
Why I think TheDAO is a Success - jackgavigan
https://jackgavigan.com/2016/06/17/why-i-think-thedao-is-a-success/
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daoland
IMO, This post just has a click-baity title with almost no information within.
TheDAO is a failure. There are a few of the other Ethereum DAOs like Augur,
Digix and Maker have invested a lot of effort over the last one year and
haven't launched yet to iron out issues like these. They didnt need to learn
such expensive lessons. Maker Market contracts were hit by the same bug and
they handled it very elegantly three days back.

TheDAO was convoluted from the beginning(code, incentives, purpose), and a lot
of us within Ethereum were highly skeptical too but when mainstream media
started covering it, our voices got drowned.

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rspeer
> to tweet, blog and bloviate their hindsight-informed opinions

If you think these are merely hindsight-informed opinions, you weren't paying
attention when people were saying the same thing as foresight-informed
opinions.

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mej10
If every mistake is going to potentially cost $120 million then you might want
to rethink your strategy.

I want decentralized blockchain based organizations to work, but haphazard
attempts like this are only setting the technology back.

Honestly, it seems like you are willfully in denial about its failure.

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JeremyBanks
Getting valuable data doesn't mean a success if the cost is too high. Too much
of the market and reputation was wrapped up in this experiment.

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jackgavigan
There's a good chance that all funds will be returned (thanks in no small part
to the fact that the siphoned ether can't be moved on for several weeks, so
that was a fortunate design decision).

The media love bad news. It's up to us to combat that negative spin.

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jolux
If it's merely fortunate that this might be dealt with safely then that should
strike you as a bad thing.

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panic
If TheDAO is a success, what would a failed DAO look like?

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jackgavigan
One that didn't teach us anything.

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arcticfox
Arguably this taught (reminded) us that DAOs are mutable at the whim of the
community majority.

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Analemma_
And that nobody knows how to write secure code.

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wslh
Sorry, I think your point is completely invalid after reading "I don’t view
TheDAO as a failure. I view it as an experiment that has reached its
conclusion.". If you go to a doctor and he/she tries to cure from cancer
giving orange juice he/she can't argue it was an experiment because this is
malpractice.

The DAO was not scrutinized enough comparing to the funds it contained.

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nemild
This is a really sloppy article - and I and many others disagree with your
premise. You don't have to put this much money at risk to innovate, and
failures like this have the potential to set the space back years (regulation
may increase, consumers will be very wary).

Nearly every engineer who launches a product goes through a staged rollout
with testing along the way (including the Ethereum network which took years to
develop and test, and likely still has many undiscovered bugs). When the costs
of failure are high (any financial services product, software at NASA,
embedded software), this is especially important. DAO innovation could have
been served by draft contracts passed around in the community, or a small POC
with small deposits or toy money, as the design was worked out - and refined
over months, and yes, even years.

Releasing a DAO contract (and marketing it, curating it), without any
limitations on funding or substantial due diligence, was problematic at best -
and gives a black eye to everyone who exercises due diligence in the space.

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mikeyouse
By this metric, the Hindenburg was a success too.

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jackgavigan
Well, it flew, so one could argue that it was a success right up to the moment
it ... wasn't.

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jolux
But that's a tautology. Everything is a success until it isn't, even if it was
designed to fail it succeeds in doing what it is designed to do.

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hspak
The problem with the Gretzky quote in this context is that in hockey, you
don't lose points for missed shots.

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brianpgordon
The title of this post is facile and ridiculous. Obviously the DAO was a
disastrous failure and very nearly resulted in catastrophe for its investors.

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mietek
I sincerely hope you have also learned that writing “smart contracts” requires
a suitable programming language.

