Software Engineering Daily

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was a digital form of venture capital. It was an ambitious idea–to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing corporations on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Few people in the crypto community were opposed to this premise–but the timeline was short, the code requirements were tremendous, and in retrospect, a vulnerability was inevitable.

The DAO launched in May 2016, setting the record for the largest crowdfunding event in history. The following month, the DAO was hacked, millions of dollars of Ether were stolen, and the reverberations of the event were a referendum on how the Ethereum community governs itself.

Matt Leising is a reporter for Bloomberg who has chronicled the DAO in his article The Ether Thief. He continues to follow cryptocurrencies closely, as the Internet of money fractals increasingly into the public consciousness.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about cryptocurrencies and their implications. You can check out our back catalog by downloading the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS, where you can listen to all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

Errata: Coinbase now supports Bitcoin Cash. 

To build the kinds of things developers want to build today, they need better tools.  That’s why Amazon Web Services built Amazon Aurora. A relational database engine that’s compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and provides up to five times the performance of standard MySQL—on the same hardware, at a tenth of the cost. Amazon Aurora from AWS can scale up to millions of transactions per minute. Automatically grow your storage up to 64 terabytes. And replicates data to three different Availability Zones. And you don’t have to manage a thing. There are no upfront charges, no commitments—you only pay for what you use. Check it out, at aurora.aws.

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