[Jabanga]

The project was very young, and the community miniscule, at the time. It could be justified as a one-time beginner's incident. The network and ecosystem can be expected to behave very differently when it's mature, or even today, given how much larger the community is now, and how much more aware people are of the risks facing smart contracts (which means there is much less justification to rescue those who put money in a complex smart contract that gets hacked).

The project itself made mistakes early on by not sufficiently warning people of the risks of the DAO, which gave justification for the do-over. I think they can be excused given the DAO was the very first smart contract of its kind, and given how much was deposited in the DAO so quickly, which was totally unexpected.

So I think Ethereum can easily be forgiven for the DAO and subsequent hard fork to redo it. It was a highly experimental technology, that saw a major hack of a early-stage application that was only aiming to attract $500,000 of ETH, but had ended up having $150 million worth of ETH deposited in it, when the ecosystem and the state of the technology were not ready.

[rspeer]

> The project itself made mistakes early on by not sufficiently warning people of the risks of the DAO, which gave justification for the do-over.

This is the weakest justification I've heard out of all of them. How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky? And how does rolling back the risk make people more aware of risk? Anyone who was not aware of the risk the whole time deserves the most to lose their money.

The right time for the DAO to say "wait, guys, this is risky as hell and we have no idea what we're doing" and give back the money was before they lost the game they had created.

(The fact that you refer to this loss as their "smart" "contract" getting "hacked" indicates that you still don't want people to be aware of the risks.)

[Jabanga]

>How do you get a "do-over" for not realizing that weird new financial instruments are risky?

People didn't realize the smart contract was at great risk of being hacked, and the project, meaning thought leaders in Ethereum, were partially at fault for this, for not warning people.

This was the first smart contract of its type. It's easy to blame the community in hindsight. I choose to forgive it, as I remember early on in any endeavor, mistakes are normal.

>The fact that you refer to this loss as their "smart" "contract" getting "hacked" indicates that you still don't want people to be aware of the risks.

I don't follow. "Smart contract" is a term of art, and does not imply it's well made or secure. I also don't know what putting the quotations around the "hacked" is supposed to signify.

[rspeer]

The "contract" was evaluated according to the rules that supposedly made it a contract, not hacked. Getting a bad deal in a contract is not getting hacked.

There will be more bad deals in the future because Solidity is badly designed. Mistakes are normal indeed, and Ethereum is certainly not done making them. Promising "this time it's for real, no more take-backs" is just increasing the risk unless they buy some insurance or something.

What's the indication that anyone is aware of the risks now, or that Ethereum devs are warning people of the risks? The investment in Ethereum has increased -- there are banks getting involved in this shit. The risk has not decreased. And yet the devs are still not handing back the investors' money and asking them to kindly wait until more security or insurance features are designed.

[Jabanga]

It was hacked from the perspective of ordinary people.

I address the sanctity of the protocol in an earlier comment:

>The rules of a mature Ethereum protocol should be neutral to the intentions of users, including those that one would reasonably characterize as hackers, but Ethereum was not a mature protocol at the time. It was effectively in early-stage beta.

>What's the indication that anyone is aware of the risks now, or that Ethereum devs are warning people of the risks?

That's what I've observed. I haven't compiled instances of social behaviour that indicates this so I have no objective evidence on-hand.

>The investment in Ethereum has increased -- there are banks getting involved in this shit

They're not putting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ETH in complex smart contracts like the DAO.