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> Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized t

> Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized that there was no way to reverse the thefts, yet many more wallets were vulnerable. Time was of the essence, so they saw only one available option: hack the remaining wallets before the attacker did. > By exploiting the same vulnerability, the white-hats hacked all of the remaining at-risk wallets and drained their accounts, effectively preventing the attacker from reaching any of the remaining $77,000,000. > To prevent the hacker from robbing any more banks, the white-hats wrote software to rob all of the remaining banks in the world. [...] One argument I keep hearing in favor of cryptocurrencies is that they are beyond the control of individual governments and their regulation through legislation and law enforcement. Next time, I'm going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of "hackers robbing banks" is "vigilantes robbing the remaining banks", something is very wrong with your system, and it is certainly not something for the general public.

AsyncAwait 9y ago
> Next time, I'm going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of "hackers robbing banks" is "vigilantes robbing the remaining banks", something is very wrong with your system I can see what you're saying, but I don't think that this is a problem with cryptocurrencies specifically, it's a problem with buggy software, yes, but it's something that is the case with every dangerous exploit being actively taken advantage of in the wild, Heartbleed would be an example that doesn't involve cryptocurrencies, but I give you that the Ether-based ecosystem seems to be a particularly buggy collection of software, probably because of too much ambition, (a Turing-complete VM), being written by people with too little experience and applied for very sensitive (monetary) transactions, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
- kahnpro 9y ago
  This is a problem that everybody seems to skip over with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are being sold as eliminating trust and allow us to rely on the cold certainty of mathematics. Only trust hasn't been eliminated from the system, it's just been shifted from a central bank to the authors of the software client you're using. To the majority of the miners in the network. The awful politics, lies, greed, corruption, are still here in all their glory.
  - Emilee999 9y ago
    Love my job, since I've been bringing in $82h… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online… •••••••••>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
  - lsmarigo 9y ago
    Much worse in fact, since the entities in power have no oversight, were not elected, and have no obligation to anything but increasing their own personal wealth.
    - novalis78 9y ago
      Not quite true. You elect with your money. Immediate. Instantly. And you withdraw your support with the one thing that hurts most: your money and move to a competing system. That's extremely liberating and powerful. Also: anybody can fork and create an alternative model whenever they prefer to do so.
      - beefield 9y ago
        Only in this particular case you do not have any money left because you made (probably unknowingly) a contract to give it away. (Or it was stolen, depending on your point of view, but anyway, there is no money left to vote with)
  - Pigo 9y ago
    >It’s important to understand that this exploit was not a vulnerability in Ethereum or in Parity itself. Rather, it was a vulnerability in the default smart contract code that the Parity client gives the user for deploying multi-signature wallets. Yeah, I don't see the difference here. So it was an aspect of Ethereum that had the vulnerability, how many more millions have to be stolen before the system is successfully QA'd? I'd never heard of Ethereum before, so now this is the only thing I've heard about it.
    - holtalanm 9y ago
return0 9y ago
> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains: who you trust. Governments have resolved the question long ago (by enforcing trust), cryptocurrencies are just now starting to face the same question. You are correct however that who you Trust remains the greatest issue behind creating a currency.
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The typical person's understanding of economics is similarly extremely limited. This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests. The growing control that government exerts over society, seen in everything from the emergence of a mass-surveillance system of unprecedented scope, to the number of regulations on the books, to the percentage of GDP made up of government spending, is not healthy, and needs a counter balance in privacy technology that empowers the individual and limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people. Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?
neuralzen 9y ago
You could say the same thing about home routers with that argument then, which are often under patched, and apparently require grey hats to act. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2988656/network-security/a-viral-vigilante-may-be-keeping-an-eye-on-your-home-router.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2988656/network-securit...
- discreteevent 9y ago
  You could but if my home router gets hacked it doesn't directly give the attacker access to all of my money.
duiker101 9y ago
I haven't had much time to follow the story or look into ether so sorry if this is a naive question but I keep seeing this "white hat hacker robbing the remaining wallets" and haven't see yet anyone mentioning what are they going to do with what they stole?
- MatthewWilkes 9y ago
  This article says they are in the process of returning the funds to the original owners.
- MatthewWilkes 9y ago
  This article says they are in the process of returning the funds to the original owners.
draw_down 9y ago
Right, people seemed a little too relieved that that happened. Sure it's better than "bad guys" getting the money, but will the white hats swoop in next time?
macspoofing 9y ago
Keep in mind that the biggest supporters of crypto-currencies tend to have a libertarian or anarchist bent. To them this is a feature.
andrepd 9y ago
Cash is not for the general public. Someone can mug you and take your banknotes, and the solution to that problem is an authority mugging those people and taking the money and giving it back. Not a sound argument.
- lathiat 9y ago
  That is so accurate
- neaden 9y ago
  There is a key difference here in that as you say the authorities are doing something. If we had random vigilantes going around mugging muggers that would indeed be a sign that we had a problem.
  - tetrep 9y ago
    Not quite that, but rather vigilantes mugging you when you're most vulnerable, and then returning the money later when they're confident you can safely hold onto it. I wonder if the vigilantes will return the money with interest...
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      "With interest" at least to me is a very greedy proposition. Those people just kept you from having zero ethereum. If anything, I'd personally give them reward money.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > the solution to that problem is an authority mugging those people The authority and the process by which they do this is agreed upon, or at least known, ex ante. That was not the case here. Trust isn't fungible.
- wwweston 9y ago
  Mugging scales poorly.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

