Why do you keep using drugs and firearms in your examples? Those are the illegal parts, not the buy / sell contract.
There's nothing illegal, to my knowledge, about writing a contract that explicitly and provably says "If you push this button, the corporation will give you all of its money."
If the contract instead said "If you illegally provide drugs / firearms, the corporation will give you all of its money," - of course that's illegal.
>Why do you keep using drugs and firearms in your examples?
To use examples where people can quickly grasp the law and not focus on the facts, which have a tendency to muddy the waters. But lets dive into the muddy waters:
>There's nothing illegal, to my knowledge, about writing a contract that explicitly and provably says "If you push this button, the corporation will give you all of its money."
Say Apple Pay updates their terms tomorrow and they include a new provision that says Apple or another Apple Pay member can take all the money from all your accounts connected to Apple Pay. Like everyone does you agree to the update without reading the terms, and next thing all your money is gone. Whether or not you know it even mighty Apple Execs would be facing criminal charges with that kind of activity.
As it relates to the DAO creators, I think the big question is if they knew or should have known the software was vulnerable to the extend investments might be lost. Factually I think they knew, as I understand one of the first DAO proposals after funding was investment for the creators themselves so they could create a security framework on top of the DAO from known attacks.
There's nothing illegal, to my knowledge, about writing a contract that explicitly and provably says "If you push this button, the corporation will give you all of its money."
If the contract instead said "If you illegally provide drugs / firearms, the corporation will give you all of its money," - of course that's illegal.