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I think this comment on the original blog post says it very well:

"To be clear, if this happened due to an exploit in the software, then I can accept a hard fork fixing the issue. However, if the DAO team made a mistake in the way they designed their smart contract, as an issue of principle, they should not be "bailed out" by the Ethereum team because they are "to big to fail." Hard lessons like these teach the cryptocurrency community at large to do their homework and to be excessively (and obsessively) diligent with their security."

I agree with this.

Do you own ethereum that will undoubtedly fall in value if the attacker is allowed to start dumping their earnings? It's within the network at larges interest to fork, so that is what will happen.

"Do you own ethereum that will undoubtedly fall in value if the attacker is allowed to start dumping their earnings?"

No, I do not own any ethereum and have had only a casual interest in the entire project. My own investments have been in "Oh By Codes"[1] most recently :)

[1] https://0x.co

> Agreed. If this soft and hard fork idea really goes through, it seems that now you are in fact getting the worst of both worlds: For your contract, you have to write code that apparently is very hard to get right and bug-free[1], while at the same time you are at the whim of a "community" -- whose decisions (sorry, "suggestions") can apparently be announced by one guy in a blog post -- not to deem what you are doing an "attack".

That's not really fair. His decree does not make it so. It still must be accepted by a majority of the miners, and this is and always has been a known property of the system. The collective will of the miners ultimately trumps the contract system. However, consensus there is purposely extremely difficult to achieve, and likely only possible in extreme cases like this.

Since this was a known property of the system, and since the agreement is inherently democratic, I don't see how this is a problem. Hard forks are simply another behavior of the network. Nothing more, nothing less.

The troubling issue with the system that this highlights is that a majority of users can agree to implement a fork which invalidates an existing contract.

As you say, that's a known property of the system. And it might be one of those things that's only viable in practice when the network is young. But can a CFO be considered to have satisfied their fiduciary duty if they write a contract which can be subverted in this way?

Ya, it's a tricky issue to be sure. But the miners are strongly incentivized to act in a way that minimizes harm to the currency itself. If they start accepting hard forks left and right then ether will lose all its value extremely rapidly. So i'm not really sure the slippery slope argument applies here.

I think this really can be considered a 'one time thing'. It isn't like miners can be pressured by a government to halt contracts for terrorists or other things. They have to be convinced and agree with the argument being made. There isn't a sole individual to whom pressure can be applied here. Granted, Vitalik may wield some influence, but if he started advocating things that were clearly not in the best interest of Ethereum, people simply wouldn't take on his suggested upgrades.

EDIT: I'd also add that for the record, as a DAO token holder, my personal opinion on what should be done is this: A soft fork to prevent ether from moving out of the child DAO, and then nothing. Just burn that ether forever. This avoids the moral hazard problem while minimizing harm to the overall ecosystem. People like me who made the mistake of investing still feel the pain, but Ethereum itself moves forward.

I respect that position, the moral hazard question is quite significant, particularly this early in the lifecycle of this network.

This basically sounds like, should we bail out Greece?

Commenting on your second thought: I hoped that people behind DAO (and Ethereum?) will stick to the terms they themselves proposed but it seems they will push hard for forking the chain (see: Ethereum blog).

Maybe someone can write an insurance contract that future DAO authors can hire, as an alternative to interventions. It would have to be bug free.

Sounds like kernel space code.

This is a smart response. The insurance company could also review the contract code in order to provide cover -- this would give investors extra confidence.

Suppose that I want to make a medical device, and I want to get liability insurance for when a bug in its code administers a lethal dose of radiation to a patient.

Is there any extant insurance company that would want to review my code in exchange for a lower premium?

If not, why would one be willing to do this for a flash-in-the-pan cryptocurrency, but not a useful, real-world device?

For an insurance policy like that, they wouldn't offer any policy without auditing the device, including the code.

Something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789829

Step 1: Write an insurance contract against the malicious use of Ethereum

Step 2: Find someone foolish enough to accept the other side of the insurance contract, in a world where "insurance fraud" is no excuse

Step 3: Use Ethereum maliciously, stealing your own Ether under another identity

Step 4: Collect insurance

Step 5: Profit (in Ether)

Step 6: Good luck turning your Ether into actual money when people figure out how broken everything about it is

The DAO was officially introduced by slock.it with "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, but now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore, it seems.

The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and for stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").

Whenever they're about to lose, those with the power to do so usually change the rules to ensure they win. Cryptocurrency developers are rarely an exception to that.

Actually, the Bitcoin devs deserve a huge amount of credit for not attempting to "improve" the block reward or total supply during their multi-year bleed down from $1200->$200.

It might also be a question of survival. If $36 million+ is drained from the DAO itself unintentionally at such an early stage, can they continue, and how confident can anyone be that their implementation will be successful if the reference implementation itself is not?

If the DAO is not ready for survival now, then no amount of protecting it will make it ready for survival. What will make the DAO survive is code that only contains bugs that are too difficult to find relative to the value of finding them.

> might this not be an opportunity to sue the developers implementing this fork in a real-world court?

That would make for a very interesting trial, where a very rigid ideology would be put to the test.