The Ethereum Classic Declaration of Independence
Well, okay. But this isn&#x27;t an answer to the fundamental dilemma of the DAO hack: either Ethereum should have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren&#x27;t really a good idea, or it shouldn&#x27;t have forked, admitting that smart contracts aren&#x27;t really a good idea. This manifesto just argues that the second option is right, but that doesn&#x27;t change the conclusion.<p>Specifically, I have seen a lot of buggy software. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen any truly bug-free software. I expect, therefore, that if I put money into a smart contract, that contract is going to have a bug in it somewhere. What happens when the bug is discovered and exploited? If you say &quot;Some humans will decide that&#x27;s not what was meant,&quot; that&#x27;s wonderful--but I already have a financial system where humans make usually-reasonable judgments about fraud and can reverse transactions. It&#x27;s not perfect, but I have a decent set of expectations about it, it works well enough, and it&#x27;s very well-supported. If you say &quot;No, the contract is the contract&quot; (as these people do), fantastic: you have a compellingly different product, not just a bunch of complicated math on top of a system that&#x27;s as squishy as my current financial system. But why at all should I believe that it&#x27;s different <i>for the better</i>? Now I have an expectation that a bug will exist, and be exploited, and it will be <i>correct</i> for the bug to be exploited. If the goal is correctness, that&#x27;s great. But if the goal is getting me to use the system, why would I want that?<p>Or, as Matt Levine put it in his writeup of the DAO hack (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-06-17&#x2F;blockchain-company-s-smart-contracts-were-dumb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-06-17&#x2F;blockchai...</a>):<p>&quot;Financial systems are supposed to work for humans. If the code rips off the humans, something has gone wrong.&quot;