A hacker has stolen more than $50 million of digital money from an experimental virtual currency project, known as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
It had been the most successful crowdfunding venture ever. According to the reports, it took one-third of the venture's money but also the hopes and dreams of thousands of participants who wanted to prove the safety and security of digital currency.
After all, this it is likely an end of the project, which had raised $160 million in the form of Ether, an alternative to the digital currency Bitcoin.
However, the computer scientists involved in the project are aiming to tweak the code that underpins Ether in a way that will recover the money.
"This is one of the nightmare scenarios everyone was worried about: someone exploited a weakness in the code of the DAO to empty out a large sum," Emin Gün Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell who co-wrote a paper pointing out problems with the project, said.
This incident has reminded everyone of how the code can be just as vulnerable to human greed and mistakes as paper bills.
The project was funded by investors from around the world using Ether, which has become popular over the last year. But in May, computer scientists pointed out several vulnerabilities in its codes.
"The DAO is being attacked," Griff Green, a community organiser with the company that wrote the project's software, Slock.it, wrote on a chat channel for the project. "This is not a drill."
The money that the hacker moved appeared to be frozen on Friday as a result of a safeguard previously built into the code. Coders working on the Ethereum network, which hosts Ether, were debating on whether to make a one-time change to the code to recover the frozen money.
"The strength of blockchain tech is that it is a ledger, a statement of truth," Bruce Fenton, a board member with the Bitcoin Foundation, wrote on Friday. "That ledger is only as good as its resistance to censorship, change, demands or attack."
It had been the most successful crowdfunding venture ever. According to the reports, it took one-third of the venture's money but also the hopes and dreams of thousands of participants who wanted to prove the safety and security of digital currency.
After all, this it is likely an end of the project, which had raised $160 million in the form of Ether, an alternative to the digital currency Bitcoin.
However, the computer scientists involved in the project are aiming to tweak the code that underpins Ether in a way that will recover the money.
"This is one of the nightmare scenarios everyone was worried about: someone exploited a weakness in the code of the DAO to empty out a large sum," Emin Gün Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell who co-wrote a paper pointing out problems with the project, said.
This incident has reminded everyone of how the code can be just as vulnerable to human greed and mistakes as paper bills.
The project was funded by investors from around the world using Ether, which has become popular over the last year. But in May, computer scientists pointed out several vulnerabilities in its codes.
"The DAO is being attacked," Griff Green, a community organiser with the company that wrote the project's software, Slock.it, wrote on a chat channel for the project. "This is not a drill."
The money that the hacker moved appeared to be frozen on Friday as a result of a safeguard previously built into the code. Coders working on the Ethereum network, which hosts Ether, were debating on whether to make a one-time change to the code to recover the frozen money.
"The strength of blockchain tech is that it is a ledger, a statement of truth," Bruce Fenton, a board member with the Bitcoin Foundation, wrote on Friday. "That ledger is only as good as its resistance to censorship, change, demands or attack."