During the last days we have received lots of questions on our point of view regarding the proposed soft fork in order to freeze the funds that were taken from the DAO contract by the means of exploiting a bug in the contract code. If you follow this forum as well as the various Ethereum subreddits you will quickly realize that a heated debate is currently going on if a potential soft- (and maybe later a hard-) fork is a viable solution for this incident.
As the admin of Ethpool and Ethermine I believe that the pool should take into account the various opinions of our customers - the miners - before making any decision in this regard. As it is very difficult to derive such an opinion from post written on this forum as well as on reddit we have decided to let the actual miners on both pools to vote on this issue.
Each miner that is actively mining on the pool (= has submitted valid shares during the last hour) can cast their vote using the account settings tab in his account page. Currently there are 4 different options:
- Not voted
- Don't care
- Yes, run the soft fork
- No, do not run the soft fork
The current result of the voting process is available at
http://ethpool.org/stats/votes and
http://ethermine.org/stats/votes. All votes are weighted by the hashrate of each miner that has voted.
The voting process will end a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO, which currently holds the funds extracted from the DAO, or earlier if a clear majority has been formed. We commit to follow the decision of our miners according to the result of the voting process. We will reserve the right to act against the voting results if a larger portion of the network starts to mine on a different chain (e.g. ethpool & ethermine vote yes on the soft fork, but the remaining network does not support it). This is solely for the purpose to avoid mining on top of invalid blocks which would reduce the mining earning of the whole pool.
A potential hard for is currently not included in the voting as there is not even a clear proposal on the table.
As this is the first time we are casting such a vote we are open to any feedback how we can improve this process.
Thanks & happy mining!
Comments
Edit: To make the result better visible we have excluded miners that have not voted yet. Their hashrate is shown in the subtitle of the chart as reference.
Why do I need to provide my IP address to vote?
can you go with something else, like recent payment (first 6 digits or more, if needed)?
I am sure that this (IP) will suppress the voting numbers.
As current DAO hack has shown, everything is hackable.
@Biodom the IP address is the simplest way to verify the identity of a worker. The recent payment id can be looked up using a block explorer. The most secure alternative would be to ask the miner to sign a message with his Ethereum account but a lot of miners use addresses from an exchange which would exclude them from the voting. Dwarfpool uses the same method the verify the identity of a miner. We had the mechanism already in place for defining different account settings, we just added the voting field.
I am not concerned about pool knowing my address since pool knows it already, but someone hacking the relevant web page to extract web addresses of participants.
If you are going to strip IP addresses from the aggregated results and only use IP to validate, then it might be OK. You really need to explain the procedure better.
OK, thanks, this is fine, then.
Thanks.
"The voting process will end a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO", but what if other attacks on the DAO would be committed before that deadline?
EDIT: It worked on second attempt.
Like a notification box under the "Account: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" text.
People don't check or change their settings that often either so will very likely miss this change there.
Also i would highly recommend adding a link to this thread besides the ethereum blog entry, as your post gives out more info about what this vote is about as well and how it will affect the pool. This will also likely raise a number of questions for miners, and thus a link to this thread would also serve for that purpose.
You could also add information somewhere, as to where will you be giving out additional info, ie. regarding the hard-fork if that plan goes forward etc. I stumbled upon this thread because i was looking for this info, on how your pool is going to handle this situation, but this isn't the first place people are going to go for this information and you don't really have a clear and well known forum/medium on where you share info regarding the pool, like twitter, this forum or something. So these could be some measures as to how to communicate this vote and change to your users.
But you are right we will add a link from the pool to this thread.
Here's a question: Will there be any down-time on the pool if the soft- and/or hard-fork is implemented?
Otherwise the world sees yet another blockchain solution that was supposed to be "better" as being no different. Ethereum is different, lets do the forks.
@Genoil this is certainly an option but it will require us to nearly double the servers required to run the pool. Each mining node is running on its own dedicated server for optimal performance. Also it will require for each miner to make an proactive swtich on their rigs if they want to vote for the fork which can be quite time consuming for them.
Anyway good point on the servers, that shouldn't be on your shoulders.