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Comment by exstudent2 | Hacker News Reader

There really is a ocean of ink being spilled by old school "experts" attacking The DAO and crypto currencies in general. It's difficult to understand their intense motivation to stop people from experimenting until you realize that crypto currencies disrupt their ability to gatekeep monetary decisions and make their current roles unnecessary.

As someone tangentially interested in the space, I've bought on every wave of negative press and have done quite well. Sure it's high risk but if you don't invest your life savings, it can be great fun, financially rewarding and technical interesting.

Hardcore naysayers have a vested interest in depressing these experiments and their commentary should be viewed as such.

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Is it really difficult to understand the motivation? Because the obvious one makes perfect sense: they are aware of the huge number of historical examples of pyramid and ponzi schemes that look exactly like a lot of behaviour on display around the DAO. People naturally fall for these, humans love them, so the only protection is for good actors to go on the offensive.

I also find the DAO interesting and am watching the experiment, but I'm pretty pessimistic given how even obviously predatory schemes get embraced by the community and attempts to out them get responses similar to yours ("Excuse me, but since there is no possible way anything is wrong with anything DAO related you are either misinformed or part of an anti-DAO conspiracy").

Or, possibly, they:

- Have enough faith in humanity to regard the possibility of collective democratic power having influence on currencies as a feature

- Are kinda noticing that life isn't actually quite a tragedy currently in most western democracies and therefore see no need for revolutionary change.

- Consider risk an essential factor in every investment, and fear it may be too high for the class of investors attracted to cryptocurrencies

- Have been convinced by actually quite serious flaws in this DAO thing, not from ideology, but game theory

- Are irritated by crypto currency advocates who go for conspiracy theories instead of arguing on the merits.

- Are wary of crypto advocates who argue with political arguments but clearly have a financial interest in the currency's rise.

For those with Faith, you've got your wise democratic currencies. But some people buy gold, presumably with those same democracies in mind ... are you against them doing that too?

As for the DAO, yeah I imagine it's got bugs. Hopefully less, and more transparently, than our existing contracts. But even if it fails horribly, other smart-contracts will stand on their own.

Do the market a favor and short the DAO (and fund an attack on it, if you can). That'll establish a demand for security and make you a pretty penny if you're right.

Even if you are right though, what would it mean? If Kickstarter got hacked or phished would that disprove all p2p funding sites forever?

> Do the market a favor and short the DAO (and fund an attack on it, if you can).

Enjoy your well-deserved prize.

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