I mean here in the real world that argument falls flat. Our legal system isn't code. It is warm fuzzy meatspace with concepts like "intent" and stuff.

But that isn't what The DAO was advertising. It was "code is law", which was supposed to remove the element of messy human judgement from things.

Of course, it was a spectacular failure because nobody actually really wants "code is law"... instead all they did was re-invent mob rule and those with the loudest voices decided what to do about the "theft".

> Of course, it was a spectacular failure because nobody actually really wants "code is law"... instead all they did was re-invent mob rule and those with the loudest voices decided what to do about the "theft".

IMO Ethereum did something that would be really nice to be able to do in the real world. A chain split, each participant got their resources on each side of the split (except the hacker) and each person got to choose which one to support, or both.

There was no need to bend to the "loudest voices" as to what to do with the theft, but rather to create two parallel chains and let each individual decide.

Yes, generally law doesn’t work as code and allows for retroactive human interpretation rewriting of transactions.

But the DAO contract specifically said, “we are bound by the results of this state machine, and it takes precedence over any human description of it”, and then wanted take-backsies as soon ask they didn’t like the result.