Before Binance (and any other exchanges involved) receive any frozen funds they should agree to do everything they can to resolve the situation, and reimburse their clients that may have lost funds as part of the attack (collateral damage), and attempt to find the perpetrators of the attack - to show that these kinds of actions will not be tolerated.
The intent behind Satoshi’s vision of block chain technology was to create a peer-to-peer electronic cash system not requiring a financial institution or trusted setup.
He did not intend it to be a way for attackers to defraud people by performing double-spends.
He actually spends a lot of time showing calculations proving that attackers would not be able to take over the blockchain unless they had more than half of the processing power, and also have bad dishonest intentions.
Let’s face it - double spending is fraud - whether it’s on a block chain - or in real life - basically - here’s my money - and - oh - here’s my money again … this is against the law in virtually every part of the world and should not be tolerated.
Blockchain technology needs to evolve if it’s going to be accepted in any serious way. Satoshi’s vision is a starting point, not an end result.
For those people who insist that “code is law” - they are entitled to their opinion - it’s obvious that there are some people who are biased towards that way of thinking - these may be people from competing projects, or other people with other agendas, trying to discredit Firo, or may be the attackers themselves trying to manipulate the vote in order to get profit out of their attack.
The people that think “code is law” - maybe it’s better if they just pick a different project to follow - since it seems that most people in the Firo community tend to put decency, fairness, honesty, and honour ahead of blind-faith in a “code is law” mentality - and the Firo community does not have any respect for scammers, thieves, or anyone who would attack a block chain or project in this way.
Technology should serve society - technology should not be used as an excuse to allow or justify bad people doing bad things. The Firo community believes that privacy should be a human right - and I would suggest that security should be included in that as well.
It’s obviously unfortunate that chain locks could not be implemented prior to this attack. The reasoning behind not rolling out too many changes at the same time makes sense - since too many things changing at the same time would create a harder time to resolve issues that occur - and the team did look at the potential risk and it was low at the time of the decision.
There have been - and will continue to be - growing pains in block chain development - but the evolution needs to aim for the best version of itself.
In this case is was necessary for the team to intervene because of some bad actors doing bad things. Some may think that - oh - that’s the way it works - and it’s only the exchanges that get hurt - well - that’s not true - there is collateral damage and other people have been hurt and everyone in the Firo community has been impacted and inconvenienced.
We have to give the team a lot of credit for reacting to this situation as quickly as they did - especially since they were able to freeze the Firo that was used in the attack.
Most projects that have had 51% attacks have not been able to retrieve any funds from the attack - and in that case we would not be having this vote since there would be no funds to repatriate to the victims (Exchanges and clients).
Firo is in an evolutionary state - and is developing some of the best privacy technology in the crypto space - there will be growing pains - but we need to evolve our thinking while the technology evolves and matures.
If you haven’t guessed by now - my vote is option 1 - Keep attackers’ funds locked and use it to reimburse exchanges.
