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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: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @04:18PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @04:18PM (#594676)

    The Big Short is government propaganda that places all the blame of the subprime mortgage crisis on Wall Street and completely glosses over the perverse incentives the US government created in mortgage lending via the Community Reinvestment Act.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday November 09 2017, @04:44PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 09 2017, @04:44PM (#594690) Journal

    The Big Short is government propaganda that places all the blame of the subprime mortgage crisis on Wall Street and completely glosses over the perverse incentives the US government created in mortgage lending via the Community Reinvestment Act.

    You mean like the two Miami real estate dealers who sold mortgages to some of the very people that the Community Reinvestment Act targeted (here, immigrants and people with terrible or non-existent credit) and bragged about the shit borrowers they were able to cram into mortgage securities without affecting the bond rating? The Act wasn't mentioned by name, but it wasn't glossed over. Sure, the Act made things worse, but the real estate crisis would have happened anyway.

    As to being government "propaganda", we have the amoral SEC agent who only shows up in the movie because they're job/husband hunting at the Las Vegas conference (with zero knowledge or care about the real estate market when questioned about it), repeated sarcastic mentions of former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan (culminating in a scene where Alan Greenspan is about to speak while the audience is heading to the exits to trade on Bear Stearns [wikipedia.org] which stock has just collapsed), and mention of the TARP bailout at the end of the film. That indeed shows government in a fine light!

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 09 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday November 09 2017, @06:57PM (#594764) Journal

      You mean like the two Miami real estate dealers who sold mortgages to some of the very people that the Community Reinvestment Act targeted (here, immigrants and people with terrible or non-existent credit) and bragged about the shit borrowers they were able to cram into mortgage securities without affecting the bond rating?

      Yeah, the perverse incentive is the bond ratings agencies being paid by the same people who sell the bonds.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:23PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 09 2017, @09:23PM (#594843) Journal

        a perverse incentive

        FTFY. I wouldn't speak of it as unique. There was quite the rat's nest of perverse incentives at play in this crisis.