Business News

NEW YORK, (APP/AFP): Hackers have diverted more
than $50 million in digital currency from an experimental fund
meant to demonstrate that such money is safe for use, according
to the New York Times reported.
The sum was stolen from a project called the Decentralized
Autonomous Organization (DAO), which had collected the money in
Ether, a form of currency similar to Bitcoin.
The hacking, which siphoned off a third of the project’s
digital money, is likely to doom the investor-funded project,
the Times reported Friday.
Blockchain, the technology that drives cryptocurrency such
as Ether, has recently been gaining traction in the world of
finance, where it could one day prove potentially useful.
In recent months, however, computer scientists had
indicated that vulnerabilities existed in the project’s code,
the Times reported.
Programmers Friday were debating whether to simply change
the code so that the money could be recuperated, or whether such
meddling broke with the project’s basic tenets.
“I recognize that there are very heavy arguments on both
sides, and that either direction would have seen very heavy
opposition,” Vitalik Buterin, the founder and lead programmer
on the Ethereum project, which hosts Ether, said on Reddit.
The hack sent the price of Ether plunging Friday.
Similarly, Bitcoin took a hard hit after the Tokyo-based
Mt Gox trading exchange declared bankruptcy early in 2014 due
to a fortune in digital currency vanishing or being stolen.