But forget obligation, real reason to bail out is because if 80 BTC is lost it will mean massive bad press, it will devastate the project, hang over its head forever. People will never stop talking about it, do you think people can lost $60000 and not fight to get it back? Does not matter who is at fault or what is fair, "only get one chance to make a first impression" and most people will hear this story as their introduction to Counterparty
A bail-out will not make people stop talking about it. It is the second major fuck up at the protocol level within mere weeks after the end of the burn period and it's incredibly damaging. People are losing big sums of money. Redditors are linking to this thread and expect this to be mentioned in any serious discussion about counterparty for the oncoming months.
I do believe the devs did a brilliant job to create a piece of software that is the first to implement a DEx. Decentralization is the way to go and I applaud them for their courage and boldness to Just Do It. But I feel the project is rushed and released when not ready. A longer test period would have been nice too, just to get more people involved.
It's nice that they want to work with an "auditor" to verify the code for bugs, but that really sounds they are either not willing or able to do a full code review themselves. Instead, they want to rely on some third party for the security of their code base. I think it's not the right way to go, and for me it fails to build any trust.
It isn't a matter of being unwilling. Although we are more familiar with the protocol, among only the three of us, we simply lack the man-power to do everything at once. It would not be possible to maintain the speed at which we are moving and also do a thorough bug check.
Moreover, it is not only the *amount* of time spent looking at the code, but the number of people who are looking at it. Even if one of us had the time to devote himself exclusively to reviewing the protocol, this wouldn't make extra eyes unnecessary.