$ETH

Some Thoughts On Ethereum and The DAO

As many (most, all?) of you know, last week The DAO, a large crowdfunding experiment based on the Ethereum blockchain, was hacked and something like $50mm of Ether was taken from The DAO. That Ether may end up being recovered due to a fork of Ethereum that was done in response to the hack. Much of this was covered in Nathaniel Popper’s post in the New York Times last friday.

I won’t say that I predicted this but I certainly saw something like it coming in my blog post on Experiment and Scandal that I wrote a month ago.

Ethereum is brand new technology. The smart contracts that can be built on Ethereum are an entirely new thing and we are just seeing what works and doesn’t work with this technology. It is safe to say that the contracts that The DAO wrote did not work. The DAO is a failed experiment that suffered from more than poorly written and ill conceived smart contracts. It also suffered from way too much money and hype being invested in it. I was thinking of The DAO when I wrote these words a month ago: