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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

The mistake was putting so much money in one untested contract.

It was a big mistake.

But Ethereum is still the leader in terms of a lot of technical aspects and also the ability to pull people together.

To try to give people a perspective: say you and your friends took out second mortgages on your houses and came up with 5 million to invest. Then you invented some tool, and someone found a back door or bug in this tool that allowed them to steal 1 million dollars.

So most of the group would like to undo this 1 million dollar theft with a patch.

Now, most outsiders are condemning you for trying to work around the bug and recover your million dollars with a patch.

I think that the mob is fickle. Quick to pile onto a bandwagon, and quick to burn it.

So, I hope Vitalik and the other group of hard working, intelligent and ethical people involved do not take the mob's response to heart.

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> So most of the group would like to undo this 1 million dollar theft with a patch.

That's very sensible. Which is why all traditional banking systems have the concept of a "chargeback" when something goes wrong.

Ethereum still sells itself as "Build unstoppable applications: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference."

The reason everyone is piling on Ethereum is because it said "we don't need politics to sort out disputes - the code is the truth". And that turned out to be untrue. There was just a huge political campaign to do a hard fork.

So if it's just yet another politically managed currency, why even bother to use it? Anything fancy it can do you can also do with a Python script, and then you can solve your disputes in a court or with chargebacks instead of starting a campaign to hard fork.

Because its not yet another politically managed currency. It still has a sound and revolutionary premise. It just had a bump in the road.

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.

If investors think it's theft, they should call the authorities.

The suspect (not "thief", because "theft" is determined in a court of law) can then be convicted via due process, which is a constitutional right.

After the Mt. Gox hack, users contacted authorities. The Mt. Gox hack lost $600M worth of bitcoin. They are now recovering some of their funds.

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.

[1] http://www.madofftrustee.com/recoveries-04.html

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).

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