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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) by coolgopher on Friday November 10 2017, @01:55AM (1 child)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Friday November 10 2017, @01:55AM (#594983)

    Are you sure about that? My reading is that it was a flaw in a smart contract, not in the Ethereum platform which executed said contract. Anyone who can pay the gas cost can deploy/run a smart contract onto Ethereum. Any bugs in it are then locked in forever more, unless you explicitly provide ways to supersede the smart contract with a newer version (which pretty much defeats the purpose of using an immutable platform in the first place).

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 10 2017, @02:04PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 10 2017, @02:04PM (#595120)

    I don't know, seems like it could be a handy ability in some special situations if you could also restrict the ability to change it - say if you need all, or a majority, or whatever of the stakeholders to approve any changes.