Out of the ether – the amazing story of ethereum and the $55 million heist that almost destroyed it all Ebook

Truth is stranger than fiction, in the world of cryptocurrencies. Not so long ago, in June 2016, there was a bug in line 666 of Ethereum’s code which enabled $55 million to be stolen in a nanosecond. The remaining $100 million barely escaped the same fate. There’s no FDIC for digital currency. This was a nightmare scenario for the entire virtual money and commerce model.  Vitalik Buterin, the 20-year-old creator of the program, desperately implemented a highly controversial fix that may ultimately prove be much more problematic worse than the crime in the eyes of many: he reversed time to a point before the theft happened, thereby nullifying the $55 million theft while reinstating all valid transactions. This was an extremely controversial move, since it sent a clear message that all transactions could be wiped out after the fact, which would create a chaotic situation. All stakeholders in the multibillion-dollar digital currency economy are struggling to explain and understand the future of money in the wake of the Ethereum crisis and the way its founder unilaterally chose to cure it.This remarkable event marked the beginning of one of the largest digital heists in history, and as it wore on that morning it gained viewers from Rio de Janeiro to New York to Tokyo. You could have watched it too if you knew how to point your computer browser to the right place. That’s because it played out on the blockchain, a breakthrough in computer science that enabled Bitcoin to go from a mere idea in 2008 to a $121 billion unstoppable digital currency today. What a coder named Jentztsch had done was build an investment fund that relied on blockchain software to allow anyone in the world to invest their money with him. What he hadn’t meant to do was insert a bug in his code, a mistake on line 666 to be exact, that provided a backdoor for the thief to enter and drain the fund of money. About $55 million would be stolen before the morning was over, yet that was only the beginning.