My thoughts on the DAO

[charleshoskinson]

Enjoy: https://hoskinsoncharles.blogspot.com/2016/06/some-history-some-musings-and-my-take.html

[1714749233]

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[1714749233]

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[kennyP]

Good read! The first response to this event was obvious (too big to fail, bail out The DAO) ... the eventual outcome is also obvious, it's just going to take a while for everyone to get there

the five stages of grief:
1- denial
2- anger
3- bargaining
4- depression
5- acceptance

[shyliar]

So what, Ripple froze funds, and it never left the Top 5.

Banks hate immutability, and will now mate with Ethereum. Hope you didn't sell Hosk.

All that the average mass adopter knows is that Ethereum is for the good guys and bitcoin is for criminals. Crypto theft and ransom issues are now anthing of the past thanks to you and Vitalik and the rest!

You're kidding right? Clearly Ethereum is for the criminals too.

[Zer0Sum]

When the DAO was announced...
It would have taken about 5 minutes for an Adult to grasp the almost laughable conflicts of interest...
But anyone pointing this out was shouted down by "the wise crowd" desperate to make riskless $$$...
(Since Stephan Tual had fraudulently promised that people could pull out their investment at par anytime).   




https://etherscan.io/token/thedao-token-chart


The Top 5 accounts hold 20% = quorum to vote in any Proposal...
While the Top 50 accounts hold about 52% of the tokens...
And these are not random people, but Founders and their inner circles...
So Mt DAO was rigged to make the 22,900 investors comprising "the wise crowd" completely irrelevant from Day One.

The DAO token ownership chart pretty much tells you what will happen next.

Since Ethereum holdings likely mirror DAO holdings to a large degree...
Whatever soft/hard fork that is necessary to bail out the Founders will come to pass...
Similar to the dynamic that forced Washington to bail out Wall Street and banks in 2008.

[r0ach]

There are hairs growing on that torus.

[charleshoskinson]

You can see why I originally dismissed it. I didn't honestly believe people would invest in something like this. It belies any common sense or decency. At best it was setup for failure, at worse it was outright incompetence

[slapper]

You can see why I originally dismissed it. I didn't honestly believe people would invest in something like this. It belies any common sense or decency. At best it was setup for failure, at worse it was outright incompetence

Right and then came up with your own brand of ICO scam with LISK.

I remember you getting out/kicked out of mETH couple of years ago, but you are a expletives removed

[slapper]

Slapper, wth?

Chuck practically invented the DAO

He was involved in the first DAO (BTS), Then Ethereum which created "The Mega DAO"

And now then BTS DPOS fork Lisk which is a DAO

Launching ICO scams = Rot in prison

I edited my post however ....

[charleshoskinson]

I can feel the love radiating off of you guys. I also didn't come up with lisk. I only recently joined

[TheMage]

Very good read, thank you for putting it together.


I loved this sentence more than anything else

The protocol marches on like a silent, yet diligent sentinel uncaring in judgement, but utterly fair.

I've also shared my thoughts....as well as a warning to Vitalik.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1520901.0

[CryptoBillboard]

When the DAO was announced...
It would have taken about 5 minutes for an Adult to grasp the almost laughable conflicts of interest...
But anyone pointing this out was shouted down by "the wise crowd" desperate to make riskless $$$...
(Since Stephan Tual had fraudulently promised that people could pull out their investment at par anytime).   




https://etherscan.io/token/thedao-token-chart


The Top 5 accounts hold 20% = quorum to vote in any Proposal...
While the Top 50 accounts hold about 52% of the tokens...
And these are not random people, but Founders and their inner circles...
So Mt DAO was rigged to make the 22,900 investors comprising "the wise crowd" completely irrelevant from Day One.

The DAO token ownership chart pretty much tells you what will happen next.

Since Ethereum holdings likely mirror DAO holdings to a large degree...
Whatever soft/hard fork that is necessary to bail out the Founders will come to pass...
Similar to the dynamic that forced Washington to bail out Wall Street and banks in 2008.

I had not seen this graph, but was looking for something similar. I think we should be promoting this. I was an early investor and sold off early. Its a fixed game from the beginning.

[iamnotback]

We can make a fair argument for better safety equipment (which has already been proposed)...

Charles don't place too much emphasis on formal languages because they aren't a holy grail:

Research paper has a section that mentions some smart contract use cases:

http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/234939/234939.pdf#page=12

Note that paper above is claiming some classes of programming errors can be avoided in smart contracts by using dependent and polymorphic types. But as I wrote upthread, that won't eliminate semantic bugs such as game theory bugs. See for example §4.3 Misaligned Incentives in the following paper:

http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/460.pdf#page8

Generally speaking, as I explained by example of the Halting problem, the runtime entropy of a Turing-complete machine is unbounded. Thus there are an unbounded number of ways to create errors, regardless of any fancy typing system and programming paradigm.

