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comment by coffeesp00ns
coffeesp00ns  ·  3077 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: TheDAO is being attacked, Ether Worth $53 Million Routed, Value Drops By 30%

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?





Complexity  ·  3076 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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?

kleinbl00  ·  3076 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    - this has to do with a vulnerability in how ETH transactions are written, in that they are able to include recursive code

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.

    - My ETH wallet is unaffected because afaik I'm not connected to the DAO in any way.

Correct.

    - As a result of this vulnerability I can expect to see a drop in the value of ETH

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.

steve  ·  3076 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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).