Abstract
Here, we want to highlight a historic moment leading to the creation of the first DAO, and how it eventually got hacked. Our discussion begins with a fresh perspective on decentralized organizations from Buterin, and leads into the story of Slock.it, the company at the heart of the DAO revolution. Then, we present some code that made The DAO dysfunctional: pieces of the smart contract relevant to the vulnerability, the conditions that allowed repetitive withdrawals from The DAO, and the exploit itself. We conclude the chapter by talking about the consequences of this hack: the debate about hard vs. soft forks, and the creation of Ethereum Classic.
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Notes
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To put this in perspective, 15 days into the DAO’s crowdsale, members of the MakerDAO subreddit were discussing proposals that would trigger an investment in MakerDao by the DAO.
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This could be the case because proposals required a quorum of 20 percent of votes to have weighed in on a proposal for the vote to be valid.
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Curators weren’t necessarily human gatekeepers. Gavin Wood “resigned” as a curator of The DAO to make a point that curation was merely a technical role and that the curator had no proactive control over The DAO.
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Rentrancy is a characteristic of software in which a routine can be interrupted in the middle of its execution, and then be intiated (reentered) from its beginning, while the remaining portion of the original instance of the routine remains queued for execution.
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© 2017 Vikram Dhillon, David Metcalf, and Max Hooper
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Dhillon, V., Metcalf, D., Hooper, M. (2017). The DAO Hacked. In: Blockchain Enabled Applications. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3081-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3081-7_6
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Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
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Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-3081-7
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