| The DAO was a very extraordinary event that occurred under very unique and unrepeatable circumstances. 1. Ethereum had just launched. There was a sense of everything being in beta. 2. The Ethereum stakeholder set was very small, so obtaining consensus for such a controversial hard fork was much easier to accomplish than it would be today. 3. The economy on Ethereum was very small, so a) a hard fork was far less disruptive than it would be today. b) an undermining of Ethereum's commitment to neutrality/immutability jeapardized far fewer decentralized application projects than it would today. 4. Smart contracts were completely new, so there was a sense that people could be forgiven for their mistakes. 5. The Ethereum Foundation had promoted the idea of a DAO on their website, and several Ethereum founders had promoted the specific DAO that ended up being hacked. These facts made the DAO appear to be more than a completely third party app. Ethereum is very different today than it was in 2016, and a DAO-like mishap would never lead to a hard fork again. |