No, it was fraud. I asked a lawyer, and the stealing of $50 million would not be considered a clause of the contract (it doesn't pass the officious bystander test). As much as programmers might try to remove lawyers and courts from our lives, they are vital to actually doing things with other people where you might have a difference of opinion on what a particular agreement means.
How is not being above the law a failure of a project? If the goal of the project was to be above the law and be accountable to no-one, then the project was doomed from day one. Then again, I never bought the concept of the DAO (lawyers are incredibly important people who are undervalued in our society).
That was the goal of the project. Quote www.ethereum.org: "One of the many advantages of having a robot run your organization is that it is immune to any outside influence as it’s guaranteed to execute only what it was programmed to."
"Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference."
First of all, the "officious bystander" test is from English law, not US law.
Second, while there are similar tests in other countries' legal systems, it's not that clear cut whether this would be considered such a case or not -- a single lawyer's opinion aside.
> First of all, the "officious bystander" test is from English law, not US law.
Yeah, sorry. But as you say there are similar tests in other countries.
> it's not that clear cut whether this would be considered such a case or not
Whether it would be considered a contract, or what are you referring to? Either way, Etherium and/or the authors of the DAO will get sued, and the investors will win the suit. If you think there's a scenario where someone walks away with $50 million and nobody goes to jail as a result, I'm sorry to say that you're delusional.
And if Etherium hard forks the blockchain, then people have lost faith in the system. So IMO this won't end well for Etherium in either case.
>If you think there's a scenario where someone walks away with $50 million and nobody goes to jail as a result, I'm sorry to say that you're delusional.
Maybe you should read up on financial fraud, white collar crime and Wall Street?
