JUST WHEN IT WAS GOING SO WELL.
I do wonder who is going to step in and what that means for a decentralised future. Or, as someone on HN said:
- Apparently all that talk of decentralisation goes out the window when you're losing money.
Edit:
yeah i got to the fucking mountains for an off the grid vacay at 10pm and the red alarm went off at 1130. fml. Catch up on the latest developments at the top of here. I'm goin to bed. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDao/comments/4oifss/myetherwallet_dao_splits_information/
Yeah, funny stuff. They really should have had a cap on The DAO. It's so high risk. That was a bad decision. It seems they are going to work it out. Geez HN hates cryptocurrencies. Some silly comments there. Bitcoin did some security hardforks in the beginning that would be very difficult if not impossible now. The decentralization comes with scale.
Guess they should have listened to you two weeks ago :) Hopefully no one was dumb enough to put their life savings in there, but I can't imagine that's not the case for some people. Bug, no bug; theft, no theft; it's irrelevant. When any asset increases by 15 fold in 5 months or so, it's probably time to hit the pause button. Anyway ETH is still sitting at $17, which would look pretty attractive by even last week's standards.
In amongst the political and emotional arguments for hard-forking the ETH blockchain or not, here's an interesting examination of DAO code which reveals that in addition to the recursion problem a fat-fingered typo could lead to much more profound problems. http://vessenes.com/deconstructing-thedao-attack-a-brief-code-tour/ If I'm reading it right, it suggests that in addition to the split sending tokens to the attacker's child DAO (which is currently ticking down its 26 days before ETH release) - the event of the 17th people are referring to as "the hack" - the actual token count may be completely out of whack in both the created children and the original DAO now. Which would be an accounting nightmare and lead to further repercussions down the line for the community to solve. mk and insomniasexx - anything tingling your coding senses on this? Edit: Here's a much more forensic, step-by-step examination of the exploit. http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/ Edit 2: A thoughtful post about how choosing a procedural vs a functional language for the EVM showed naivetΓ©. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4opjov/the_bug_which_the_dao_hacker_exploited_was_not/ Edit 3: Philip Daian provides a more interesting analysis of the situation and concludes that there may be some very serious issues with Solidity itself (at least when it comes to handling financial issues in the order of millions of dollars). insomniasexx this is worth a read.
Buying ETH is gambling, plain and simple. Whether it's a good time to buy depends on whether you think that it is undervalued, not on whether the price has com down 30% in a day. I would say that there's even odds that it comes down again tomorrow. The real question is whether ETH is "worth" 10x what it was in December or January when it started taking off. No one can really answer that. DAO was ETH's first demonstration of utility, and obviously they have some work to do, but of course this doesn't mean it won't deliver in the long run. My best guess is that the price will continue to slide for a few more day, and by the time the bleeding stops 50% or more of the high price will be shed. But if the answer to the question is if ETH is a decent bet in the long run (that is, whether it's useful) is yes, then it is a good buy today, yesterday, and tomorrow, because if it does turn out to be useful, then the sky is the limit pricewise. If you're looking to pick up a quick 50%, then I think it's a terrible buy, because it's gained 1000% in a few months. That's the exact opposite of when anyone should buy any asset on a gamble.
Massive kudos to insomniasexx (and everyone else) for ninja-like response to this. Amazing community effort. Get some sleep, Insom.
Got 4 hours. Luckily most of the daohub and slockit team is in Europe so they weren't as bad as me. And my sleep cycle as been shifting to 10am-3am so because of that so it wasn't the most terrible thing, timing wise. Notjing like a fat pile of adrenaline to keep you going.
The panic in the dao slack channel though. Imagined you typing curt replies through gritted teeth in Bumblefuck, Nowhere as you patched MEW code on a cellphone. I swear I was reading this as a Vernor Vinge sci-fi novel unfolding in real time.
The last time we came up to the cabin was the first time it got anywhere close to $15 dollars. Remember that? And the next morning I woke up to thr dude who made the reddit post "MyEtherWallet burned me for 1200" This time we come up on the run up to $20 and all that gets destroyed by this. ππππ Next time I come up here it's going to be in a bearish market lmfao.
Ok, so total cryptocurrency newbie here. I hold some ETH. as far as I'm reading, this is what I'm getting: - this has to do with a vulnerability in how ETH transactions are written, in that they are able to include recursive code - My ETH wallet is unaffected because afaik I'm not connected to the DAO in any way. - As a result of this vulnerability I can expect to see a drop in the value of ETH is this stuff right? Am I missing anything? I understand that the forking proposed is setting bad precedent for decentralization as well. I'm not planning on spending ETH any time soon, but if I did, is there a program I could use to read the transaction code to see if there is a recursive loop or other vulnerability?
My understanding is that it is not the ethereum virtual machine that is flawed but rather that there was a flaw specifically in the DAO code itself. Insom will be more in the loop on this, although she may be on five whiskeys and a beta blocker by now ;) The exploit of the DAO code allowed the attacker to leach eth out of the DAO. This is no different from an attacker exploiting code poorly written in C. The language is not broken but its use was. Eth's drop was a market response. If you don't own DAO tokens you have nothing at risk save the choppy price of eth as a result of the market reaction. The tricky part now is whether this exploit justifies a hard fork of the blockchain, and if it does what precedent that sets in the community. How small an event like this justifies another rollback? And if a rollback is justified, what does that say about the distributed nature of this blockchain and who really controls it?
This has to do with a vulnerability in how DAOhub implements its structure. The quantity of Ether you hold is unaffected. Obviously, market forces are stomping on ETH right now but if you have no ETH in DAOHub, your ETH is inviolate. Correct. And have seen, no doubt. Thing is, cryptocurrency is volatile as fuck so it's dropped back to where it was, what? 5 days ago? It'll be interesting to see what happens because Mt. Gox was a big black eye for BTC, as was Silk Road... but since the exploit can't be claimed until mid-July (because of how DAOHub is implemented) there's some time to figure out how to deal with it. It's entirely possible that ETH will come out the other side of this looking better than before because the crisis, so far, looks to be managed in a less opaque, more recoverable fashion. I got money in DAO. But then, most of my ETH was purchased at under a buck so it's all play money to me. The crazy gains are due to the crazy risks and you win some, you lose some.- this has to do with a vulnerability in how ETH transactions are written, in that they are able to include recursive code
- My ETH wallet is unaffected because afaik I'm not connected to the DAO in any way.
- As a result of this vulnerability I can expect to see a drop in the value of ETH
I'm not an expert by any means, so take this for what it's worth. I think we're in a similar boat. I have a few ether. I never touched the DAO. I still have all of my ether (I just checked). I don't think we're in any real danger... other than the value of our holdings decreased (for now).
Critical Update Re: TheDAO Vulnerability. They are not hardforking but softforking and considering a hard fork.