That's why Yahoo made the point of blaming a "state-sponsored actor". You would expect a giant tech company to be able to defend itself against random hackers, but what if it was the government of Russia?? That's why Sony Pictures blamed North Korea for what was, in the opinions of security experts, the work of an insider.
Google moved out of University Ave as soon as they exceeded the capacity...they didn't try taking over downtown, they took over boring office park space north of 101 in PA for a while.
Now say, you took out a mortgage and came up with 5 million dollars. Another 100 people don't have any dollars, so they would like to seize your 5 million dollars with a patch. There's a clear majority vote to take your 5 million dollars. Should they be allowed to do that?
Its not anything like that though. Its more like the small group of investors with the most money in the pot are voting to protect the large amount of money 'hacked' away. Its not like a majority stealing money.
The idea of decentralization and objective rule by code is sound, but the other part of this is that it is an alpha system that was untested, and obviously this was a theft. Forking in this case does not invalidate the concept or the team or any of it.
It doesn't mean there will be people forking in the future to steal money.
It really seems like most people are operating on the same level that the kids were in my 7th grade class. Which is pretty bad, because it was full of dullards, children acting almost like monkeys, and actual juvenile criminals.
Honestly the common reaction here is at a middle-school level.
It's worth comparing the Madoff scam. It's been a long, slow grind, with lawsuit after lawsuit against many different parties. But 63% of the losses of direct customers of Madoff have been recovered.[1]
The anonymity feature of Etherium is why this can't happen with the DAO. Nobody knows who has that money. It's tied to a numbered account. They haven't been able to launder it yet, but everyone seems to assume they will be able to.
If Etherium were non-anonymous, this problem could have been unwound in court.
That's a possible course of action, but in order to be practical and effective in restoring justice, it needs some technical abilities that Ethereum currently doesn't have and probably cannot have - namely, the ability within due process to (a) freeze the anonymous stolen funds during the trial and (b) after a (hypothetical) decision of court, seizing the funds against the will of the account's owner (e.g. trial in absentia).
The DAO did exactly, exactly, what it was supposed to do. In no way can it be have said to fail, except in the "wasn't a great investment" sense. Maybe in failed in the "wow using terrible languages to write complicated code is a bad idea" way, too.
Ethereum failed, as they decided smart contracts aren't a great idea, so they're now going to involve humans when they feel like it. The whole premise of Ethereum was the opposite of what they're doing.
I believe that Ethereum+DAO was a sucessful experiment (with negative results) - they had a vision/hypothesis that smart contracts without human/legal overrides are a good idea, despite the experience of the whole financial and legal world over the last couple of millenia telling them that this vision is naively utopic. The whole point of Ethereum was implementing and testing this vision in practice, which they did.
In practice they found out (and showed the public) the kind of consequences everyone was expecting; and so we have a successful experiment giving some evidence on whether smart contracts w/o overrides are a good idea - apparently, it's not; and now based on this we can build better systems that properly account for the risks that DAO had.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know people were doing this. I had only seen EthereumClassic, which seems prone to attack, and a nightmare for exchanges.
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