tl;dr Regardless of how the hardfork decision will turn out, learning about Ethereum and Blockchain will be extremely valuable and very important for the Blockchain Community as a whole.

We need experts to avoid future catastrophe!

We need diversity to avoid groupthink, bubbles, bad decision making and partisan politicisation of Blockchain!

There is a whole world out there. Learning about Ethereum will unlock Tendermint, Rootstock, Bitcoin, Hyperledger and much more. Once you know the basics you will be able to pick up other technologies very quickly. It’s all based on very similar foundations, think OSI vs. TCP/IP.

If you master one, the others are a piece of cake.

Bitcoin piqued my interest in 2009 and when it became clear that smart contract platforms were really feasible, in late 2014, I dived right in.

The Blockchain community clearly needed high quality training material so that is what my team and I have been focusing on over at B9Lab. (We recently launched our Certified Ethereum Developer Online Course as well as an introductory course, Ethereum 101)

Our first online course on Ethereum Development has generated a lot of interest and the first cohort of more than 50 developers is busy learning how to build decentralised applications on Ethereum.

The most significant event in the Ethereum community over past few weeks was the utter chaos following the catastrophic failure of the DAO which had amassed approximately $150 million in investments by then.

The technical details of the attack have been described very well by Peter Vessenes here. In short, a malicious contract can, under certain circumstances, use a re-entry vulnerability to call a function again, before it was fully executed. In the case of the DAO, the withdrawal function was vulnerable because it transferred funds before updating balances. The attacker was able to call the vulnerable function again and again, draining the contract.

I don’t want to discuss fault or mitigation strategies, many others have covered that topic. I want to talk about two things.

1. Don’t get dissuaded from learning about Blockchain

Since the DAO incident we have received question after question about the future of Ethereum and Blockchain by potential and current students.

Our answer is: Ethereum will most likely survive, but even if it doesn’t, Blockchain will be around for a long time. And if you learn how Ethereum works you will be able to pick up Bitcoin, Hyperledger or Tendermint in a heartbeat. There is a whole world of Blockchain out there and it needs experts!

2. We need a bigger community of experts

We now need experts more than ever. Every expert begins their journey as a novice. The failure of the DAO is an example of miscommunication and people investing in something they don’t understand. It is also an example of parts of a community getting overheated by hype and not exercising good judgement.

The experts behind Ethereum have done excellent work so far, but there are not many of them.

A more diverse community from a wider variety of backgrounds would help to make sure that catastrophic failures such as the DAO are less likely and that Blockchain technology is used to improve the way we interact online.

We need more critical eyes on critical code. We need more cool minds challenging group think.

So, whether you read a book or article, watch videos or sign up to a course (*wink*) we encourage you to learn! Together we can work on making Blockchain a positive thing for the world.