Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies онлайн

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Not everyone was in agreement with this decision. The community continues to use Ethereum Classic. The tokens for Ethereum Classic are still traded but have lost significant market value. The new Ethereum token still hasn’t regained its old high from before the hack.

The decision to fork rocked the blockchain world. It was the first time a majority blockchain project had hard-forked to make whole an investor. It called into question many of the principles that make blockchain technology so attractive in the first place.

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, ssss1.) 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.