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Digital Currency Ethereum Is Cratering Amid Claims Of a $50 Million Hack (businessinsider.com)
Digital currency Ethereum's value has dropped amid a hack on DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), an organisation with huge holdings of Ethereum (Wikipedia page). Its value is now below $15, down from more than $21 a few minutes ago. It is believed that as much as $50 million of the digital currency has been stolen. From a blog post on DAO: An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability, where an attacker called the "split" function, and then calls the split function recursively inside of the split, thereby collecting ether many times over in a single transaction.From a Quartz report: It's no surprise that cryptocurrency markets are in a panic. Funds invested in the DAO represents more than 10% of all the ether in circulation ($81.8 million worth). A massive hack on the DAO's holdings would be roughly equivalent to a successful heist at a major financial institution.
"A sucker is born every minute"
-- Bill Gates
So you're saying Ethereum's value has become ethereal?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Except you don't have to find a sucker who will give you real money for your imaginary currency first.
Doesn't sound very successful if the thing you're stealing becomes worthless because you successfully stole it. Unless you have significant holdings in other crypto-currencies which will increase in value due to their better security.
someone yelling that the Dollar is not a safe currency (well the U.S. Dollar IS crashing but it's besides the point of the analogy) because someone's wallet got picked, and they happened to have Dollar-bills in it.
On the bright side, as the value of the currency drops, the amount stolen would drop as well. So given a roughly 30% drop in value that $50 million is now only worth about $35 million!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Another digital currency in the bit bucket.
An attack has been found and exploited in the DAO, and the attacker is currently in the process of draining the ether contained in the DAO into a child DAO. The attack is a recursive calling vulnerability, where an attacker called the "split" function, and then calls the split function recursively inside of the split, thereby collecting ether many times over in a single transaction.
I keep reading about Ethereum being better than Bitcoin, this just proves that it's not.
Ha ha!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The fact that this bug occurred is a black mark on DAO and an utter embarrassment, but nothing has actually been "stolen". As the DAO blog post says, a community effort is underway to fork and lock out the attacker. They have a month to make it happen. No money will be lost.
Basically, this system is based on programming contracts (think legal contracts, usually written by lawyers and reviewed by judges). Someone left a bug in the contract, and because this is a programmed contract, not a written one, no one could enforce the "spirit" of the contract over the exact (erroneous) content of the contract.
This huge community panic and fork undermines the idea of these "programmed" contracts, and thus the system itself.
Important to note that the exposed vulnerability has nothing to do with the Ethereum code or blockchain, but a smart contract (the DAO) written atop of it. The Ethereum developers responded this morning by proposing a soft fork that would prevent the hacker from withdrawing the Ether for long enough for the community to decide on next steps. Next steps could involve (if miners choose to accept the code) a hard fork that would allow original investors in the DAO to withdraw their Ether.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-vulnerability/
Except if this happened at a "major financial institution", the Federal Reserve would step in and stop a panic by insuring the funds. That's why we *have* a federal reserve. See the Panic of 1907 for an example.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Good practice makes safe programs. Not programming languages.
If magic bullet programming techniques were the cure we'd all be running microkernel operating systems programmed in lisp.
I sort of looked into Etherium, and I'm an expert on bitcoins, and their website's marketing fluff bullshit sounded an awful lot like it's bitcoin but run by 1 giant central company and they're downplaying that fact and outright lying about it. Does that accurately sum it up or am I missing something?
1. An unknown currency has such value?
2. Someone bothers attacking an unknown currency?
3. The attacker has a facility to convert a large portion of the digital currency into something tangible without it instantly being worthless?
4. Slashdot assumes we know WTF the summary is talking about?
"this is an issue that affects the DAO specifically; Ethereum itself is perfectly safe."
Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016...
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
No.
Since you seem to be an expert. Rather than just listing vague claims about a language, describe how the features you listed are pertinent to this attack.
Not the first time an altcoin cratered because of reasons. Always someone else's fault, of course. Always "haxx0rz". Sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"there exists no automatic method that decides with generality non-trivial questions on the behavior of computer programs."
Ian Ameline
If I steal $1,000,000 worth of foobarcurrency from you, and it's value drops to $1,000, I'm still ahead $1,000. You're screwed but I don't really have to care.
It is already failing with fractured "anonymous" crypto currency groups. All you need for electronic currency is a UUID for whatever denomination probably with a PGP fingerprint to help guarantee legal funds.
Mod parent up.
So long as the contract language used by Etherium is Turing-complete, they're pretty much doomed to having this sort of thing repeating. To their credit, they have mechanisms to, through community consensus, block and reverse these thefts.
(A good currency design should be tolerant of fraud -- assume it will happen, and have in place mechanisms for detecting and reversing it.)
In support, I give you Rice's Theorem;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"there exists no automatic method that decides with generality non-trivial questions on the behavior of computer programs."
Ian Ameline
Shouldn't the headline say it's a 34.8 million dollar hack?
I sense this attack was mostly about embarrassing the company. From the Etherium website:
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
(emphasis mine)
Breakfast served all day!
oops, I guess something of value WAS lost here.
Carry on....
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
So the US economy is great!
a $50 Million Hack
Wait, no, $5 million hack.
Oop, now it's $5,000.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's no surprise that cryptocurrency markets are in a panic.
Yet nobody is in a panic. $81.8 million dollars worth? What is the size of the US national debt? Global trade imbalances are how big?
This story reaks of FUD. Where is the real story? If you are going to discuss money why wouldn't you discuss the loss in value of currency in the United States since the Federal Reserve snuck control of it in 1913.
Creature from Jeckyll Island on YouTube all day and night for years.
...while it's cheap.
EthCore's Ethereum implementation is written in Rust anyway, I believe.
"DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), an organisation with huge holdings of Ethereum"
Might want to work on the Decentralised bit.
create a digital currency
get lots of people to invest in it.
hack into your own system, steal the currency, cash it out before the value drops.
winning
"microkernel operating systems programmed in lisp"
So Emacs?
As of eight minutes ago, the price was at roughly $13.21, which looks bad compared to the $21 value that the original article talks about, but only if you don't pay attention to the numbers from further than five days back. If you look back beyond 6/13, it's been hovering anywhere from $11-$13 since 5/20.
bahahaha. The ponzi schemers probably sold off vulnerabilities to their NSA bothers so they could be moved to their mansions.
Existing fiat currency systems are surprisingly robust in the face of many problems, of which fraud is a minor one - and much more so than gold standards or bitcoin, IMO.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
To their credit, they have mechanisms to, through community consensus, block and reverse these thefts.
Reversing the "thefts" would be the quickest way to drive the value of Ethereum to zero.
It is my opinion that the primary value in Blockchain currencies the decentralization. Reversing these funds would prove it is centralized and requires trust from authority figures.