
Ask HN: The DAO hack – Where does the real money go? - winteriscoming
I am a complete newbie when it comes to crypto currency and the current DAO hack is something that I haven&#x27;t yet fully understood. From what I have read so far, someone hacked TheDAO which is a crypto currency based program and made away with some amounts of &quot;ether&quot; which then translate to X amounts of real money ($$).<p>How does the culprit encash that amount or rather where does it really end up? In some (real money) account(s)? Or does it stay as crypto currency which can then be used to buy stuff (online)? And there&#x27;s no way to track how a particular account&#x2F;address ended up with that much worth of currency?
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cprecioso
This was answered in the comments of the link sent previously, but basically:
it's gone to a public blockchain address, of which everyone knows the public
key but only its owner knows the private one. Also, the blockchain is
pseudonymous, so nobody knows who the owner of the address is.

Therefore, everyone knows where the ether are, but only its owner can touch
it. He can use them as if they were legitimately obtained (they are, depending
on perspective) and go to an exchange to buy dollars (or euros or whatever),
or exchange them with other addresses for goods and services.

Anyone will be able to audit these movements of money (at least the ones that
stay inside the ether blockchain), although there exist some cryptocurrency
laundering schemes.

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winteriscoming
Thank you.

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max_
Here is what exactly happened
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4os7l5/the_big_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4os7l5/the_big_thedao_heist_faq/)

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winteriscoming
I don't claim to be the smartest of software developers, but I have been
around in software development for more than a decade and I have been able to
grasp most of the technical articles that I read out of curiosity. But I have
to admit, the past few days I have read a bunch of articles around this,
including this one, which try to make it simpler to understand, but I still
don't have a grasp of the basic concepts around this :) Makes me wonder, are
there enough people out there, who really know how this works and how to
develop for such applications.

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max_
I hope this podcast helps...[https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-
bitcoin-297-...](https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-
bitcoin-297-the-death-of-thedao-part-one)

please let me know if it does/doesn't

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thrill
I don't believe any gold was involved.

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vorotato
lol if you think that gold has any real value

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hanniabu
If you can sell it,then it has value

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wallace_f
To be pedantic, economists use the word value in a specific way. It is how
much you can gain or benefit from something.

Price is what you can sell something for.

So gold has both value (you can use it as a commodity), and it has a price
(you can sell it in exchange for currency).

Worth is another one: it's a mostly subjective, philosophical judgement.

So technically, I could sell something that has no value; and something which
has no agreed upon price can have value. Everyone can then disagree about what
that something is worth.

