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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: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 09 2017, @10:44PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 09 2017, @10:44PM (#594895)

    If you're out in the middle of nowhere without a functioning government that even knows you're there, I'm fairly certain you don't have to worry about paying for health insurance and medical copays. Because you won't be getting a doctor anywhere near you anytime soon.

    As for the ACA, the only thing worse than the ACA in recent years was what was going on before the ACA: The consistent pattern was that you'd pay in premiums when you were healthy with faith that this would turn into payments from the insurance company when you got sick, then the moment you got sick the insurance company would find excuses to not pay and cancel your policy as quickly as possible. And then you'd be stuck without insurance at all, because no insurer would ever allow you to get a policy without first proving you were healthy. Now there are at least some cases where illness doesn't immediately mean you're financially ruined.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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