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posted by takyon on Thursday November 09 2017, @02:54PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:30PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:30PM (#594630)

    nothing of Value was lost.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:37PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:37PM (#594641) Homepage
    But was something of positive marginal utility lost?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday November 09 2017, @05:52PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday November 09 2017, @05:52PM (#594726)

    Lots of kWh used to mine those coins, and lots of discounts on video cards which didn't happen