In the late hours of Thursday night/Friday morning, I was getting ready to head to bed when my phone started to buzz. Griff from the DAO’s slack was sending out emergency messages saying the DAO was under attack! After a while I followed the links showing the balance of ether in the DAO’s account and I could see it was, in fact, losing ether rapidly.

This was really exciting. I don’t mean that in a cruel way to those who have lost money, but it was genuinely interesting to see the community rally and try to work together to figure out what was happening and then collude to spam the network to try and slow it down.

This weekend has turned darker as people are starting to realize the gravity of the situation. Ethereum’s price tanked from $20 to $10, and the DAO’s market cap has gone from $220 million USD to $88 million USD in three days. Debates on reddit have turned fierce as investors in ethereum hotly debate what happened (feature or bug?) and what should be done about it. Stephan Tual is probably the most hated figure in cryptocurrency right now.

Who is to blame for this massive destruction of capital? Is it Slock.it’s fault? Is it Vitalik’s fault? Obviously, the person/people who are draining the DAO are to blame, but since they’re anonymous (for now), it’s hard to hate them.

It seems like everyone is shocked, shocked!, that cryptocurrency is still a very new field, with hazards, risk, and no guarantees. The internet community based around bitcoin and ethereum, usually made up of a larger concentration of libertarians than, say, the Tumblr community, seems to have suddenly made an about face, with various calls for law enforcement involvement, hard forks to rewind the transaction, and soft forks to prevent spending of the ether that was acquired/stolen.

On the other hand, many have a more laissez faire attitude. Redditor apoefjmqdsfls’s comment summed up this school well: “I made a bad contract in the first days ETH was online and lost 2K ETH with it, can I also get it back? Thanks!”

It’s all fun and games until a billion dollars is at stake.

In my last article, I discussed the pros of pyramid schemes in testing ethereum’s smart contracts. While pyramid schemes are ridiculous and generally fraudulent, these contracts allowed speculators and coders to play in a small sandbox and test ethereum code. Just as California was originally populated by gold speculators and get rich quick scams, these contracts blazed forward and allowed more cautious, slightly less speculative people the opportunity to see that ethereum worked as advertised.

Of course, the DAO didn’t get that opportunity. Instead of capping the investment to a small amount, the DAO creators allowed an unlimited number of ether to be put into the DAO, with the explicit statement that splitting from the DAO was always possible. In 20/20 hindsight, this was the fatal flaw that created an insane behemoth that was unmanageable, unworkable, and ultimately, a hacker’s dream target.

It was a combination of these three that caused me to sell most of my DAO tokens last week, at a 5% loss against ether. The risk was too great, with no upside in the near future. There were too many features and buttons to push in the DAO tokens. This was less an agile VC firm so much as twitch plays Dark Souls.

Whatever your loss is, learn from this experience. Don’t blame others. Don’t blame Vitalik, don’t blame Stephan. Stephan gave us exactly what we wanted. It was FOMO and greed that caused us to lose money, not fraud. If anything, we deceived ourselves. The promise of incredibly easy money (every ICO seems to be 4x at release…even Lisk!) lured us into thinking this would happen again, and the DAO would make us rich.

Now that we’re not, instead of blaming ourselves and taking responsibility for our actions, we’re burnishing pitchforks. We should be ashamed.

Yes, money has been lost. But each of us is responsible for his own decisions and investments. Hating people who put together this historic investment/catastrophe blinds us to learn from ourselves how we could have increased our due diligence, how we can apply this to future investment decisions, and ultimately whether we are in crypto primarily for money, or philosophical reasons.

Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote is apropos:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Cryptocurrency is inherently risky. 10x rewards do not come without extreme risk. Neither Vitalik nor Slock.it are to blame, even as they struggle to create least bad solutions to this awful situation.

Caveat emptor. We’ll see you in the next ICO.