A hacker stole $31M of Ether – how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum
&gt; <i>Having sounded the alarm bells, a group of benevolent white-hat hackers from the Ethereum community rapidly organized. They analyzed the attack and realized that there was no way to reverse the thefts, yet many more wallets were vulnerable. Time was of the essence, so they saw only one available option: hack the remaining wallets before the attacker did.</i><p>&gt; <i>By exploiting the same vulnerability, the white-hats hacked all of the remaining at-risk wallets and drained their accounts, effectively preventing the attacker from reaching any of the remaining $77,000,000.</i><p>&gt; <i>To prevent the hacker from robbing any more banks, the white-hats wrote software to rob all of the remaining banks in the world. [...]</i><p>One argument I keep hearing in favor of cryptocurrencies is that they are beyond the control of individual governments and their regulation through legislation and law enforcement.<p>Next time, I&#x27;m going to use this case as a counterexample, because when the solution to the problem of &quot;hackers robbing banks&quot; is &quot;vigilantes robbing the remaining banks&quot;, something is <i>very</i> wrong with your system, and it is certainly <i>not</i> something for the general public.