Bitcoin has been front page in the crypto-world and mainstream news alike. Because of this, some may not be abreast of what has been happening with our old friend, The DAO.
A quick recap: The Holy Trinity, DAO Epic Fail, DAO’s Audacity & Vitalik the Hedge Fund Manager.
Recently, a group both known as the White Hat Group (WHG), and The Robin Hood Group (apparently NOT the Ethereum Foundation), have been counter-attacking the DAO to ‘recover’ the remaining ETC against the black hat. They have since been successful with over 7m ETC recovered. Now, they have been receiving legal threats from DAO investors to have those funds distributed. The WHG took it upon themselves to send some of the funds to Kraken and Poloniex in a valiant effort to exchange the ETC for ETH, only to have their accounts frozen. Why not simply return the ETC to the original token holders?
In an attempt to clear the air, Bity SA (the original legal team advising Slock.it) announced collaborationwith the group, stating several arbitrary reasons why they are selling ETC for ETH (e.g. claims of 51% attacks on ETC). All of these have been shot down quite well.
After what appeared to be an initial pathetic conversion of ETC to ETH & BTC (Jack Sparrow’s Blog shows they sold for 20% below market value), Bity announces a change in strategy: just send the original ETC back to DAO token holders. What a vain effort.
What have we learnt? That the ETH foundation and all groups associated, loosely or otherwise, do not appear to have the wisdom of foresight. We understand this is relatively new technology, but how about reaching out to the community first and spend some rigor in the execution? The DAO could have been the start of something exciting, but instead it has turned into a massive fail sending the community back months if not years of confidence and trust.