Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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hackers hit The DAO and took out 3.6 million ETH. At the time, that amounted to around 1,851, the stolen ETH would be worth $6.6 billion, placing it among the most expensive hacks of all time. a.image2.image-link.image2-259-1456 { padding-bottom: 17.78846153846154%; padding-bottom: min(17.78846153846154%, 259px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-259-1456 img { max-width: 1456px; max-height: 259px; } The hackers aren’t billionaires today, though. The funds were put on a 28-day hold based on the terms of the smart contract, which gave The DAO and the broader Ethereum community nearly a month to figure out what to do. After a contentious debate, the Ethereum core team, led by Vitalik Buterin, released a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. It was essentially a new version in which everything was the same, except in the forked version, the heist never happened. The Ethereum core team couldn’t force people to move over; people voted with their feet, answering this question: does the benefit of erasing the hack outweigh the cost of human interference on trust in Ethereum? To most, it did. While some people continued to use the Ethereum blockchain on which the heist had occurred, renamed Ethereum Classic, the Ethereum we all know and love is the forked version. If you look at the Ethereum blockchain today, you won’t find any trace of the heist. No harm, no foul.
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Bitcoin is limited. It’s kind of dumb. It doesn’t really know much, can’t really change itself, and doesn’t really do anything; “it simply exists, and leaves it up to the world to recognize it.” It really is like gold in that it sits there as people do stuff to it and assign value to it. More charitably, to analogize with an equally complex analogy (this is the nice thing about having smart readers!), ifBitcoin is like Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), DAOs are like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Bitcoin does the thing that it was programmed to do really well, but DAOs can theoretically do anything really well.
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DAOs are all about maximizing stakeholder value. The users and contributors are also the investors and owners. While community ownership seems weird and novel and almost hippie, it’s actually a more natural model than a few outside investors and board members dumping a bunch of money into a company and deciding what it should do. The reason we do it the way we do is that, until now, it’s been too hard to coordinate having a lot of small owner/stakeholders who all get a say in decision making. Technology is finally enabling the more natural model.
✏️ Question: What if certain individuals in the community amass more than others? Wouldn’t they have more clout and power than others, reverting this into the current standard of “few investors deciding what to do”? Or is there some regulation in place to prevent this?