The DAO was created with the intention to allocate its funds according to a certain voting scheme, with everyone's power determined by the number of tokens they held. But the program did not correctly implement this intention, and the DAO hack exploited the difference to bring the funds under control of the attacker. This most likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and was thus illegal.
Which is one of the issues with smart contracts. Yes, written contracts are the contract in the physical world. And sometimes people get outlawyered or just plain screw up and lose money because of circumstances that they didn't foresee. But when things come to court, there's still generally some oversight usually provided through the court system or mediators to put the brakes on clearly absurd and/or unfair results. Which is generally considered a positive thing.
As I understand it, the DAO website explicitly stated that the code of the contract superseded any written or stated intent. Basically: The code is the law.
The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" applies to the US.
What if the hacker lives somewhere else? Then that law does not apply to him, and the action was not illegal.
yorwba|8 years ago
The DAO was created with the intention to allocate its funds according to a certain voting scheme, with everyone's power determined by the number of tokens they held. But the program did not correctly implement this intention, and the DAO hack exploited the difference to bring the funds under control of the attacker. This most likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and was thus illegal.
ghaff|8 years ago
Zarath|8 years ago
portent|8 years ago