The $11 Billion Mistake That Vitalik Buterin Made With Ethereum
They found who hacked the DAO
We all know that hindsight is 20/20. And when it comes to investing, we can often find ourselves asking “what was I thinking?” However, when it comes to the $11 billion mistake on Ethereum, we have to ask… what were *they,* meaning the developers, thinking?
Before last month Ethereum was responsible for a great mystery: who committed the largest digital heist of Ether ever by hacking The DAO (Ethereum’s №1 application in 2016).
Now that mystery has been solved thanks to journalist Laura Shin.
Let’s get into it.
What is The DAO?
Ethereum works like the internet; it enables other developers to build decentralized applications on top of it and in 2016, one such application was created —“ the DAO.”
The DAO was like an investor-driven venture capital fund. Anyone who invested funds in it could vote where they wanted those dollars spent.
However, because Ethereum is an open-source network anyone can see the code used to build these decentralized applications (dApps). This means if you made a mistake in the code, a hacker can exploit it and ruin your program, or worse, steal tons of money…