I totally agree with you. More to follow...

I don't think there is any fail-proof encapsulation for Turing-complete smart contract failure. Each smart contract needs to be extremely well vetted before people invest a lot of money in that specific smart contract. The market will eventually learn this.

[Getcoinsite]

So what, Ripple froze funds, and it never left the Top 5.

Banks hate immutability, and will now mate with Ethereum. Hope you didn't sell Hosk.

All that the average mass adopter knows is that Ethereum is for the good guys and bitcoin is for criminals. Crypto theft and ransom issues are now anthing of the past thanks to you and Vitalik and the rest!

You're kidding right? Clearly Ethereum is for the criminals too.

A criminal group might get 3.6 million Ethereum. But that might be stopped by the community, especially with the efforts of the miners.

[iamnotback]

Charles, I don't think you sufficiently emphasized Bruce Fenton's points. You provided a link that seems lost in a sea of the mix of historical storytelling with a smidgen of your self-aggrandizing verbiage, so I doubt most readers even read what Bruce wrote.

Crypto is Not Politics

I keep reading arguments about how The Will of The People should decide. And how this is the only fair and equitable way. And I am here to say this is 100% retarded bullshit and any one who repeats it (and nonchalantly dismisses this!), is retarded.

What distinguishes the intention of Satoshi's block chain invention from the world we had before it, is that it eliminates politics. The technical reason is because due to the Nash equilibrium, then no one (not even mining nodes) have any fucking control.

If we destroy the Nash equilibrium with a 51% attack (aka fork) by not honoring the decentralized protocol, then we fall into a no-man's land of ambiguous interpretation and the brutality of the majority.

It is as simple as that. Either we choose to honor the code and protocol, or we go back to the depressing clusterfucked world we have before Satoshi.

Now the other problem is that BitCON is also becoming centralized because of economies-of-scale in mining. We haven't yet perfected Satoshi's invention. But that should not deter us from our ideals.

If you support forks, you violate everything Satoshi tried to do for the world.

No forks! No Blockstream forks either! Offer proof-of-burn if you want to propose new features on a new block chain, so that people are autonomous with their money.

And any arguments about empathy and intent in contract law are up against moral hazard which leads to the aforementioned clusterfuck of brutality. Don't reward retarded speculators for not doing due diligence and their derelict incapable developer idols, because they carry the mental affliction of those who want the clusterfucked world that existed prior to Satoshi's invention.

[shyliar]

So what, Ripple froze funds, and it never left the Top 5.

Banks hate immutability, and will now mate with Ethereum. Hope you didn't sell Hosk.

All that the average mass adopter knows is that Ethereum is for the good guys and bitcoin is for criminals. Crypto theft and ransom issues are now anthing of the past thanks to you and Vitalik and the rest!

You're kidding right? Clearly Ethereum is for the criminals too.

Of course I'm not joking.  Are you?

I Don't know what world reserve currency your planet uses, but here on earth, the masses vote for Fed Res Notez and if you are a criminal, then yours are confiscated SWIFT-LY.  Iran and Russia = criminal therefore sanctions.

So it would depend what you think the law is for there to be a criminal.

If you think that code is law then Vitalik is the criminal.  But if you think that laws should protect the poor and discriminate against the rich like they do in Socialist Paradises, then the richest man in the room is always evil.  And now that Bernie Sanders has shown that America is really a welfare Socialist Government where the rich should be eaten, then mob rule makes the law and Vitalik is just like Robin Hood robing the rich and giving to the poor.

Was Robin Hood a criminal?

Vitalik is Robin Hood.

So to those who naively think that code is law, you fail to realize that law itself is altruistic and not widely recognized nor respected by humans with no moral compas as those who believe in Socialism where humans are not allowed to own anything like the Indians who traded all the land in the US for a bottle of cheap whisky.  So you think that the Native Americans should just accept the fact that their ancestors entered into a uneven contract with the Europeans, and just bend over and stfu and take it because contracts are law.

Good luck selling that to the masses.

So do you see why you are not going to win this arguement?

Because you are the wealthy 1% (the thief), and you somehow expect the masses of useless eaters to sympathize with Nate Rothschild?

LOmotherfucknL

Good luck with that Mr. Million Dollar Man because the poor and oppressed are going to beat you up and take your money:

BERNIE SANDERS FOR THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE AND PRESIDENT OF THE USA IN 2016 WILL ABOLISH ALL PERSONAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND IMMUTABLE BLOCKCHAINS!

