When the DAO hack occurred, the Ethereum community was faced with a dilemma. The hacker had stolen Ether from the DAO and it was not clear how to best retrieve the stolen funds and return them to the rightful owners. After much discussion, the community decided that the best course of action was to hard fork the Ethereum blockchain. This meant that there would be two versions of Ethereum, the original blockchain and the new forked blockchain.
NOTE: WARNING: Ethereum underwent a hard fork after the DAO hack in order to reverse the transactions involved in the hack and restore funds to investors. This hard fork should not be taken lightly, as it has the potential to create two competing versions of Ethereum—the original version and a new version with a reversed blockchain. As such, users should be aware that these competing versions could lead to instability in the cryptocurrency markets and adversely affect the value of their Ethereum investments.
The original blockchain would be left unchanged and the new forked blockchain would have the DAO hack reversed. This decision was not made lightly, but it was felt that it was the best way to protect the Ethereum community and ensure that the stolen funds were returned to their rightful owners.
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The highly anticipated Constantinople hard fork was supposed to occur on January 16th but ended up being postponed due to a last-minute security vulnerability. The fork was rescheduled for February 27th, but that date has also come and gone without any action. So, what’s the hold up?
When the DAO hack occurred, the Ethereum community was faced with a choice. They could either hard fork the Ethereum blockchain to refund the DAO investors, or they could do nothing. The majority of the community decided to hard fork, but a small group disagreed.
When it comes to cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has been one of the most popular platforms in recent years. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s immune to market fluctuations. In fact, Ethereum has been on a bit of a downward trend lately.
On November 12, 2020, Ethereum dropped by over 13% in a matter of hours, and at one point, was down over 20%. This was a significant drop compared to other major assets, including Bitcoin, which only dropped by about 3% during the same time period. There are a few possible explanations for why Ethereum dropped so much compared to other assets.
As of late, Ethereum has been on the rise, and there are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, Ethereum is a much more versatile platform than Bitcoin. While Bitcoin was designed as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, Ethereum was built with the intention of creating a decentralized platform that would enable developers to create smart contracts and decentralized applications.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of fraud or third party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent ownership of property. This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.