> Next time, I'm going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of "hackers robbing banks" is "vigilantes robbing the remaining banks", something is very wrong with your system I can see what you're saying, but I don't think that this is a problem with cryptocurrencies specifically, it's a problem with buggy software, yes, but it's something that is the case with every dangerous exploit being actively taken advantage of in the wild, Heartbleed would be an example that doesn't involve cryptocurrencies, but I give you that the Ether-based ecosystem seems to be a particularly buggy collection of software, probably because of too much ambition, (a Turing-complete VM), being written by people with too little experience and applied for very sensitive (monetary) transactions, which seems like a recipe for disaster.

kahnpro 9y ago
This is a problem that everybody seems to skip over with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are being sold as eliminating trust and allow us to rely on the cold certainty of mathematics. Only trust hasn't been eliminated from the system, it's just been shifted from a central bank to the authors of the software client you're using. To the majority of the miners in the network. The awful politics, lies, greed, corruption, are still here in all their glory.
- Emilee999 9y ago
  Love my job, since I've been bringing in $82h… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online… •••••••••>>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
- lsmarigo 9y ago
  Much worse in fact, since the entities in power have no oversight, were not elected, and have no obligation to anything but increasing their own personal wealth.
  - novalis78 9y ago
    Not quite true. You elect with your money. Immediate. Instantly. And you withdraw your support with the one thing that hurts most: your money and move to a competing system. That's extremely liberating and powerful. Also: anybody can fork and create an alternative model whenever they prefer to do so.
    - beefield 9y ago
      Only in this particular case you do not have any money left because you made (probably unknowingly) a contract to give it away. (Or it was stolen, depending on your point of view, but anyway, there is no money left to vote with)
- Pigo 9y ago
  >It’s important to understand that this exploit was not a vulnerability in Ethereum or in Parity itself. Rather, it was a vulnerability in the default smart contract code that the Parity client gives the user for deploying multi-signature wallets. Yeah, I don't see the difference here. So it was an aspect of Ethereum that had the vulnerability, how many more millions have to be stolen before the system is successfully QA'd? I'd never heard of Ethereum before, so now this is the only thing I've heard about it.
  - holtalanm 9y ago

return0 9y ago

> something is very wrong with your system To be clear, neither of the two situations is "more moral" than the other. In the end however, the question remains: who you trust. Governments have resolved the question long ago (by enforcing trust), cryptocurrencies are just now starting to face the same question. You are correct however that who you Trust remains the greatest issue behind creating a currency.

dullgiulio 9y ago
Look, no. One hundred times, no. Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions. Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies. Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion. I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment: Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The typical person's understanding of economics is similarly extremely limited. This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests. The growing control that government exerts over society, seen in everything from the emergence of a mass-surveillance system of unprecedented scope, to the number of regulations on the books, to the percentage of GDP made up of government spending, is not healthy, and needs a counter balance in privacy technology that empowers the individual and limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc. People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people. Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?

neuralzen 9y ago

You could say the same thing about home routers with that argument then, which are often under patched, and apparently require grey hats to act. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2988656/network-security/a-viral-vigilante-may-be-keeping-an-eye-on-your-home-router.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2988656/network-securit...

discreteevent 9y ago
You could but if my home router gets hacked it doesn't directly give the attacker access to all of my money.

duiker101 9y ago

I haven't had much time to follow the story or look into ether so sorry if this is a naive question but I keep seeing this "white hat hacker robbing the remaining wallets" and haven't see yet anyone mentioning what are they going to do with what they stole?

MatthewWilkes 9y ago
This article says they are in the process of returning the funds to the original owners.
MatthewWilkes 9y ago
This article says they are in the process of returning the funds to the original owners.

draw_down 9y ago

Right, people seemed a little too relieved that that happened. Sure it's better than "bad guys" getting the money, but will the white hats swoop in next time?

macspoofing 9y ago

Keep in mind that the biggest supporters of crypto-currencies tend to have a libertarian or anarchist bent. To them this is a feature.

andrepd 9y ago

Cash is not for the general public. Someone can mug you and take your banknotes, and the solution to that problem is an authority mugging those people and taking the money and giving it back. Not a sound argument.

lathiat 9y ago
That is so accurate
neaden 9y ago
There is a key difference here in that as you say the authorities are doing something. If we had random vigilantes going around mugging muggers that would indeed be a sign that we had a problem.
- tetrep 9y ago
  Not quite that, but rather vigilantes mugging you when you're most vulnerable, and then returning the money later when they're confident you can safely hold onto it. I wonder if the vigilantes will return the money with interest...
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    "With interest" at least to me is a very greedy proposition. Those people just kept you from having zero ethereum. If anything, I'd personally give them reward money.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> the solution to that problem is an authority mugging those people The authority and the process by which they do this is agreed upon, or at least known, ex ante. That was not the case here. Trust isn't fungible.
wwweston 9y ago
Mugging scales poorly.