Author: Taylor Monahan
When do you need this?
You need this instruction if you want to split from The DAO, perhaps because you don't agree with a proposal or with the curators. It is a way to ensure the decentralization and autonomy of The DAO.
One should note that splitting is not entirely hard, but it has a number of steps and is time consuming. It takes (minimum) 7 days to Split the DAO and arrive at a place where your Ether and Reward Tokens are now in your complete control. However, it takes a minimum of 48 days to "cash out" Ether into a standard account where you can send them, trade them, etc. You will need to take action, wait 7 days, take more action, wait 27 days, take more action, wait 14 days, and then you will finally have ETH in an account you control.
If you simply want to cash out, you may want to consider trading your DAO Tokens on an exchange rather than splitting.
Ingredients
You need:
- Mist / Ethereum Wallet: Downloaded, installed, and sync with the main net.
- "The DAO" added as a Watch Contract
- "The DAO" added as a Watch Token
- Your token address
- Some Ether at your token address to cover cost of gas
- Time.
Table of Contents
Create a Proposal to Split the DAO
Find the ID of your Proposal to Split
Vote “YES” on your new proposal
Wait 1 week
Call the Split DAO Function
You are now officially split & have your ETH + reward tokens & are no longer part of the original DAO
Wait the 27 Day Creation Period
Add your address to the whitelist (if you don’t want to send it to the new curator address)
- Create a new Proposal to send all your ETH to an address
- Vote Yes on the new proposal
- Wait the 14 day debating period
- Execute the proposal
- Your ETH have now been sent to the address specified.
Directions
1. Create a Proposal to Split the DAO
Additional Information
Instructions
Go to ‘Contracts’ and then click on the ‘The DAO’ contract.
On the right side, click the “Pick a Function” dropdown.
Select “New Proposal”
Recipient: enter the address new curator for your DAO (your address)*
Amount: Leave Blank
Description: Leave Blank, or enter a human readable descriptor like “0x762f split proposal” so you know it is yours later. **
Transaction Data: Leave blank
Debating Period: ‘604800’ this is 1 week in seconds, the minimum amount of time.
New Curator: Check this box!
Choose your token account to execute from
There is no need to send any ETH
Ensure you have some ETH in your token account for gas.
Click “Execute”
A pop up will appear confirming gas, etc. Enter your password and press "SEND TRANSACTION".
* If you are just splitting the DAO with just yourself, you would enter your address and therefore become the new Curator. Make sure you have access to this account! If you are creating a new DAO with other people, this should probably be a multi-sig wallet held by multiple trusted people.
** Anyone who enters the Proposal ID will be able to read this descriptor, so don’t include personal information.
2. Find the ID of your Proposal to Split
- The easiest way I have found to do this is:
- Immediately after submitting the proposal, put your cursor in the “Proposals” field on the left side under “Read from Contract” -> “Proposals”
- Scroll up until the data below the number field stops changing.
- Scroll back down to find the real ID of your proposal (when you go down one number and it changes to a different proposal.)
- Confirm that it is your proposal by typing in the Proposal ID number into the field where you were just scrolling and verify the information is yours.
- You now know the Proposal ID number. Remember or write down this number as you’ll need it later.
As we can see nothing funky is going on in Proposal 1 above. 
Taylor determined that Proposal 1 was a malicious attack by an untrustworthy curator, and decided that splitting the DAO would be her best choice, as seen in Proposal 2.