Personally, I think DAO is a joke, from a certain point of view, it personally split the ETH, the emergence of ETH and ETC
That was not intended as a joke. It was a good experiment. But it failed due to a bug in the software implementation.
As if it can be expected that complex code will not contain a bug or an exploit. That was the first failure but it is a *fundamental* failure: one cannot write complex software from scratch, without having it used, and the guarantee that no bug or exploit will exist.
Normal software gets around this, by updates, when bugs or exploits are detected. But, by definition, smart contracts cannot be updated because they are a contract which has, of course, to remain in place as it was originally convened (unless you make the update part of the contract, which opens even more the Pandora's box of potential bugs and exploits).
The principle of complex, Turing complete, bug free and exploit free smart contracts from the start, unstoppable and unalterable, is an oxymoron.
Moreover, the *economic function* of the DAO was ridiculous, as I posted earlier. There's nothing the DAO could economically accomplish which simple crowd funding cannot accomplish. It just got vastly more complicated, where some privileged got more to say about other people's money.
I really wonder what was the sense of this experiment, of which the disastrous outcome was evidently predictable. Did one really need to mess with $150 million to find out the obvious ?
Keep in mind that not only the DAO got hurt, but the entire market. Before the attack, market cap of the cryptocurrencies was about $14.2Bn and it was shrinked to ~$12.5Bn in a ~week. Bitcoin was at its peak since the beginning of 2014. Look what I've said 2 days before the attack:
You can't just take $200Mn from the people, without doing vast amount of researches on your product (though I admit again that I didn't make any deep researches on ETH or DAO)! This could kill all the crypto!
... and what Hueristic answered:
...This could kill all the crypto!...
LOL, not a chance in hell. When it crashes and burns it'll just get more peops interested.
I believe its safe to say that the DAO failure caused a few hundred million $ (quite possible to be even over a billion $) in losses. Its not like I'm bragging or anything, but I was expecting this to happen and it was the main reason to start this thread. Projects are coming and going all the time, but when it comes to a project with such funds, then we should all worry about on what may happen in future.
The night is young my friend, it will come to pass.
