To understand why I support this EIP, I expose the premises my reasoning starts from.
- Consensus always wins, the God of Code does not exist (yet). Changing blockchain state is always achieved by consensus, it's already true for every block and transaction. Consensus is expressed by people, and people form a Community around those consensus rules
- EIP is a good enough method to propose changes that require a hard fork. Different methods can be chosen to propose changes to the Community, but EIPs are already used to reach consensus about many different changes in the Ethereum ecosystem (Core, Networking, Interface, etc.). If we need to change something at chain level we need consensus, an EIP sounds to me a good enough method to try reaching such consensus
- A precedent already exists at block 1,920,000 (20th July 2016), EIP779. Almost 2 years ago, because of some bugs in the DAO contract, someone moved 3.6M ETHs (of a grand total around 12M ETHs) from the DAO balance to its own account. After many days of discussion, the majority of the Ethereum Community agreed that the contract didn't acted as intended by the DAO's developers, and it chose to hard fork from the original chain to rescue funds of DAO's investors, zeroing the hacker's balance and giving funds to the original smart contract. This precedent demonstrated that the Ethereum Community tolerates changing the blockchain's state in some specific cases. Ethereum Classic - the original chain - is still there demonstrating that Community matters and consensus mechanisms work
- We can discuss about changing chain's state because of errors in a smart contract. In this community this kind of discussions are allowed, and in case of success a hard fork is admitted restoring something that went wrong. The DAO's hard fork, EIP779 and this EIP999 are here to demonstrate that. And it's very good for me to have two communities that act differently, because I can choose which one is the best for each different use case
About this specific EIP
- This seems to me a very reasonable fix. The DAO fix was very serious, and it changed the state at a very intrusive level: it essentially moved funds from an account - the hacker's one, that has gained those ETHs following the bugged rules of the smart contract - to the DAO's account. This is very far that case: here many people lost access to their own ETHs, but those funds gone nowhere: they are still there untouched inside each multisig wallets, but nobody can use them. And this because a piece of code - a library - some wallets rely on was deleted by the hacker. This EIP will enable those wallets to regain access to their own funds, giving wallet's owners the ability to use those ETHs again
At the end this EIP simply restores a state of the chain where multisig wallets can work again, no one loses ethers, tokens or whatever and no one gains them. This seems legit enough to me, and this is why I support this EIP.