You are raising the point that PoS has security flaws, but I was treating that as an orthogonal concern.

What is a DAO?

In a normal corporation, the investors delegate control to a board of directors and the board decides whether to retain profits or pay dividends and hire/fire the CEO.

In DAC/DAO/DO, the investors actively vote on issues. The distinctions between those three have to do with the structure of this control...

Let's first review Vitalik's chart below:


Notice on "Internal Capital" table, the horizontal line separating "Automation at the center" at the top from "Humans at the center" at the bottom is labeled "DO" for decentralized organization, because "DO" is decentralizing the "Humans at the center" but not automating the decisions of protocol at the center controlling the "Human at the edges" (where edges means who do the work).

And the vertical line separating "Automation at the edges" on the left from "Humans at the edges" on the right is labled "Tools" because they are doing the majority of the work but not automating (thus still requiring human workers for) their operation.

You can see that table is quite insightful and abstract. This is an example of why people think of Vitalik as genius. But it is all quite obvious if one were to sit down and think about deeply for a while as obviously Vitalik did.

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Now I am going to demonstrate (in a very sleepless and almost delirious mental state so please excuse the low quality of the prose) I am an abstract forward/deep/paradigm-shift thinker similar (but different of course) to what some people observe/praise about Vitalik.

It is on the term "autonomous" that Vitalik's taxonomy gets murky (muddled) as he admits. It appears that Vitalik conflated "automation" with "autonomy". It appears that Vitalik thinks that we require automation in order to obtain autonomy.

Here is the insight that occurred to me in the past 48 hours or so (the days have all run together). Whereas, I am thinking the autonomy attribute is applicable to the "humans in the center" involved in the control. In other words, DVCS open source enables each human participant to be autonomous because each can have their own individualized repository. Automation has nothing to do with it. The key technological breakthrough for DVCS was the relative changeset logic, using a hash to identify changesets, and storing the repositories locally, which isn't automation but rather a protocol for destructuring to increase degrees-of-freedom, i.e. removing hierarchies.

So whereas for Vitalik the distinction between a "DAO" and a "DO" is the former has complete A.I. automation over all decisions controlling the humans at the edges, i.e. like a master 1984 enslavement computer, I rather conceive that the "DAO" as destructuring (perhaps even automated) protocol which enables humans at the center to be autonomous. And the "DO" is many decentralized humans in the center, but they are bound together with less degrees-of-freedom in the structure enforced by the protocol that governs (i.e. by-laws for) their organization.

For example, my understanding of DASH's protocol for stakeholders is limited, but I assume it is based on a majority vote and there is no way to opt-out other than to sell your stake (unstake your masternode deposit), and thus the humans in the center controlling it are not really autonomous, thus DASH is a "DO" not a "DAO". And The DAO wasn't autonomous either and that was its critical flaw (other than the bug that enabled theft of funds) in that individual humans could not autonomously elect projects (and splitting had flawed game theory), so it couldn't be anything more than a power vacuum (slush fund) with spoils to whomever could win in the voting game theory. The DAO was worse than if the participants had invested in individual projects separately, thus the only purpose of the DAO was a game theory around controlling the pooled funds. No individual autonomy for the investors. The Ethereum and DAO developers appears to be so strongly into automation (and creating a master 1984 enslavement system? or is this just their Millennials Warcraft game A.I. culture?), that they built a DAO which was less autonomous than if each investor invested in projects separately from the DAO.

A Dash consultant Ira Miller wrote something similar but with different conclusions to mine:

https://medium.com/@gitguild/not-too-late-for-humans-to-save-ethereum-2f42f5fdfb75

Vitalik goes on to compare DAO to Dan Larimer's DAC, with the key difference being that profits are not retained in the latter. Retaining profits in the collective pool lowers autonomy, so actually DAO = DAC except when it is a non-profit. Vitalik seemed to think retaining profit (i.e. the organization is profitable) is non-profit if the profits aren't distributed back to the humans at the center. Whereas, I think the distinction is that retained profits indicates a "DO" because the stakeholders are no longer empowered to take their capital away except by selling the token which is not the same because liquidity of the float is not the same as distributing profit, i.e. 20% of the stakeholders can't sell their tokens at once to protest a vote of the majority. The DAO offered a split feature but the game theory was flawed.

I have more to write when I am not so delirious from lack of sleep. This is just a first draft to get some of my ideas written down. I'll need to expound on the differences between Ira Miller's perspective and mine.

Anyone know more about the author's background? Any LinkedIn? I am curious because he said he works for DASH.

I was in the midst of writing a similar post (here is the post), but with somewhat different conclusions.

There are so many TPTB inside of TPTB, you'll never know which one you are dealing with.

The red or blue pill. It's your decision. I can only be the matrix, I can't take your free will without your choice.

Smooth if forks are authorized by a protocol that was designed in the coin from the start, i.e. an ability to vote on changes by stake holders for a PoS coin (e.g. DASH), then that appears to not be a 51% attack. But otherwise I agree with you, and when you have the same group of devs from the ICO able to control the politik then they are essentially running the enterprise.

There is a grey area where someone from the outside creates a fork and the users and miners spontaneously decide to switch over to it. This can be argued to be a feature of decentralization and open source, and necessary to correct deficiencies. Yet it is still a 51% attack. If done with proof-of-burn, then it is not a 51% attack.

But your analysis of the issues here seems to be oversimplified because the law interacts with all this to create more complex scenarios. Please read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1517223.msg15271289#msg15271289

The argument is there is no one the court could pinpoint to enforce such a ruling on. The miners, exchanges, users, and devs would all play a role in the community outcome, yet no one can be identified as responsible for that outcome.

Whereas, if the developers and foundation push for a fork and politik for a 51% attack on the protocol, then the attacker potentially accuse them of being in control of the enterprise and sue them. So that is why I say it is very risky for them to fork. OTOH, if they don't fork, they might be vulnerable to a class action suit from the n00bs who had their ETH taken from them by the "smart" (too smart = dumb) contract. This is why I made a thread  to ask if the developers who have promoted this so carelessly without conspicuous warnings, could be in deep legal trouble now? They appear to me perhaps the easiest to target with a lawsuit, but IANAL so I am pondering what is their risk?

But note the "attacker" may have committed an illegal action or at least violated contract law, so in that case is unlikely to reveal identity and sue. Thus I was thinking the safest is to fork, but that has the risk of the n00bs potentially accusing them of being in control of the coin and class action sue them for the exchange rate losses. So it seems those who created and promoted ETH and DAO (without sufficient warnings of risks) may have a legal quagmire, but IANAL so I am just hoping they have retained adequate counsel.

If you are willing to share this, how much DASH do you have staked/deposited in order to get that ROI?

I haven't studied the specific vulnerability in this case[1], but I think it has to do with the contract code doing mutability aliasing on global state. So this is an issue of synchronizing mutability aliasing.

For example, imagine if some intended to be atomic operation[1] of a check for sending of ETH out of the contract had not set a global count of sent before some recursion which enabled sending more ETH out, thus exceeding the threshold.

So the Reddit post seems to be somewhat clueless about the actual issue. Functional programming and static typing is orthogonal to the issue of dealing with global state and mutability aliasing. I had just finished analyzing this issue at the Rust-lang forum and in my private discussion with keane recently. Although Rust can statically check mutability aliasing, this is restricted to disjoint data structures. We concluded that some semantics can't be modelled with a static checker. Mutability aliasing is thorny issue and I am not familiar enough with Coq to know if it can model it. I would need to really dig into the details of this and study it before I can comment with high degree of confidence.

[1]

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=730 https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/master/GasEcon.md#case-study-the-crowfunding-contract-example https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/#what-about-the-recursive-race-problem-in-thedao

DASH does seem to be a functioning DAO where D is distributed but sure if it is decentralized control. The stakeholders apparently vote on the actions or management of the development of the open source. The stakeholders apparently approved to have % of the mining rewards paid to a foundation which then distributes the funds according to projects approved by votes of the stakeholders. However what is not clear to me is to what degree this is all enforced by smart contract protocol or done manually by the foundation.

There are allegations however that the distribution of the DASH tokens were highly concentrated by an alleged instamine and subsequent masternode ROI scheme which may have further concentrated the tokens held by the core insiders. But I don't know if anyone has been able to prove conclusively that DASH is not really decentralized, although the suspicion is apparently strong amongst some especially Monero supporters.

please note the correction of the thread name above.

If mining is decentralized, I think it is impossible to enforce a court decision on the miners because new miners can pop up any where. You'd need some totalitarian total world control over the Internet and block the protocol.

Doesn't seem plausible near-term in current state of the world.

More likely any court decision would be enforced on the exchanges. New exchanges could pop up, but they can also be regulated.

Perhaps any class action suit if any might attempt to name any of those prominant insiders who have profited by promoting and selling ETH such as Vitalik, Tual, etc.. I am not sure if a lawyer would advise that or not, and whether it could be successful. I hope they've retained counsel.

TPTB was confident there was a bug in the SOL code, but he didn't take the time to try find it.

Because he is not going to do something that will get his ass thrown in jail.

TPTB doesn't have a vendetta against Ethereum. TPTB motivation is to earn $ in positive ways that help advance CC.

TPTB is not a hacker from the dark side of the world.

Is GPU mining the main reason that ETH has more value than Monero (which is more CPU mining friendly)  

No. leopard2 and I mean that the intent of the DAO contract is roughly not to allow 1 user take all the value out without consensus voting.

And contract law will likely enforce rule for that intent, regardless of an weakness in the code which prevents enforcing that intent.

Edit: but note it is not clear whether the law could enforce it.

51% attack taking control of the protocol is not a hazard  

They could decide to increase the number of coins issued, install the ChainAnchor KYC on all transactions, etc..

He has inconsistencies in his logic.

So you might as well fork then, because this means for those future attackers that don't comply, you will support a fork. So if you represent the decision of majority hash rate, then no one can trust Ethereum to not 51% attack itself to fork the protocol.