Good thoughts. Thanks for sharing. Your position seems to hinge largely upon the terms of the DAO and its statement that the code would control. While a valid statement, it ignores two key points that I made in my original post: (1). That the terms of the DAO can't and don't supersede the "terms" of Ethereum in general, which can and does allow miners to collude to fork, and even reverse transactions, when doing so protects the network, and (2) everyone knew this going in. In Blockchains, miners rule, and miner collusion can be either good or bad depending upon its purpose and result.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
I can only repeat the question already asked by others: why do you bother to use a blockchain then? Everything you describe can be achieved with the standard centralized technology and a multi-sig account.
Unlike centralized technology, blockchains are highly censorship resistant. Not censorship proof (since miners can collude), but highly censorship resistant. They are resistant because: (1) getting different miners with different political and economic agendas to collude is difficult and costly, (2) minors are only likely to collude when doing so obviously supports the network and token value and not when doing so undermines them (game theory 101), and (3) a sufficient number of miners generally cannot be legally compelled to collude.
The DAO situation provides a perfect example. Miners will only fork if they believe doing so supports network and token value and is worth the cost. And even if authorities wanted to compel miners to make DAO participants whole via a fork, they couldn't (both as a practical matter and as a legal matter).
My dream is to make blockchain censorship resistant both from the outside and the inside - there should be no way a majority could blacklist a single person and shut him up. As long as you play by the rules hard-coded in the blockchain, nobody, even the majority should be able to exclude you. This is how I understand being censorship resistant.