And in fact, in many countries, the DAO actually is a legal company/association, just not officially incorporated. But incorporating is not required everywhere for the normal laws to apply.
Just the fact that people put their money together and are acting as a group gives them various legal requirements. The fact that the DAO limits what they can do might interfere with their ability to follow the laws; that does not mean that the laws do not apply. You don't get to throw your hands in the air and say "we cannot pay taxes on our profits, it's physically impossible" when you made it impossible yourself by creating and/or associating with the DAO.
The DAO isn't actually worth 120 million. For one, it's based on the price of ETH, which would completely crash if you attempted to sell even a few million worth.
Secondly, everyone can withdraw their funds from the DAO before any funds are sent to projects. Many have invested because those who invested early make money from those investing later, since the number of "DAO tokens" you get per "ETH" has gone down over time. (cough pyramid cough)
I just sold one of my hairs to myself for $10. Is my head now worth a million?
With Apple, there's intrinsic value to consider. And frankly, if you sold enough Apple stock for it to go down 50%, I'd personally start buying. I doubt that's the case for ETH, where there's only early adopters buying it hoping to strike it rich.
That's because of the tiny liquidity. Nowhere near $120 million was sold, and it still lost 50%. Now try selling tens of millions worth, and see what happens.
> Market incentives exist for it not to crash. People who put money into ETH/DAO and who want to see growth have strong incentives against this type of bank run.
That's where the pyramid/ponzi/bubble comparison comes in. There's no actual value (yet?); the adopters would have to keep buying more to keep the price up and to keep the "value" of their holdings high. Not because it's so useful; just financial incentives.
You're not exactly linking to the type of source you'd want to read for trustworthy scientific information. Unless your version of science says fluoride in drinking water is killing you, eating greens will cure cancer, and GMO's are horrible.
Comparing to JPEG seems somewhat dishonest (or thoughtless), considering the large parts of one color in some of the images. PNG and other algorithms not designed for detailed pictures would probably do better.
I suspect being hit by the beams might harm the victim, with the electricity just being a bonus. I doubt the laser generators are cheap and portable as well.
The folks who created it (slock.it) are planning to be the first proposal voted on. Now you might understand why the incentives are so incredibly slanted towards yes votes (and even more so on the first vote, given the extraPremium or whatever the pyramid aspect of the initial price is called).
First: if you vote to do something illegal as a shareholder, then you can be held responsible. Even in a limited liability corporation. [0]
Second: it's not a company: it's a partnership, by my interpretation. By law (in all countries I know of) partnerships by default do not have limited liability. If you want limited liability, you're going to need to set up a proper corporation/LLP, file the proper paperwork, adhere to various laws, keep books, etc. Otherwise, in the US you are probably jointly and severally liable.[1]
The defense "The DAO did it" wouldn't work, since people are voluntary members of the DAO, and presumably voted/stayed in when it got to the point of criminal acts.
The legal system is not a machine you can bypass with magical internet code. (As opposed to a legal system as a Smart Contract running on Ethereum, perhaps.)
>So, for example, person A can eat 3000 calories of cookies per day, but would gain weight on 3000 calories of rice. Person B could be the opposite. From the paper, it looks like genetics is a factor, though epigenetic factors and microbiome seem more important.
That's not at all what that paper says. It describes that blood glucose response to various foods can differ between people (and shows to extreme outliers as examples). Your interpretation with "3000 calories of cookies" vs rice is both not supported by the study, and also nonsense.
I'd look up the studies for this if I had the time, but: the actual correlation (relationship) between calories and weight gain/loss is extremely large, with the differences between most people of similar body types less than 200 calories/day.
Your call with the lab is an attempt to appeal to authority. Also, thanks for the "sigh".
I read your link. It's about blood glucose. Not about weight. The crux of your argument is that blood glucose response equals uptake of calories, which is not supported by your link, and which is not true. If it were, you could eat 5000 calories of fat in a day, have no blood glucose response, thus not get fat.
Are you really trying to claim that the outlier participants of whom the blood glucose plots are shown in your link are unable to use any of the calories in bananas/cookies, because they had no blood glucose response?
Your traffic to websites goes trough a fixed "circuit" (that changes every few minutes). Within a circuit, the exit node sees all outbound connections you make, or don't make.
Why can't kids play on a street designed only for traffic to houses on that street? I played on the street all the time as a child. Of course, my streets weren't flooded with drivers trying to save a few minutes by driving through residential areas.
What? It was clear from the very beginning to anyone who actually looked into what the DAO was and how it worked, except those wanting to strike it rich believing the crypto hype.
You're saying you trusted it, got burned, and are already looking forward to the next one?
The DAO was described as "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, and now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore?
The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").
The DAO was officially introduced by slock.it with "the code of the contract is the absolute truth, any other description is just a guideline", which was hailed as a new miracle by the investors, but now that it doesn't mean mountains of gold the founding principles are suddenly not important anymore, it seems.
The "hacker" simply used the DAO as it was meant to be used (i.e. according to the smart contract code), and deserves the funds. If there is a hard fork, I hope he sues slock.it for controlling the DAO, and for stealing the funds he is owed according to their own terms ("The contract is king").
No, the DAO believers explicitly decided "f* the government, in code we trust" and wrote in their contract that whatever the DAO did, according to its code, was right.
You don't have such an agreement with Amazon.
Regarding your edit: I don't want to vote for anything. I'm simply pointing out that there is a (real-life!) agreement, and a party (slock.it et al.) not holding themselves to that agreement, and that I'd enjoy seeing that played out in court, where it belongs.
You didn't invest in a "distributed investment and unstoppable tool that is distributed", you invested in a partnership with the DAO code explicitly stated as the (potentially legally binding) operating document. If you didn't share the values and conditions in that contract, you probably shouldn't have joined the DAO/partnership.
Regarding your last paragraph: I'm not sure why you're attacking me personally here.
You could make the same claim about bitcoin not being needed, given that we have money and a working banking system. Your POV is just as invested in bitcoin as others are in Ethereum.
A properly configured $5 VPS can handle a massive amount of traffic if it's just serving a single static (cached) page.
But to follow up on your point: I hope the EB script that updates the pages automatically while doing maintenance will not wait for a response to its POST requests before actually letting EB perform the maintenance. Otherwise you create a crucial unwanted dependency on your status server.
