@MicahZoltu I think one part of the story might be the not-so-long-yet availability of Constantinople
dev tools. We released the EthereumJS
Constantinople VM 22 Nov 2018, it took Truffle some time to integrate and the first Constantinople
-ready Ganache version came out just 6 days ago. Since ChainSecure uses this first beta to test the vulnerability my assumption is that these releases might have triggered experimentation, will investigate this further.
One outcome of this might be to take dev tool readyness stronger into account when planning a hardfork date, and make release of the 2-3 most used tools (and not just the VM as some base layer) a precondition for some date settlement.
It should also be noted that even though there were risks in going ahead with the fork and risks in delaying the fork, there was an asymmetry in timing. The closer we get to the time of the planned fork, the harder and riskier it is to call for a postponement.
As such the decision to delay the fork had to be made really quickly. This undoubtedly played into the decision tonight.
It was simply not feasible to spend 12 hours investigating / discussing because by that time (less than 24 before the fork) a delay may no longer have been possible.
I've created a github issue, designed to capture questions and comments which cannot be addressed right now, but which would be valuable to discuss during a post-mortem.
ethereum-cat-herders/hard-fork-checklist#1
Thank you for your contributions and patience.
@Souptacular since all the updated versions are released, we should update the blog post to reflect that. I recommend changing:
"Miners, Exchanges, Node Operators:
to
"Miners, Exchanges, Node Operators: