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Three individuals call for a moratorium to prevent losses to the Ethereum DAO

Three Ethereum DAO critics have called for a moratorium on proposals to prevent losses to the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) which is a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.

Dino Mark, Vlad Zamfir and Emin Gun Sirer were the three individuals who called for a moratorium. They released a paper on 27th May, 2016 describing a number of security vulnerabilities in a novel cryptocurrency crowd funding project that has raised more than $100 million.

The paper noted that, a moratorium on proposals to prevent losses caused by unintended consequences will provide time to ensure security upgrades. The paper analyzes the rules of the DAO and examines problems in its design that could motivate investors to act strategically to reveal their presence. The paper offers suggestions to prevent attacks like hijack investments of honest DAO investors.

Authors argue that the money that has been put into the DAO project are all in a digital currency called Ether. “The current implementation can enable attacks with severe consequences,” according to the paper, written by the computer scientists Dino Mark, Vlad Zamfir and Emin Gün Sirer.

According to cryptocoinnews.com, one moratorium by a curator is to have DAO token holders place a self-imposed moratorium by voting against every proposal. But, this mechanism should not be relied on to prevent attacks, based on the flaws connected to negative voting.

Another option is for the DAO token holders to opt-in to security measures and to deploy a moratorium by voting for a new curator. For the curators to impose a moratorium and to permit the DAO token holders to opt-out is the most immediate and safest approach.

Gün Sirer is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University who previously authored a paper pointing out a serious vulnerability in the structure of Bitcoin. Zamfir, one of Mr. Gün Sirer’s co-authors, is one of the 10 curators.

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