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from the you've-never-seen-1000-tonnes-of-gold-instantly-evaporate dept.
User mistakenly takes control of hundreds of wallets containing cryptocurrency Ether, destroying them in a panic while trying to give them back
Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn't deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident. The lost money was in the form of Ether, the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum distributed app platform, and was kept in digital multi-signature wallets built by a developer called Parity. These wallets require more than one user to enter their key before funds can be transferred.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/cryptocurrency-300m-dollars-stolen-bug-ether
This is less than 1% of the entirety of the total value of Ethereum (as perceived by speculators). One must remember that the national debts of issuers of some fiat currencies could effectively destroy 100% of those currencies, so is it appropriate for dollar users (which indirectly is all of us) to sneer at cryptocurrency users for this apparent weakness which will, presumably, be fixed and never happen again?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Thursday November 09 2017, @02:58PM (7 children)
Was that green-site style editorializing paragraph at the bottom necessary? Don't pretend that "since national currencies are fiat, they are no better than cryptocurrencies where a moron can wipe them out with a few keystrokes."
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:11PM (3 children)
Green site editorializing would be anti-crypto. Their owner, BizX, runs a digital currency which is directly threatened by decentralized digital currency. They print half a dozen anti-crypto articles a day. This one is at the top of their feed.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/09/1317254/the-bitcoin-bubble [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:33PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:41PM
The editorializing leads me to believe you're more anti-fiat than pro-crypto, but you're still attracted to crypto as a result. If so, I fall into the same boat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @05:18PM
Partial corroboration of the parent post can be found at https://www.sdbj.com/news/2016/jan/28/slashdot-media-acquired-bizx-undisclosed-price/ [sdbj.com] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BizX [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
Some people might think that 300M is a lot of Etherium, which it is to those who've lost it, but it isn't more than a tiny portion of the whole. Some people might not know that most fiat currency is created in equal quantities as debt of that currency (which then grows). Which bit of the paragraph do you consider to be misleading? Should I also have added a sentence that said "Of course, don't believe for one minute that Etherium, and other crypto-currencies are not in fact fiat currency themselves", for balance? ( https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/not-so-novel )
Strangely - or not so strangely, as you don't address the economics of the story - you didn't seem to note the largest bit of bias I included in the submission. Happy head-scratching...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 10 2017, @03:55PM
I would argue that ether is not a fiat currency. The reason is, as far as I understand, ether is the only way to make ethereum Turing machine run. To run this computer one needs electricity and ether (and one can be conveniently converted to another so just ether). From this point of view ether is just your old plain boring commodity as any real money is supposed to be. Money, by definition, is a commodity used for exchange. Ether is (real, classical, nonfiat, same as gold) money, dollar or even bitcoin is not.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:40PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves