Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All by Matthew Leising

Part I
It is the business
of the future
to be dangerous.
– A.N. Whitehead

Zero
For most of the world the attack began on a Friday in June 2016. The
planning and testing and tinkering had been in the works for weeks.
Everything would have to be just right or it would fail. What was about to
unfold was one of the most elegant, complicated, and weirdest thefts in
history.
The clock read 3:34 in Coordinated Universal Time. That's the same as
Greenwich mean time, for those who remember. The wee hours in Europe,
still Thursday in New York City, and half past 11 in the morning in Beijing.
A pair of eyes checked the screen again; a finger hovered over a mouse
button. This was a moving machine with many parts: all interacting, all in
code, all in cyberspace. It's baffling and complex, and some of the best
computer scientists in the world struggle to put into plain English what
happened. Robots attacking robots on the web. That's how one person put it
to me, and I've never forgotten it. In this case the reward the robots battled
over was immense – a quarter of a billion dollars.
None of this would have been happening if not for a new computer science
discipline known as blockchain. While certainly a buzzword, blockchain is
simply a new way of implementing databases. Instead of one company or
government controlling access to data, the ledger is shared and spread
among computer hard drives all over the world. It is what made Bitcoin
possible.
Bitcoin, of course, ushered in the era of cryptocurrencies, a time where a
new type of money came to exist, one that isn't backed by a government or
bank but instead derived from whether people believe it's useful. Bitcoin
was the pioneer, but by mid-June 2016, the second-most valuable
cryptocurrency after Bitcoin was called ether. Ether is the fuel that allows
the Ethereum blockchain to work.
The hacker looked at the contract he'd written one last time, then clicked his
mouse. His target: a computer program that held $250 million worth of
ether. What it also held was an enormous bug in its code that the hacker
believed would let him walk right in and steal it all.

Out of the Ether: The Amazing Story of Ethereum and the $55 Million Heist that Almost Destroyed It All by Matthew Leising