Drawing Lines in Sandy Grounds
“All things that we think of as specifiable or technically constrained, very quickly end up embedded in a larger social ecosystem which in…
Drawing Lines in Sandy Grounds
“All things that we think of as specifiable or technically constrained, very quickly end up embedded in a larger social ecosystem which in some sense defies the simplicity of the protocol.”
David Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of TCP/IP
I started this blog post over a year ago, with just a headline and a quote that I liked. At the time, I had a feeling of what I wanted to express but not much else to work with. So I let it sit in my medium archive until, inevitably, the quote would prove itself true.[1]
On Friday, June 19th 2016, a Smart Contract was hacked. It wasn’t just any Smart Contract: measured by the amount of capital the contract was responsible of, it was by far the most significant one running on the public Ethereum network. In fact, the contract controlled at its peak roughly 15% of Ethereum’s total supply of its base currency Ether.
Smart Contracts are computer programs (state machines) executed in a decentralized network of peers managing digital assets such as cryptocurrencies according to a given set of rules.
It was, rightfully, the most important Smart Contract running on the Ethereum network t
Footnotes
[1] There’s a lot more where that came from.
Exported from Medium on January 3, 2025.