[cyrillic]

If the contract code can be upgraded by the majority of involved parties, it would be simple to buy 51% of the voting power and change the code to pay out everything else. Each takeover would double your wallet. Am I missing something here?

[brbsix]

51% attacks are a known issue. A sustained 51% attack is pretty much an existential threat to any blockchain. So I doubt the issue gets any better when dealing with individual contracts.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/15/long-range-attacks-the-...

http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/544

[cyrillic]

Thank you for your valuable input. The problem I see is not in having 51% of the whole capacity of the blockchain, but of the smaller entities/organizations/contract codes. With the proposed simple contracts, the little 'start-up' contract codes with little voting power will easily get acquired by bigger ones, which then vote for a code change to pay out the remaining shares. This is much more realistic that the traditional 51% attacks. Letting the majority of a small DAO-like organization vote for code change (which translates to law-change) will not only be used to fix bugs, but to change the contract to the majorities advantage. This may eventually result in one single big contract code that incorporates every new organization on the horizon.

[cyphar]

But isn't that how businesses and boards work anyway? A supermajority will gladly screw over anyone else on the board. Just look at "Silicon Valley", the whole plot is about how boards can screw over the founders.

[nawitus]

It should be possible to define that you need e.g. 90% of the shareholders to approve a change to the contract. The 90% could still steal money from the 10%.

[brbsix]

It is. The example code for a DAO [0] illustrates how everything from minimum quorum for proposals to margin of votes for a majority is configurable. However like you said, so long as the contract is mutable, it's possible for a majority to subvert it.

[0]: https://www.ethereum.org/dao