Vitalik and Tual going to end up in jail?

[iamnotback]

Yup those good ole boys who control the enterprise were hyping a moonshot without sobering disclaimers:

 

But it is vitaliks centrally planned toy. Vitalik has been and will be the central weak link of the project. If he wishes to break the immutability of the blockchain. Let it be so!

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[maxsinner]

Looks to me that they got themselves in deep legal shit...

a) The terms and conditions of the particular smart contract supersedes hundreds of years of US legal contract law, not! Directly or indirectly, this has been fudded all over the internet. 100% of the legal consensus is that  in the US, US contract law is the guiding agent. Who has jurisdiction is another matter, but in whatever jurisdiction, that jurisdiction's legal system is the controlling entity. You are not waving away the US court system with words written in magic pixie dust on a piece of paper.

b) It''s clear that the Ethereum foundation immediately needs to consult with legal experts in the areas of contract law and security and exchange law in order to clarify in their talks what exactly they can and cannot claim/promise. CEO's never say anything for public attribution without clearing it with legal.

Absolutely!

Why do they fail if they fork?

Seems to me the fanboys who buy anything that sounds good, don't really care about whether it is decentralized, because we were writing for months in the Ethereum Paradox thread that Casper would be moving it towards centralization. They only believe what they want to believe.

So why would recovering the funds for the fanboys be worse than not from the perspective of sustaining Ethereum?

They can state that the rules weren't well elucidated and that in the future, all users must understand that contracts are not warranted to perform as advertised.

Tual has potentially a big problem if they didn't do adequate disclosure. This can end up in lawsuits and he can end up prosecuted under securities regulations. If they did make very clear and conspicuous disclosure about risks, then they definitely shouldn't fork because no one will ever again know what the rules are (as they will be open to change at-will).

All about fungibility and centralization. It sucks, and I don't think anyone could honestly argue that the attacker deserves the coins, but intervening would be disastrous to the long term prospects of ETH. There's plenty of precedent to suggest that intervention like this would be a death sentence. The "fanboys" wouldn't care, but as far as long term adoption and all that goes, you're really shooting yourself in the foot. Those in it for the quick money are no doubt pissed off, but anyone in it for the long haul should be staunchly against a fork.

I think the "attacker" deserves the funds, because and assuming he did nothing illegal (but I am not even sure if he didn't violate some obscure law). But we are discussing about perceptions of what the risks are. Please re-read my prior post as I added to it. For me, it hinges on whether they had adequately explained/disclosed the risks to the DAO and ETH investors. I suspect not (otherwise why $168m invested[1]). Thus I argue they can fork and then make the conspicuous and repeated disclosure so that it is clear they will be consistent from here on. And they pretty much have to fork in that case, else they throw themselves under the legal liability bus (but due to the decline in the ETH price they are fucked legally no matter what they do). As for the threats of lawsuits from the "attacker", these can be ignored because they can claim that the majority has the Byzantine power to fork and everyone who uses CC knows that.

Or they can take the stance that all CC investors should know the risks and that they are the owners, because it is decentralized. In that case, they shouldn't fork, but I think they will lose this argument in court perhaps. The DAO investors can file a class action lawsuit for example (which btw supercedes every international jurisdiction!) and claim to be n00bs who trusted Vitalik and Tual their idols.

I believe this clusterfuck is going to lead to securities regulation of CC.  

Vitalik is growing up very fast I think right about now.


[1] Where are the statements about how participants could lose everything if there is a bug? They should have scared away some of the money. I read 18,000 investors for $168 million, so several $1000s each.

Luckily there is Common law. Contracts are all about consent; abusing a gap/hole/vulnerability in a contract is obviously non-consentual and thus illegal. Without such a legal framework, no contract in the world could exist. No contract is perfect.

Agreed.

My father specializes in contract law, graduated top of his class at L.S.U. and was former West Coast Division Attorney for Exxon.

I once was fretting over the fine print of a contract for a $205,000 license I sold for CoolPage in 2001, and he advised to not kill the contract negotiations because he said the court would not enforce a one-sided contract.

So contract law interprets what is the intent, not just what is written in the contract.

Do you mean the intent of the DAO is not to enrich somebody by $50 million by exploiting a hole in the coding?

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.

I do hope they end up in jail, but I really doubt it. A lot of guys in prison will appreciate Vitalik in many different ways, I am sure.

