It happened when Ethereum was less than a year old. The hack exploited a vulnerability that was arguably systemic, since it also existed in a lot of the sample code on ethereum.org.
When Bitcoin was a little more than a year old, it reverted five hours of transactions after a bug exploit.
Both blockchains have matured since then and don't do that anymore. An Ethereum cofounder's company lost over $100M in ETH, and the community refused its requests to restore funds with a fork.
Maybe under very exceptional circumstances, i.e. a systemic network risk. Since the DAO fiasco we've had a number of high profile incidents and the community has rejected stepping in (look at the failure of EIP 999). I'm not sure if there's presently anything on Ethereum, that should it fail, would be as bad as the DAO failure. Maybe MakerDAO?
I think they meant more system technical risk than financial. as in, a change to prevent bypassing private key checks, or minting quadrillions of BTC / ETH beyond the issuance schedule.
I mean, no? There are two cryptocurrencies, ETH and ETC, and apparently most people think it's fine to revert a transaction for the reason ETH reverted it. The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.
>The only problem is that people posit "but it's a problem when transactions are reverted, and, look, ETH reverts transactions!", which assumes the problem even though the assumption doesn't really seem to hold.
But if all we cared about is the "right" thing to be done at the end, why bother with smart contracts? Why not use the courts?
I'm not the right person to ask, as I don't believe that there's a way to somehow make software bug-free enough to deal with huge amounts of money for an indefinite amount of time. However, it seems that enough people think that "do the right thing automatically unless someone steals millions, in which case revert it" is a good compromise.
Well the true genius of Eth was making choosing the fork the default option. So no, there isn't evidence that the community intended to accept the fork.
All blockchains are secured by trust in the developers. Proof of work is merely a way to buy their token from a power company. All of the problems with have with online contention, will manifest in blockchain for this reason.
ETC exists, if you don’t like ETH go use ETC, the community voted with their wallets, ETH won, give it a bone already