The DAO hack: the day Ethereum rewrote its own history
June 17, 2016. The DAO, a crowdfunded investment fund on Ethereum, had a bug in its "split" function. An attacker used it to withdraw again and again inside one transaction and drained about 3.6M $ETH, around $50M at the time.
The stolen ETH sat locked in a child DAO for about 27 days while the community argued: do nothing ("code is law"), blacklist the attacker, or hard fork.
On July 20, 2016, at block 1,920,000, Ethereum hard forked and moved the funds to a recovery contract so DAO holders got their ETH back. About 85% of miners followed, per the Ethereum Foundation.
The rest kept mining the original chain. That became Ethereum Classic, $ETC, where the hacker still held the coins.
Lesson: even a "decentralized" chain runs on social consensus, and a smart contract is only as safe as its code. With the Binance hack still fresh, remember that every rescue has a cost.
#CryptoHistory #Ethereum #DAOHack
NFA
June 17, 2016. The DAO, a crowdfunded investment fund on Ethereum, had a bug in its "split" function. An attacker used it to withdraw again and again inside one transaction and drained about 3.6M $ETH, around $50M at the time.
The stolen ETH sat locked in a child DAO for about 27 days while the community argued: do nothing ("code is law"), blacklist the attacker, or hard fork.
On July 20, 2016, at block 1,920,000, Ethereum hard forked and moved the funds to a recovery contract so DAO holders got their ETH back. About 85% of miners followed, per the Ethereum Foundation.
The rest kept mining the original chain. That became Ethereum Classic, $ETC, where the hacker still held the coins.
Lesson: even a "decentralized" chain runs on social consensus, and a smart contract is only as safe as its code. With the Binance hack still fresh, remember that every rescue has a cost.
#CryptoHistory #Ethereum #DAOHack
NFA
