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Parity's $280m Ethereum Wallet Freeze Was No Accident Claims Startup

posted by takyon on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the vanishing-act dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

A crypto-currency collector who was locked out of his $1m Ethereum multi-signature wallet this week by a catastrophic bug in Parity's software has claimed the blunder was not an accident – it was "deliberate and fraudulent."

On Tuesday, Parity confessed all of its multi-signature Ethereum wallets – which each require multiple people to sign-off transactions – created since July 20 were "accidentally" frozen, quite possibly permanently locking folks out of their cyber-cash collections. The digital money stores contained an estimated $280m of Ethereum; 1 ETH coin is worth about $304 right now. The wallet developer blamed a single user who, apparently, inadvertently triggered a software flaw that brought the shutters down on roughly 70 crypto-purses worldwide.

[...] Cappasity has alleged the wallet freeze was no accident: someone deliberately triggered the mass lock down, we're told, and there's evidence to prove it. By studying devops199's attempts to extract and change ownership of ARToken's and Polkadot's smart contracts, it appears the user was maliciously poking around, eventually triggering the catastrophic bug in Parity's software. "Our internal investigation has demonstrated that the actions on the part of devops199 were deliberate," said Cappasity's founder Kosta Popov in a statement this week.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/10/parity_280m_ethereum_wallet_lockdown_hack/

Ethereum.

Previously: $300m in Cryptocurrency Accidentally Lost Forever Due to Bug

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ese002 on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:18AM (1 child)

    by ese002 (5306) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:18AM (#597169)

    Getting mad at hackers is the same bullshit as getting mad at tax avoiding (evading? whatever the legal one is.) companies. Stop, think, change the tax code they hacked instead of demanding they follow the spirit of the tax code rather than the letter.

    The people getting mad at tax avoiding companies don't actually have the power to change the tax code. The best they can do is lobby Congress to close the loopholes. Unfortunately, tax avoiding companies are already lobbying Congress to create loopholes for them and they are better at the game than you are.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:50AM (#597172)

    Having a system which requires voting for politicians swayed by lobbying you disagree with if one wishes to have a worthwhile vote isn't. We ought to use a system which is hard* to tactically vote in (IIRC Australia has something NP-hard) and push the number of candidates upwards (which I would assume is a natural consequence of practically having to vote honestly).

    *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem