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Lädt ... Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist That Almost Destroyed It All (2020. Auflage)von Matthew Leising (Autor), Chris Henry Coffey (Erzähler), Recorded Books (Publisher)
Werk-InformationenOut of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All von Matthew Leising
Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  Tytania | Dec 29, 2020 |  keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
"Truth is stranger than fiction, in the world of cryptocurrencies. Not so long ago, in June 2016, there was a bug in line 666 of Ethereum's code which enabled $55 million to be stolen in a nanosecond. The remaining $100 million barely escaped the same fate. There's no FDIC for digital currency. This was a nightmare scenario for the entire virtual money and commerce model. Vitalik Buterin, the 20-year-old creator of the program, desperately implemented a highly controversial fix that may ultimately prove be much more problematic worse than the crime in the eyes of many: he reversed time to a point before the theft happened, thereby nullifying the $55 million theft while reinstating all valid transactions. This was an extremely controversial move, since it sent a clear message that all transactions could be wiped out after the fact, which would create a chaotic situation. All stakeholders in the multibillion-dollar digital currency economy are struggling to explain and understand the future of money in the wake of the Ethereum crisis and the way its founder unilaterally chose to cure it. This remarkable event marked the beginning of one of the largest digital heists in history, and as it wore on that morning it gained viewers from Rio de Janeiro to New York to Tokyo. You could have watched it too if you knew how to point your computer browser to the right place. That's because it played out on the blockchain, a breakthrough in computer science that enabled Bitcoin to go from a mere idea in 2008 to a $121 billion unstoppable digital currency today. What a coder named Jentztsch had done was build an investment fund that relied on blockchain software to allow anyone in the world to invest their money with him. What he hadn't meant to do was insert a bug in his code, a mistake on line 666 to be exact, that provided a backdoor for the thief to enter and drain the fund of money. About $55 million would be stolen before the morning was over, yet that was only the beginning"-- Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)364.162Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Crimes of property TheftKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3)
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Written by a journalist and based entirely on first-person interviews, it's got credibility and an in-depth perspective. Leising spends a lot of time speaking with and admiring wunderkind founder Vitalik Buterin, Russian-Canadian child-prodigy eccentric genius who saw the potential of blockchain to do more than just serve as a ledger of a digital currency. The beauty of Ehtereum, the Avis to Bitcoin's Hertz, the number-two-trying-harder, is that its ledger doesn't just store coins or tokens or static things. It also stores programs, "smart contracts", which can DO things to the things. You can have literal contracts. You can do crowdfunding. You can do anything you can dream up and code in their programming language, Solidity.
But it also stores cryptocurrency, ether, the "gas" that makes the contracts go, and a speculative currency in its own right. And basically, one day a hacker found a bug in a big important "smart contract" which allowed him to sneak in and steal ether, over and over again.
He was stopped. White-hat programmers first went in and exploited the same bug to "steal" as much ether as they could to keep it safe from the thief and be able to return it to its rightful owners... but then the hacker snuck into the stolen ether, too.
So they had to decide what to do... one option was called the "hard fork," which meant basically rewriting history so that the hack never happened. Ether is, well, ethereal - it doesn't exist except in the blockchain, so, why not? You can code whatever you want and make it so the hack never happened. But many objected to this, including Vitalik, as "icky." You're not supposed to do that. The thing about blockchains is they're supposed to be immutable. In fact, the thief didn't really "steal" anything or do anything wrong, right? In theory, he just ran the program a certain way, doing something that it allowed him to do. There was no fundamental bug in Ethereum. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Not the hacker's fault somebody coded something in a smart contract that they didn't intend to.
Well, the other option was to basically invalidate the stolen ether - they could make it so that it would no longer be tradeable for other currency, making it worthless.
They chose the hard fork. This isn't a spoiler. Anyone who cares knows.
It was a pretty good book... never really got bogged down in anything that would be over an interested reader's head, and never got boring. (