I’ve mentioned The Dao before. Called it a kind of digital distributed democratic dragons den, and noted that 10% of all Etherum, a hundred million dollars, was now controlled by a software contract.

And an exploit was found in that software contract, practically as soon as transactions were allowed, and money started draining from it into a hacker’s account.

Where it will be frozen for a couple of weeks at least.

Meanwhile those who wrote and continue to update the software that runs Etherum, the currency which the DAO was written on, have posted patches to make that freeze longer, and maybe return all the money back to the original investors.

Whether the giant loose-knit collection of server-maintainers who are running that code to keep the currency running will accept that patch and allow the effective roll-back is still unknown. The tokens that represent an interest in the DAO are trading for about .6 of their original value, so presumably that market thinks there’s only about a 60% chance that the patches will be accepted by the miners.

So that’s how it stands. Either the miners decide the software contract is the arbitrator of what’s allowed and the hacker gets to keep 10% of all the Eth, or they decide to roll it back and it turns out that software-defined money-contracts aren’t quite as immutable as was assumed.

Can’t be good for Eth either way I don’t think.

I’m re-invested in Bitcoin, despite the approaching halving, at least for now. Hopefully can pick up some Eth at a tenth the price in a few weeks when it’s all blown over.

There’s a letter claiming to be from the Hacker asserting his right to the cash too.

The whole thing is hilarious, certainly.