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Even if it is flawed, the contract never said I couldn't untie or cut the string before pulling it (or move the head away from the gun). So I remove the string

Even if it is flawed, the contract never said I couldn't untie or cut the string before pulling it (or move the head away from the gun). So I remove the string from the trigger, pull it, and walk away with $10. This illustrates the difficulty with rigid computer-enforced contracts. Clearly, both parties violated the intent of the contract by strict, bloody-minded adherence to its literal terms. The cleverest, most obfuscated contract writer thus wins against everybody but the cleverest, most analytic contract disassembler.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> Even if it is flawed, the contract never said I couldn't untie or cut the string before pulling it (or move the head away from the gun). So I remove the string from the trigger, pull it, and walk away with $10. Again, this is not an accurate analogy to the DAO contract, which I could fully inspect, and even theoretically run in a sandbox environment myself. Your analogy is more akin to what actually happened, which is that people said, "nah, we didn't mean that", and re-tied the string to something else.
h1d 10y ago
I agree that is the current state but if that is going to be the case for time to come, I doubt it will fly as every investor needs to be the cleverest. If nothing is learned by the devs and if all they do is make investers look less angry, this project is not going anywhere.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  The same problem exists in non-networked investment vehicles. Clever people can create derivatives and convince less-clever people to buy them, not realizing that the math actually simplifies out to "heads, I win: tails, you lose". The capital markets industry has never been able to keep clever people from making a little more money for themselves at the expense of a lot of money that would otherwise have gone to investors. At least with ETH and its future competitors, the specific sort of cleverness that is required to profit is very close to the cleverness that I now possess. Not saying I'd put a dollar that I can pay actual bills with into ETH right now, just that it seems more approachable to me than traditional investment, barring only the low-fee index funds. But those are plenty good enough for me right now, as I tend to shy away from games of skill where merely good players are routinely slaughtered by expert hustlers.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> Even if it is flawed, the contract never said I couldn't untie or cut the string before pulling it (or move the head away from the gun). So I remove the string from the trigger, pull it, and walk away with $10. Again, this is not an accurate analogy to the DAO contract, which I could fully inspect, and even theoretically run in a sandbox environment myself. Your analogy is more akin to what actually happened, which is that people said, "nah, we didn't mean that", and re-tied the string to something else.

h1d 10y ago

I agree that is the current state but if that is going to be the case for time to come, I doubt it will fly as every investor needs to be the cleverest. If nothing is learned by the devs and if all they do is make investers look less angry, this project is not going anywhere.

logfromblammo 10y ago
The same problem exists in non-networked investment vehicles. Clever people can create derivatives and convince less-clever people to buy them, not realizing that the math actually simplifies out to "heads, I win: tails, you lose". The capital markets industry has never been able to keep clever people from making a little more money for themselves at the expense of a lot of money that would otherwise have gone to investors. At least with ETH and its future competitors, the specific sort of cleverness that is required to profit is very close to the cleverness that I now possess. Not saying I'd put a dollar that I can pay actual bills with into ETH right now, just that it seems more approachable to me than traditional investment, barring only the low-fee index funds. But those are plenty good enough for me right now, as I tend to shy away from games of skill where merely good players are routinely slaughtered by expert hustlers.