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Comment by heliumcraft | Hacker News Reader

First of all the DAO was a decentralized organisation, it didn't belong to Buterin, it isn't "Buterin's company"...

The hard fork had a lot more to do with the fact the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor. There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners, there was consensus to do the fork and so the fork happened.

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> the overall community didn't thought the system would survive the eventual switch to proof of stake if 15% of all ether was in the hands of malicious actor

The author of Casper, Vlad Zamfir, clearly stated on numerous occasions on Reddit that there was no risk to PoS b/c of the hack.

> There was also the moral matter that something could indeed be done to actually return the stolen money to their original owners

That's a really nice way of phrasing "we have a moral right to help gamblers recoup their losses."

I have seen stated that even 7% could be an issue depending on the parameters used. Regardless, it was certainly a big concern at the time for most of the community.

That's a bit cynical to call the token holder gamblers, sure many of them "invested" thinking they would get some return back, but a lot of people were genuily curious in participating in this decentralized democracy experiment that never came to be. Regardless even if these people were 'gamblers' stealing is still stealing and returning stolen money is the right thing to do.

The DAO existed mostly to funnel cash to an IOT startup, Slock. They were going to sell network-connected door locks, with some AirBNB like service to manage them for rentals. The COO of Slock was from Etherium.

This was a lot less decentralized than the PR indicated.

> The COO of Slock was from Etherium.

That's incorrect, He was previously in the Ethereum Foundation but left (due to disagreements with Vitalik) long before the DAO was created.

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