A fairer comparison would be to that of MtGox, three years earlier, in which approximately 10X as much money was stolen from early Bitcoiners, but which did not

A fairer comparison would be to that of MtGox, three years earlier, in which approximately 10X as much money was stolen from early Bitcoiners, but which did not result in any clawback of funds. Conversely, in the “billion bitcoin bug” situation, no funds were stolen from anyone — 51% of mining power merely chainforked to a non-buggy version of the network. FWIW an identical situation could happen today on Bitcoin via a 51% attack, but it probably would be rejected in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons. In both the MtGox and Ethereum DAO incident, the underlying network was functioning normally; but only one resulted in a clawback of funds from a sovereign entity. Notably, Ethereum had been advertising itself under the banner of “unstoppable applications” up to that point. Seemingly it’s a case of “unstoppable applications, not unstoppable applications”.