...
“The contract is the code, it's unstoppable code, it's unbreakable, it's self-executing and autonomous — right up until everything goes wrong. And then, 'No no no no, that's theft!' Which is some social norm that we've attached to it that's not based in the code, and then we're going to stop the whole system and basically bail it out. Is this something we're going to do every time a smart contract fails? Or is this just because there are a lot of [Ethereum] insiders in The DAO?"
Study case: the 2016-06-18 attack
...