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The developers behind Ethereum are hacking the hacker who hacked it – Quartz

Hacking is a one-way street.

The core developers behind Ethereum, which supports a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency, launched an attack on an anonymous hacker who had stolen at least $ 89 million through its network.

Ethereum Lead Designer Alex Van Der Sande announced the counterattack on Twitter today. Within four hours, the core developers were able to get back over 7 million of their ether currency, or $ 89 million, depending on the wallet address where the funds are stored.

The Ethereum developers are trying to win back money invested in the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), which raised $ 150 million in the largest crowdfunding project in history. The anonymous hacker posted an open letter saying he had merely uncovered a loophole in Ethereum’s smart contract system and the funds were “legally claimed”. How much the hacker stole is still unclear.

The hack shattered trust in Ethereum, which has piqued the interest of companies like IBM and Microsoft. There are, in theory, other ways to get the funds, but they could also have violated the community’s trust in the network, as Quartz’s Joon Wong Ian wrote:

Stephan Tual, co-founder of a startup called Slock.it that helped found the DAO, says there is a way to fix the problem and make the Ethereum economy resilient. The Ethereum miners, who decide which transactions form the permanent record of the cryptocurrency, can work together to “roll back” by rewinding the Ethereum blockchain to a certain point before the hack. The transactions for the stolen funds would effectively be voided and erased from the records. “It shows that the community can work together for the common good,” says Tual.

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Bitcoin miners did at least one rollback in 2010 to fix a technical bug. But Bitcoin was then traded for pennies, a far cry from the $ 11.5 billion worth of Bitcoins in circulation today. Ether at current prices is already worth some serious money. All of the ether in circulation today is estimated at around $ 1.3 billion at current prices.

Another question is whether a rollback will dangerously undermine a cryptocurrency that is designed to be decentralized and beyond the control of a single party or group. Tual also has an argument against it. “You have to compare that to a central server in a bank, on which you can simply change numbers without anyone noticing,” he says. “In this case it’s completely different. When all the miners get together and [do a rollback], it’s a community action. And it’s transparent, completely transparent. “

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