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 burn 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's true a bail-out will not make people stop talking about it.
I don't think this is the right course of action.
I'm not sure how one account was allowed to withdraw 80 BTC in one lump sum. Any withdrawal over 10 btc should need to be reviewed by an admin. If you look at any of the large BTC exchanges this is how they operate. So yes, its unfortunate that Poloniex was duped, but not to have any security measures in place to protect ANY of the currencies on the exchange was foolhardy.
Having a third party audit your code is standard practice.
After looking at something day in and day out for months your brain becomes accustomed to it and may not notice what other new eyes will see right away.
This is common sense. Not just in the programming world but the entire technical and development world. This project does not seem rushed to me.
edit: to reiterate; the developers are under no timeline or schedule. They owe nothing to you or I and release only when they feel something is complete.
They are certainly not releasing things half-asses because their boss is breathing down their necks. They have no incentive to release things in a rush.