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The evening of the attack, the Ethereum Foundation has asked the community, essentially the miners, to decide on whether they want to soft-fork, or freeze, the funds of the hacker. A soft-fork to freeze the hacker’s child DAO would buy the community more time to decide on a more permanent course of action, whether it is to hard-fork to return the funds, to freeze the funds indefinitely, to “negotiate” or extort the hacker to return most of the funds, or to let the hacker keep the funds.
If the majority of miners decides to do so it would be impossible for everyone to move ETH from every "theDAO" version. So it would affect the main "theDAO" and all the splits - including the regular and the malicious one.
An upgrade of both widely used Ethereum clients geth and parity will give the miners the power to support or not the soft-fork. Specifically, the upgrade would make it so that miners running the new software won’t be able to accept transactions from blacklisted addresses affiliated with the troubled fund.
The proposed patch works by giving miners the opportunity to flag that they support the soft fork, and then use their clients to lower a metric called the 'block gas limit', which puts a cap on the amount of gas (an element of ethereum transactions) that can be included in a block.
Miners, which compete to add new transaction blocks to the network, can already change their own block gas limits, but in this specific case, the mechanism allows for a form of miner-based voting to be held on ethereum. Once the network reaches block 1,800,000, if the overall network is below a threshold of 4m gas per block, the soft fork will activate.
Drawbacks
But such an action undermines the stated premise of Ethereum. As stated in its status, “Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party influence” - ethereum.org. Obviously going for a fork, even a soft one, is a difficult decision.
See also
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