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Comment by popey456963 | Hacker News Reader

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popey456963

This is how I understand the situation:

- 2,436,828 Ethereum has been routed to the address starting "0x304a554a310c7e546" [0]

- This is worth roughly $46,000,000.

- This has happened because there is some weakness in the Ethereum security

- The conversion between Ethereum and USD is dropping significantly, now down to 16. [1]

Due to this security threat, the developer is telling people to try to effectively DDOS the service in order to stop all transactions. Also, people are being told to split, but I can't see why.

Copy of page at 9:45: - http://puu.sh/pvOqy/929f40bddb.png

[0] https://etherchain.org/account/0x304a554a310c7e546dfe434669c...

[1] http://puu.sh/pvOVw/5443a70ced.png

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Is this a weakness on Ethereum or the DAO?

I can't read the page but I was under the impression that recently someone found a problem with the DAO and then they put all DAO activity on hold until they could fix it. Perhaps someone is exploiting that problem or another one they found.

The fact that many scripts written suffers similar vulnerabilities unless extensive (and, seemingly failure prone) mitigations are applied, suggests that the root cause is a known design flaw in the ethereum smart contract architecture.

Doubly so when the latest reviewers of this systems and custodians of the DAO include the system's creators.

When building systems that provide irreversible transaction processing, safe only under perfect use is not sufficient.

Ethereum is a general purpose system: it has sharp edges. We can use the same reasoning to condemn C/++'s pointers (people trip over themselves all the time, even serious audits occasionally miss big bugs), but we still survive with C code running much of our lives. If there's issues with implementing in ethereum code directly, there are many ways of addressing it and only some of them view the issue here as a 'flaw' rather than a 'hard to use feature'.

Ethereum just has to work. It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be easy. Being pretty will help it work, but there's enough money on the table, and TheDAO demonstrates this, that it will advance on alternative institutions if it works.

TheDAO may never be 'safe' or 'perfect'. It only has to be safe right now, from the threats that real, interested parties are capable of implementing. This list of threats is quite large at 250,000,000$, and will be larger when/if TheDAO/its descendants hit 250,000,000,000$+.

TheDAO. It's a flaw in the way they wrote the contract.

0xbb9bc244d is the The DAO account.

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