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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?
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 10 2017, @03:55PM
I would argue that ether is not a fiat currency. The reason is, as far as I understand, ether is the only way to make ethereum Turing machine run. To run this computer one needs electricity and ether (and one can be conveniently converted to another so just ether). From this point of view ether is just your old plain boring commodity as any real money is supposed to be. Money, by definition, is a commodity used for exchange. Ether is (real, classical, nonfiat, same as gold) money, dollar or even bitcoin is not.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.