[electronicash]

Except Vitalik has nothing to do with US laws (fortunately).

So that's going to save his ass? Good lord  

I've invested on DAOs too but I definitely don't put all my life savings there. we all know crypto isn't the whole thing in this world.
And i guess those investors who deposit millions thinking they'd earn millions as well are just as noobs as they are. so they shouldnt try to find anyone to blame. they've been warned a lot of times in this forum.

[iamnotback]

You're mixing apples and potatoes here. Bitcoin mostly uses soft-forks in order to improve its capabilities. Bitcoin has never used any kind of coin-control or bailouts which is exactly what ETH is going to do. If they do that, ETH is not immutable. Period.

Forking to remove 184 billion Bitcoins is a form of coin control.

Do you understand that Bitcoin was forked to address an issue created by a bug in the Bitcoin code?

It was not forked because a transaction script did not do what someone expected as DoOverCoin is proposing to do.

Intent is ambiguous unless we bind ourselves to a majority vote:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15278364#msg15278364

Thus I now say the fork of Bitcoin was equivalent to a fork of Ethereum w.r.t. to the context we are debating.

I just realized this.

Btw, this is also why Satoshi did not solve the Byzantine General's Problem.

[iamnotback]

In other words, I have no idea what sort of people Vitalik hangs with, so talking shit on the interweb prob'ly ain't the smartest thing ever.

...

This could be his downfall if Ethereum sides with "law" and lure him into violating some US law. The SEC is probably still waiting to entrap him.

But I don't like where Vitalik is headed with this blacklisting shit!   

As many of us opined before the failure, The DAO was going to lead to more regulation of CC.

Vitalik et al creating an obvious clusterfuck that results in blacklisting thus handing the State the power to implement KYC blocking in the future, just smacks of premeditated.

The legalness of the "attack" got murky when the "attacker" put in the order for the eth short. Curious to see if using that information, or dissemination of it to others, constitutes insider trading.

The vulnerability was open sourced before he did it thus apparently no insider information was used! Even the developers of DAO had a patch but didn't push through with it.

It is so unbelieveable, but I can't make this stuff up.

[BitUsher]

[BitUsher]

Truth about the "1 million dollar" security audit-

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ota1q/the_truth_about_the_security_audit_stephen_tual/

This is the only published security report from Deja Vu Security for Slockit.

https://mega.nz/#!MVwHAaxb!Ym7TYpjO5k059bty5rWG-Cwi6jjd78rl1HeTsE4PIBc

A 3 page document with under 100 words of text, concerning an 'Integer Division Error Accumulation' dating from March 25th.

If there has been more comprehensive code review, the burden lies on Slockit it team and theDao curators to prove this.

From the evidence at hand, there is ZERO evidence of a comprehensive security audit, which is shameful and sickening.

This seems like an elaborate plot to:

    Save money on security audits (since he wasn't getting paid 1 mil USD)
    Attribute blame to DejaVu, even though technically they were not asked to comprehensively review DAO code.

If there was no additional security audit, DejaVu is well within its rights to sue Tual for libel.

[iamnotback]

LTB Live - TheDAO TheFork TheFallout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ

Published on Jun 18, 2016
A live show recorded in the aftermath of the DAO's draining of funds by an unknown actor. In this show, Andreas M. Antonopoulos moderates a discussion with guests Pamela Morgan (attorney), Brian Klein (attorney) and Taylor Gerring (Ethereum Project co-founder), with live twitter Q&A and participation from the DAO slack channel.

Starting at @11min and especially @18:30min, some of my upthread points about the legal culpability are backed up by a real attorney!

[iamnotback]

Vitalik et al are playing with fire as I pondered upthread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=3864

Especially listen at 1:06:15! And listen at 1:11:15 where the attorney says Vitalik (et al) is creating dangerous legal liability for himself (themselves) by being the judge!

The likely party to be sued are those who can be identified and have a pot of money.

[BitUsher]

https://dao.report/

[varusisog]

Vitalik et al are playing with fire as I pondered upthread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=3864

Especially listen at 1:06:15! And listen at 1:11:15 where the attorney says Vitalik (et al) is creating dangerous legal liability for himself (themselves) by being the judge!

The likely party to be sued are those who can be identified and have a pot of money.

