Following the DAO hack, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a solution – software fork – to prevent the ether from being withdrawn by the attacker. This, however, has become a heated debate that whether a potential soft- (and maybe later a hard-) fork is a viable solution for this incident.

In a Reddit post, Buterin wrote:

“I personally believe that the soft fork that has been proposed to lock up the ether inside the DAO to block the attack is, on balance, a good idea, and I personally, on balance, support it, and I support the fork being developed and encourage miners to upgrade to a client version that supports the fork.”

According to latest results from the ongoing voting on the issue, most of the ether miners (who have voted so far) support soft fork. CoinFox noted that as votes are weighed not on the basis of “one user – one vote” but according to the hashrate of each participant, the actual number of the supporters of a given strategy is unknown.

On Ethpool, 50,729 MH/s support the soft fork; 14383 MH/s are against it, while 2149MH/s voted they ‘don’t care’. At the time of writing, 240566 MH/s have not voted yet.

On Ethermine, 54,340 MH/s have voted in support of the soft fork; 15,106 MH/s have voted against and 1060 MH/s don’t care. So far, 351585 MH/s have not voted their preference.

A potential hard fork is currently not included in the voting as there is no clear proposal yet. An online post, Ethereum Community Forum said:

“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.”