Ether investors lose close to $80 million in monster heist

By Jon Martindale June 17, 2016

theft of cryptocurrency ether ethereum2

The value of the digital currency Ether has crashed by more than a quarter at the time of writing, following a heist which saw as much as 10 percent of the entire world total of the cryptocurrency spirited away. The theft even had a knock-on effect with Bitcoin, taking that more famous cryptocurrency down a few percent points — though Bitcoin may have already begun to recover.

For the uninitiated, Ether is a digital currency much like Bitcoin, which utilizes programmable transaction functionality to make it more user-friendly and secure. At least in theory. Unfortunately for investors in the digital asset, the theft of almost $80 million dollars from a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) has left many wondering about the future of Ether and the Etherium platform.

Related Videos

The DAO could arguably be called the biggest crowd-funding project in history, having generated $150 million from thousands of investors. The idea was to use the fund to make investments based on the vote of the collective, ditching the classic fund manager middleman.

While that aspect of the DAO may have worked as intended, the fact that someone has stolen Ether currency valued at $79.6 million (as per QZ) of Ether has shaken a lot of people’s confidence in the platform. At the very least, it seems unlikely that such a fund will be created in the future.

Of course anyone who has followed Bitcoin’s history will know that there is always a risk involved in putting digital currencies in singular wallets. Part of the reason so many of the big dark-net drug marketplaces folded is because owners went rogue with the wallets that stored escrow funds between buyers and sellers.

Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox also famously went belly up after several hundred million dollars in Bitcoins vanished from its coffers.

Moving forward, it seems unlikely that the DAO will survive in its current guise. The developers of Ethereum have been conducting damage control, pointing out that this was a fault with the DAO itself and not with Ethereum, which goes into more detail about how the theft took place on its official blog.

There is some suggestion that if “Ether miners” work together, they could effectively “roll back” the Ethereum blockchain to some point before the hack, thereby defeating the entire purpose of the theft. However there is concern that such a course of action would mark the start of groups of individuals controlling a currency whose value was intended to remain beyond the whims of individuals.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Computing

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti is destroying AMD, even though it shouldn’t

The RTX 4070 Ti graphics card on a pink background.

Despite the fact that the RTX 4070 Ti has been reviewed poorly, Nvidia's latest GPU seems to be doing well in terms of sales numbers -- at least as far as the European market is concerned.

According to newly published sales figures, Nvidia managed to sell a huge quantity of RTX 4070 Ti GPUs. It effortlessly defeated its biggest rival, AMD, even though the AMD RX 7900 XT is the better value. Regardless of how it's reviewed, the RTX 4070 Ti seems to be the king of all the new graphics cards that have out in 2023 so far.

Computing

Hackers stole $1.5 million using credit card data bought on the dark web

A credit card is passed from one person to another.

In what sounds like a movie script, over $1 million was stolen by a group that made use of thousands of credit cards posted for sale on the dark web. Some of the details of this complex cybercrime operation have come to light following an indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the United States v. Trevor Osagie, the defendant has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit credit card fraud from 2015 to 2018. Osagie worked with a network of thieves and managed to rack up over $1.5 million in damages.

Cars

Mercedes EV charging hubs are coming to North America by the end of the decade

What a future Mercedes-Benz EV charging hub might look like.

You can't have more electric cars without more charging stations, so Mercedes-Benz is building a global charging network covering North America, China, Europe, and other major markets to support its goal of going all-electric by the end of the decade where market conditions allow.

Announced at CES 2023, the network should be in place by the end of the decade in line with Mercedes' electrification goal. It's a bold move by the automaker, which has mostly relied on third-party charging networks until now.