Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 147

Ethereum has never been hacked. The hard fork in 2016 due to the DAO hack mentioned in the sidebar, “With great power comes … great power,” was not an actual hack of the system, but confusingly it is often referred to as a hack. Ethereum worked perfectly. The problem was it was too perfect. It became necessary to restart the system when a large amount of money and a majority of its users were threatened.

The only way to correct an action on a blockchain like Ethereum is to do a hard fork, which allows for a fundamental change to the protocol. (You can read more about forking in the context of cryptocurrency mining in Book 6, Chapter 8.) A hard fork makes previously valid blocks and transactions invalid. Ethereum did this to protect the funds that were being pulled out of the first DAO by a user. The DAO hack was, conceptually, one of the largest bug bounties ever.

That said, many scams and hacking attempts occur in the cryptocurrency space. Most of these attacks target centralized exchanges and applications. Many hackers want to steal cryptocurrency. It has real value and isn’t protected in the same ways that regular money is protected by governments. The anonymous nature of cryptocurrency also makes it appealing to crooks. Catching and prosecuting these individuals is difficult. However, the cryptocurrency community is fighting back and creating new measures to protect themselves.

Hacking one place is significantly easier and cheaper than trying to overcome a decentralized network. When you read about hacking in the blockchain world, it’s likely just a website or a cryptocurrency wallet that has been hacked, not the whole network.