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Mastering Blockchain

You're reading from   Mastering Blockchain A deep dive into distributed ledgers, consensus protocols, smart contracts, DApps, cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, and more

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781839213199
Length 816 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
Languages
Concepts
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Author (1):
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Imran Bashir Imran Bashir
Author Profile Icon Imran Bashir
Imran Bashir
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Toc

Table of Contents (24) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Blockchain 101 2. Decentralization FREE CHAPTER 3. Symmetric Cryptography 4. Public Key Cryptography 5. Consensus Algorithms 6. Introducing Bitcoin 7. The Bitcoin Network and Payments 8. Bitcoin Clients and APIs 9. Alternative Coins 10. Smart Contracts 11. Ethereum 101 12. Further Ethereum 13. Ethereum Development Environment 14. Development Tools and Frameworks 15. Introducing Web3 16. Serenity 17. Hyperledger 18. Tokenization 19. Blockchain – Outside of Currencies 20. Enterprise Blockchain 21. Scalability and Other Challenges 22. Current Landscape and What's Next 23. Index

The DAO

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), started in April 2016, was a smart contract written to provide a platform for investment. Due to a bug, called the reentrancy bug, in the code, it was hacked in June 2016. An equivalent of approximately 3.6 million ether (roughly 50 million US dollars) was siphoned out of the DAO into another account.

Even though the term hacked is used here, it was not really hacked. The smart contract did what it was asked to do but due to the vulnerabilities in the smart contracts, the attacker was able to exploit it. It can be seen as an unintentional behavior (a bug) that programmers of the DAO did not foresee. This incident resulted in a hard fork on the Ethereum blockchain, which was introduced to recover from the attack.

The DAO attack exploited a vulnerability (reentrancy bug) in the DAO code where it was possible to withdraw tokens from the DAO smart contract repeatedly before giving the DAO contract a chance to update...

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