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(copy-pasting) The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances. 1. Ethereum had just launched. There was

(copy-pasting) The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances. 1. Ethereum had just launched. There was a sense of everything being in beta. 2. The Ethereum stakeholder set was very small, so obtaining consensus for such a controversial hard fork was much easier to accomplish than it would be today. 3. The economy on Ethereum was very small, so a) a hard fork was far less disruptive than it would be today. b) an undermining of Ethereum's commitment to neutrality/immutability jeapardized far fewer decentralized application projects than it would today. 4. Smart contracts were completely new, so there was a sense that people could be forgiven for their mistakes. 5. The Ethereum Foundation had promoted the idea of a DAO on their website, and several Ethereum founders had promoted the specific DAO that ended up being hacked. These facts made the DAO appear to be more than a completely third party app. Ethereum is very different today than it was in 2016, and a DAO-scale mishap would never lead to a hard fork again.

notahacker 5y ago
That's arguably even worse though, it's the Ethereum Foundation acknowledging the principle that DAO code is law and people deserve the contracts they sign up for is fundamentally nonsense, but taking the position that malicious actions mattered only when early adopters were the people hurt and people behind the Ethereum foundation were personally embarrassed by them.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  I may not have conveyed my point effectively. What I was implying is that the EF may have inadvertedly gave the impression that the DAO had its blessing. If something is presented as part of the official protocol, then people will assume that a hack will lead to a rollback. In general, I think given how ambitious the DAO was, the rollback can be excused. It's hard to stress how new a universal smart contract execution environment were at the time. Until outside of a few extremely niche communities, the idea had never been discussed, let alone experimented on, before Ethereum was introduced. And the DAO was a very complex smart contract, that every one jumped in with intuition about the vulnerabilities of smart contracts.
theduder99 5y ago
Reminds me of another story this week about a bug in a smart contract leading to $30 million being stolen. The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point. It's a programmatic contract. But 'smart contract' is easier to write/say, and otherwise catchier, so I suspect it'll stick.

notahacker 5y ago

That's arguably even worse though, it's the Ethereum Foundation acknowledging the principle that DAO code is law and people deserve the contracts they sign up for is fundamentally nonsense, but taking the position that malicious actions mattered only when early adopters were the people hurt and people behind the Ethereum foundation were personally embarrassed by them.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
I may not have conveyed my point effectively. What I was implying is that the EF may have inadvertedly gave the impression that the DAO had its blessing. If something is presented as part of the official protocol, then people will assume that a hack will lead to a rollback. In general, I think given how ambitious the DAO was, the rollback can be excused. It's hard to stress how new a universal smart contract execution environment were at the time. Until outside of a few extremely niche communities, the idea had never been discussed, let alone experimented on, before Ethereum was introduced. And the DAO was a very complex smart contract, that every one jumped in with intuition about the vulnerabilities of smart contracts.

theduder99 5y ago

Reminds me of another story this week about a bug in a smart contract leading to $30 million being stolen. The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>The term smart contract is starting to feel a bit ironic and I wouldn't be surprised if the name gets changed at some point. It's a programmatic contract. But 'smart contract' is easier to write/say, and otherwise catchier, so I suspect it'll stick.