Vitalik just propose a change to the Etheruem protocol. It is the miners who will be responsible for the restoring the money from the theft.

[iamnotback]

Vitalik et al are playing with fire as I pondered upthread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=3864

Especially listen at 1:06:15! And listen at 1:11:15 where the attorney says Vitalik (et al) is creating dangerous legal liability for himself (themselves) by being the judge!

The likely party to be sued are those who can be identified and have a pot of money.

Vitalik just propose a change to the Etheruem protocol. It is the miners who will be responsible for the restoring the money from the theft.

The court may not agree that Vitalik has no political power. Considering how much all the mETH supporters prays at his feet, I'd say it is likely the court will find that Vitalik and his accomplices are significantly in control of the enterprise. But that is just my opinion as an observer. What do others think?

And remember that the attorney pointed out that each of the 1000s of plaintiffs can sue in any one of the 1000s of jurisdictions. Someone can find a favorable judge some where!!!

This is what I specifically warned about over the past months. I can even quote where I said that jurisdiction shopping would be a PITA because one would have to defend themselves against an unbounded number of threats.

As the attorney Pamela points out, this issue could have been significantly mitigated if their attorneys had advised them to add an arbitration clause to the TOS and also had more sobering disclosures on their TOS so that plaintiffs couldn't just choose willynilly to make any sort of claim of injury in any jurisdiction.

Who set up the legal structure for Ethereum et al?  They apparently suck!

[densuj]

It is too fast if we judge vitalik going to end in jail, because he is just a part of developer ethereum. And we are don't have any proof that vitalik has taken the coins.

[iamnotback]

It is too fast if we judge vitalik going to end in jail, because he is just a part of developer ethereum. And we are don't have any proof that vitalik has taken the coins.

I've morphed my understanding to threats being more civil lawsuits and not securities regulation with potential criminal liability, although the former can apparently in some cases drive the latter (i.e. the SEC feels compelled to come in because of the public outrage, which the attorney mentioned early in that linked video).

Now that we have a real attorney on camera, you all can stop thinking I am full of bullshit.

Vindicated!

[fedmahnkassad]

I just want to know who are the fucktards still buying ETH at the current prices.

[GreenBits]

I just want to know who are the fucktards still buying ETH at the current prices.

The answer was in your question but seriously, those are the vultures, thinking there are bones at pick. It's going to get much leaner when they publically announce the forkage decision. Basically, if you are buying now, you are assuming this is the bottom (it's not).

[varusisog]

I just want to know who are the fucktards still buying ETH at the current prices.

I am a miner, but as the price is quite low at the moment, i have stopping selling, that might support the price a bit.

[iamnotback]

This stuttering "genius" is your leader? Vitalik was clearly flustered by the question. Must listen to this! And look at the body language of Gavin Wood and the other guy on the podium.

"I am 99.999% certain this is bug free."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahj4WJtp20&feature=youtu.be&t=42m52s

The Naive hubris is very dangerous within Vitalik.

[Zer0Sum]

Nothing to do with US laws. Hahaha hahaha, God you're funny. Best joke I've heard all day. Look up US Securities treaties

Ethereum is based primarily in North America and EU...
So I would guess 25-50% of DAO investors would be US citizens.

This places events squarely in the jurisdiction of US authorities.

VB is likely in the clear...
But Stephan Tual and the Slock.it group are certainly guilty of multiple violations including fraud...
They invented and coded the DAO in order to finance their pet projects with free $$$...
And Slock.it specifically promoted the fact that investors could have their ETH refunded at par (no risk)...
While hiding the fact that an ETH refund was VERY technically difficult... and would take at least 7 weeks (high risk).

Anyway, PoW means the miners decide...
And EthPool miners are voting 99.5% in favor of a "soft fork" to freeze DAO funds.

http://ethpool.org/stats/votes

No Chinese miners that launder money for a fee here...
No patented Bitcoin-style leadership paralysis that has mired BTC for 2.5 years below the pre-Gox high.

[iamnotback]

Anyway, PoW means the miners decide...
And EthPool miners are voting 99.5% in favor of a "soft fork" to freeze DAO funds.

http://ethpool.org/stats/votes

Apologies for attacking you about your choice of supporting the soft fork. I edited my message to remove the offending part. I support the free market and the people must decide what they want.

Here is my response to your vote for the soft fork:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1518508.msg15283083#msg15283083