Governments might not be immune from a sustained majority attack, but that's the point... governments are large entities that (hopefully) operate at large timescales and have some degree of inertia and stability.
In turn, governments provide recourse and security for smaller, constituent systems (companies and individuals.) As long as the government remains intact (or intact enough), it can be a an arbiter and enforcer between the smaller entities (i.e, the entire legal system).
With Ethereum, there is no arbiter. There is only the exact code of the contract. It is entirely possible that the code is flawed in a way that is disadvantageous to all parties, such that they cannot change it, or that a mistake was made that allows one or more parties to act in violation of the "spirit" of the agreement.
Of course, some of these situations can be foreseen and accounted for (exit clauses, consensus code updates, etc.) But not everything can be foreseen, and the irony is that the more situations are explicitly accommodated for, the more surface area there will be for difficult-to-detect edge cases.
The legal system has built in resiliency, due to multiple fallback layers of (hopefully) impartial arbiters to add a layer of empathy and judgement on top of the strict letter of the law. It's not perfect, but it works.
Unless Ethereum can find some equivalent, I cannot see it taking over anything but certain types of very well-understood transactions. Don't get me wrong, that still has value... automated escrow, options & futures trading (etc.) is huge. But until this problem is solved, effective DAOs are a pipe dream.
In turn, governments provide recourse and security for smaller, constituent systems (companies and individuals.) As long as the government remains intact (or intact enough), it can be a an arbiter and enforcer between the smaller entities (i.e, the entire legal system).
With Ethereum, there is no arbiter. There is only the exact code of the contract. It is entirely possible that the code is flawed in a way that is disadvantageous to all parties, such that they cannot change it, or that a mistake was made that allows one or more parties to act in violation of the "spirit" of the agreement.
Of course, some of these situations can be foreseen and accounted for (exit clauses, consensus code updates, etc.) But not everything can be foreseen, and the irony is that the more situations are explicitly accommodated for, the more surface area there will be for difficult-to-detect edge cases.
The legal system has built in resiliency, due to multiple fallback layers of (hopefully) impartial arbiters to add a layer of empathy and judgement on top of the strict letter of the law. It's not perfect, but it works.
Unless Ethereum can find some equivalent, I cannot see it taking over anything but certain types of very well-understood transactions. Don't get me wrong, that still has value... automated escrow, options & futures trading (etc.) is huge. But until this problem is solved, effective DAOs are a pipe dream.