Gaming the DAO: Emin Gün Sirer’s Cornell Talk
The other night a few Blockstack community members and myself attended the IC3 NYC Blockchain Meetup at Cornell Tech where Professor Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University Computer Science, and co-Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3) outlined and highlighted “Gaming The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).”
With the previous days events with the DAO being “hacked” or attacked due to a flaw in the architecture of the DAO code, Prof. Gün Sirer began to receive heat from the founders of the DAO, claiming he was fully aware of the exploit and had not raised the issue to anyone.
After a heated Twitter debate, he announced that he would be presenting the exploit and attacks at Cornell University in NYC.
The following is a short recap of some of the tweets and posts from the talk.
Soon after the intros Gün Sirer began his talk by taking a poll of the attendees which ended up being a varied crowd of hackers, journalists, professors, investors and enthusiasts.
Gün Sirer then polled the audience and asked who in the room knew how the DAO worked. Followed by an in depth introduction to the DAO and how it was hacked.
There were Ooo’s and Aww’s from the audience as Gün Sirer rattled off a few choice quotes on how the DAO should never have been released and marketed so hard before strong testing.
As the talk progressed some in the audience pointed out that the DAO was up some 30%
Professor Gün Sirer finished the talk by excitedly explaining that this was a good exercise for Smart Contracts as it allowed for some serious researchers to contribute suggestions to solving the black hackers attacks.
And lastly for those asking for more meat on the talk..
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