A voting is ongoing started by Ethereum developers whether a soft fork should be implemented to fix the consequences of the recent hacker attack on The DAO. Most ether miners back the idea.

Not all have voted, though. On both mining pools where the voting is taking place, Ethpool and Ethermine, the majority of users have not expressed their will yet. At the press time, miners with the joint hashrate of 239,645 MH/s have not voted yet on Ethpool, while the votes are arranged as follows: 49,341 MH/s support the soft fork, 14,252 are against it, 98 “don’t care”. It is worth noting that votes are weighed not according to the principle “one user – one vote” but according to the hashrate of each participant, that is why the actual number of the supporters of a given strategy is unknown.

Ethermine’s statistics looks similarly. Users with 359,552 MH/s have not expressed their opinion, 52,598 MH/s support the soft fork, 13,724 are against it, 880 “don’t care”. However, the announcement about the voting was made only on 19 June at both pools, the voting is in progress even now, which means that soon there will be very few of those who have not voted.

The voting mechanism only allows “active” miners to participate, that is, users who have submitted valid shares during the last hour. Moreover, if a miner makes a break, their vote will expire in an hour. Thus, the Ethereum team stimulates the community to remain true to the cryptocurrency. The system also makes it possible to re-vote. Over the last few hours, the number of “don’t care” miners in both pools has decreased.

In general, the miners’ readiness for the soft fork shows that they see the recent attack on The DAO as a serious threat. Anxiety has risen in comments to the administrator’s statement, concerning the requirement to provide an IP address to be able to vote. “As current DAO hack has shown, everything is hackable,” notes one of the users.

Ethereum developers promise to follow the decision of the miners, whatever the outcome. The voting will end “a few days before the freeze period of the Child-DAO,” hints the author of the statement. However, if the majority of the community does not support the decision (for example, users will continue mining on the old chain in spite of both pools supporting the soft fork), then it will not be followed.

Andrew Levich