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RE: Ideological security vs financial security, which comes first?
It is now becoming recognized that a hard fork may be the only way to guarantee that individuals who were brave enough to take the risk with The DAO are not punished for it.
How can you call something "a risk" when there is a safety net in place?
For me, a risk is something which can turn out to be either beneficial or destructive. This is the very essence of risk taking and it has nothing to do with the concept of punishment.
- You want to take a risk?
- Yes.
- Fine. There might be very bad outcomes, are you still sure you want to take the risk?
- Yes, I'm sure.
Bad outcome occurs.
- We have a bad outcome, you need to accept the consequences.
- I don't want to. I want my money back.
- But you can't. That's what the risk was about.
- I don't care. I was brave to take the risk so I now deserve to be helped.
Is requiring people to take responsibility for their actions an act of "ideology". If so, what kind of ideology is this?
I don't think I want to punish them. I just treat them as adults, whereas you treat them as victims.
Who is doing more harm to them? Me or you?
Can you name another investment which literally went from market cap $150 million to $0 in a matter of days? It's not so much people weren't used to risks but no one expected or is accustomed to hundreds of millions being zapped out practically overnight.
Altcoins aren't all successful but they almost never go down to $0. Money might be lost but it's almost never a 100% loss. When money is lost from behaviors in the market then there is usually time to see it coming, or get out, or make trades, it usually never happens overnight. The kind of loss we saw with The DAO is unprecedented and not only is it the largest single crowd fund in history but it is also the biggest heist in history.
You are free to say you don't want to punish the investors but technically it is a punishment. It is what it is and it is what it looks like. As far as treating them like adults, again this is according to ideology not harm. Harm is pretty easy to measure if you look at the loss of money. If someone loses $1 million that they invested in The DAO then that is definitely going to at least hurt them emotionally even if they have $99 million more.
And for most people we are talking about young 20 or 30 something startup mentality types who are dreamers. Their dreams will definitely be dashed and some might never recover from this financially or psychologically. It is what it is and it's definitely an act of ideology if you say you want to make sure the investors are treated a certain way because of what they deserve.
As you know I see it differently but I am willing to entertain anti fork arguments. I understand how ideological security could be important and how ideological cohesion can be a sort of intangible asset for a community. That being said, there are also other assets of value which are more commonly referred to as financial assets. These financial assets are lost and this results in a lost capability and less financial freedom within the community. Clearly you would expect the effects on the ecosystem to be negative.
If the hacker keeps 100% of the tokens then the hacker likely is not going to do anything good for Ethereum with it or at least not be able to use it better than the people they took it from.
If The DAO was a VC and this happened to Andreessen Horowitz, then you would expect the VC money to dry up quite quickly. The VC might even feel they got scammed and tell other VCs not to invest. Ethereum may lose it's ability to finance future projects because $150 million is very hard to replace.
You confuse emotional / financial pain with harm. Pain is only a process. There can be pain inflicted but no actual harm done - sometimes quite the opposite.
I'm just trying to treat people with the respect they deserve. It this sometimes involves inflicting pain, so be it. And that's all. There is no "ideology" behind it.
There is not only psychological harm, but also emotional labor. Harm is subjective but you can assume that if someone loses money they aren't going to be happy about it. Pain and suffering count for something. Maybe you should take a poll of DAO investors and ask them if they are psychologically harmed from losing in this way?