
Ethereum did exactly what Omni is now proposing to do, and no, they did not achieve community consensus before hard-forking their way out of the DAO mess.
What Ethereum did was hold a rushed and little publicized poll to decide on the default vote of the reference implementation, ensuring the poll was favorable towards the hard-fork. So every node voted in favor of the hard-fork by default, unless explicitly configured to do otherwise. Ethereum calls it a 90%+ consensus for the hard-fork, I call it a rigged vote. Others called it the same, which is why Ethereum Classic exists.
This is also why, as someone who bought ETH on the first day of their presale, I completely divested myself from the project. It is also the reason why I don’t touch Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens, no matter how much I like the projects. I’m in this for the principle first, profit second.
If anyone ever considers Ethereum based tokens, please consider Ethereum Classic.
Well, thanks for the information; I didn’t know it. But why did the hard fork happen? Could you please explain? Sorry i’m new with this technical terms.
Though this event I think There are so many great projects Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens.
How do you think this could influence their efficency or their aims?
Both the Omni fork and the Ethereum fork were due to thefts of coins. In the case of Omni, it was Tether tokens taken from their ‘treasury’ (3 of 4 multi-sig) wallet. In the case of Ethereum, it was Ether held in the DAO contract. Both forks blocked the hacker’s access to the stolen coins.
