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$300m in Cryptocurrency Accidentally Lost Forever Due to Bug

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.

FatPhil writes:

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: 4, Insightful) by ilsa on Thursday November 09 2017, @11:26PM (1 child)

    by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 09 2017, @11:26PM (#594915)

    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?

    I can't believe not just the idiocy but the audacity of the person that wrote that drivel.

    That's cold comfort to all the people that just collectively lost THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS with no way of recovering it short of getting 51% of all etherium users to agree to effectively do a 'git revert'. This sort of situation should not have been able to happen. It's inexcusable, and it's damn well frightening.

    I don't know what the build process is behind Etherium, but clearly someone hasn't figured out dealing with finance requires more rigor than a social media stream filled with cat videos. And I doubt this will be the last catastrophe to happen either as long as people think that it's acceptable to throw away responsible development practices for an hacker/newer-is-better/anything-older-than-6-months-is-obsolete-mentality.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by FatPhil on Friday November 10 2017, @09:37AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday November 10 2017, @09:37AM (#595076) Homepage
    Do you understand what will eventually happen if the US debt ceiling isn't extended? $300M is *nothing* compared to that. Employ the wrong guy at the Fed, and tada - the chaos begins.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves