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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You're missing an essential point of the whole argument. Either the DAO as it is is self-contained or it is a failure. If it needs the courts, either to enforce a contract or to try to prevent enforcing a contract then the whole thing is dead.

On which side of such a lawsuit you are is not important, the fact that the DAO can not be trusted to be complete and that there is a possibility that contracts once executed can be rolled back makes it un-viable in this incarnation.

Personally I think it was oversold, this lesson could have been learned a lot cheaper but that's easy to say after the fact. As bug bounties come this was a pretty good one, and I'd be highly surprised if it was the only flaw in the present implementation.

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You want to make that point. I don't care.

The attacker tried to exploit a flaw in TheDAO's code to steal its ether, not because it was designed to allow that or because that was the intent of its designers, but because he could.

Well, the Ethereum community can also do something that was neither intended nor planned for. You say that doing so would be a breach of contract. I say: Well, go ahead and sue me.

He didn't 'try', he (or she) did. And he could because it was allowed, intent or not.

> Well, the Ethereum community can also do something that was neither intended nor planned for.

Of course they can. And that will make the whole concept moot.

> You say that doing so would be a breach of contract. I say: Well, go ahead and sue me.

No-one will. But then also: no-one will ever trust the concept. It either works or it does not, you can't say it works and if it doesn't we'll fork. That's simply institutionalizing unreliability.

The attacker has - very elegantly - pointed out a major flaw in the whole thing in a way that not much else could have: in the end we all have to either trust some higher power to interpret the context in which a contract was drawn up or we will have to live by the letter of the contracts. You can't have it both ways.

> But then also: no-one will ever trust the concept.

I think they will. In time, one of us will be proven right.

I believe ethereum is dead, but I also believe that a better implementation of the idea has merits. So long term I'm optimistic but it would have been better if DAO had been a bit more conservative before taking on substantial outside involvement. Overselling something is never good.

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