Sorry, but the masses are as hungry as they are too stupid and lazy to read contracts.

And you, my friends are the wealthy evil price sleculators who become criminals under the NEW laws. Yeah, laws change all the time.

You, my friend, are a "grotesque" speculator under the NEW Socialist laws:

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/10158

and we have a jail cell waiting for rich folk like you who are un-American and unpatriotic!

USA
USA
USA
USA

SUPERMAN IS VITALIK AND HE IS A TRUE AMERICAN HERO

https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@etherqueen/ethereum-will-clean-up-bitcoins-image-by-ending-blockchain-theft-and-ransom

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll continue to think criminals will use any crypto-currency and you can continue to think ETH is immune. Have a great day.

[SmirkinPepe]

Trying to remove power plays/distribution from life is like trying to build a perpetuum mobile, thats what a lot of people in crypto forget.

[HCLivess]

The five stages of grief are the best explanation of all the hidden desperation currently bubbling though this forum

[iamnotback]

Charles, I don't think you sufficiently emphasized Bruce Fenton's points. You provided a link that seems lost in a sea of the mix of historical storytelling with a smidgen of your self-aggrandizing verbiage, so I doubt most readers even read what Bruce wrote.

Crypto is Not Politics

I keep reading arguments about how The Will of The People should decide. And how this is the only fair and equitable way. And I am here to say this is 100% retarded bullshit and any one who repeats it (and nonchalantly dismisses this!), is retarded.

What distinguishes the intention of Satoshi's block chain invention from the world we had before it, is that it eliminates politics. The technical reason is because due to the Nash equilibrium, then no one (not even mining nodes) have any fucking control.

If we destroy the Nash equilibrium with a 51% attack (aka fork) by not honoring the decentralized protocol, then we fall into a no-man's land of ambiguous interpretation and the brutality of the majority.

It is as simple as that. Either we choose to honor the code and protocol, or we go back to the depressing clusterfucked world we have before Satoshi.

Now the other problem is that BitCON is also becoming centralized because of economies-of-scale in mining. We haven't yet perfected Satoshi's invention. But that should not deter us from our ideals.

If you support forks, you violate everything Satoshi tried to do for the world.

No forks! No Blockstream forks either! Offer proof-of-burn if you want to propose new features on a new block chain, so that people are autonomous with their money.

And any arguments about empathy and intent in contract law are up against moral hazard which leads to the aforementioned clusterfuck of brutality. Don't reward retarded speculators for not doing due diligence and their derelict incapable developer idols, because they carry the mental affliction of those who want the clusterfucked world that existed prior to Satoshi's invention.

No forks!

Another argument made in favor of forking is that consensus is created "by the community", that "the miners can vote". This is even more subtle and misleading. Miners are not meant to be the final arbiters of transactions and contracts. By design, they are supposed to be dumb slaves of the protocol rules. A dumb lottery validating transactions according to deterministic rules.

If they need to employ good judgment, we are at the mercy of their good sense.

It comes down to is this. If smart contracts must be interpreted by humans for their "intent" instead of by code for their programming, then smart contracts cannot be autonomous and automatic, and instead can be retroactively reversed by the community, the courts or governments.

If this is the case, it's hard to see what value smart contracts actually have, which means that it's hard to see that ethereum should have any value at all.

The only way for ethereum to be able to recover from this event and thrive in the future is for it to stick to its principles.

[BitUsher]

https://petertodd.org/2016/ethereum-dao-bailout-vote

[iamnotback]

https://petertodd.org/2016/ethereum-dao-bailout-vote

Btw, I already know how to do the bolded part decentralized in the redesign of proof-of-work I am preparing to launch:

What This Means For Bitcoin, And Myself

I’m genuinely concerned that the way Ethereum is handling the DAO hack is setting a precedent that decentralized systems should be managed with the same kind of human interventions seen in centralized systems. I didn’t get involved in Bitcoin to make an inefficient PayPal clone - I got involved to give users the choice to use a system based on something different, a choice they didn’t have before. And I don’t want to be a target for people trying to make those interventions happen.

While I did previously agree to support the idea of a flag day hard-fork with a non-consensus, information-only, show of coin-days-destroyed support, in hindsight I think that was a mistake; I will not be a part of anything less than a genuine, consensus-enforced coin vote going forward.

Finally, I’ll continue working on finding ways to reduce miners’ control over Bitcoin, whether it’s freezing funds, or forcing protocol changes against users’ will.