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Someone 'Accidentally' Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds (vice.com)
On Tuesday, a single user "permanently" locked down dozens of digital wallets containing nearly $300 million dollars worth of ether, the unit of exchange on the Ethereum platform, allegedly by accident. From a report: Now, some in the Ethereum community are considering the possibility of a risky network split, known as a "hard fork," to fix it. The affected wallets -- known as "multisignature" wallets because they require multiple people to sign off before funds are moved, making them popular with companies -- were all created with Parity, a popular program for digital wallets. Parity multisignature wallets experienced a bug in July that allowed a hacker to steal $32 million in funds before the Ethereum community scrambled to band together to hack back and secure the rest of the vulnerable ether.
1) It is extremely volatile
2) Few businesses accept cryptocurrencies
3) They are easy to steal
4) They are not backed by real world goods, so the value can easily go to zero
5) There is no anonymity because all transactions are public
Anyone who cares about their privacy and security should avoid cryptocurrencies like the plague.
apparently your "assets" are as secure as a cloud with all the subscribers having full admin rights.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
ok i got me mah $250k in cash come at me
Nothing to see here. Move along.
1. don't let people write code if they don't know what the hell they're doing
2. Don't let one company run a cryptocurrency. In fact that's the entire point of cryptocurrencies.
3. why does slashdot still require me to type br / to make a new line?
Nope. Sorry, mate. It ain't worth shit.
Worth comes from somebody (a person) actually doing work to make it. Or its scarcity, the case of natural resources.
Not from Alice believing that Bob will pay $x for it because Bob believes that Alice will pay $(x+y) for it.
That is called insanity. Get a therapy.
Where do I "invest" all my monies in bitcoin? Spashdot will tell me right??
We live in awe inspiring times!!!
One man's bug is another man's feature. Pacta sunt servanda.
To refund your account... Or wait....
So far the early adopters seem to be trying to make a fast buck on the ever increasing value of the system - which grows because new people enter it. Is this real growth or a ponzi scheme?
Wow - imagine if the banks could have an Undo button. Reset. Start over.
National Debt could be erased, all those bad loans. Bankruptcy? What Bankruptcy?!
I can't imagine losing $32 million in some money "system" --- could you imagine placing your paycheck into this "bank" to pay for all your stuff, and then the landlord says "last month's check never came through" only to find everything gone! $32, $320, $3200... or $32 million. Who cares how much evaporated - it's gone. Speculative investments at their best.
It's an experiment that people are willing to invest $100's millions into? Feels more ponzi to me.
I get the point of why people find cryptocurrencies necessary.
And, it's not like banks or investment portfolios haven't (effectively) done the same sort of thing to a comparable order of magnitude of actual dollars.
But while bitcoin et al *seemingly* climb in value, I personally don't see the market recognizing/factoriing in this sort of vulnerability to equally-fiat crypto currencies.
-Styopa
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
So now we had a wipeout from a bug fix for the last wipeout. This will, of course, be the last one... until the next one. Recovery from the prior debacle involved white-hat hackers taking it upon themselves to steal currency from vulnerable wallets (and eventually returning it) before black-hat hackers could. And this time around, apparently the only fix is basically to start an entirely new ecosystem and hope like hell everyone migrates.
Contrast this miserable chaos to the sweet lilting tones from the founders:
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference .
Caveat emptor indeed.
Why do people keep putting money into ethereum?? How many times must this happen before "investors" are declared legally insane?
Will Joe SixPack suddenly start buying goods and services through blockchain because the transactions are verified through a decentralized computer network? The only viable uses for blockchain seem to be black markets and avoiding money transfer fees. Everything else is covered by existing "good enough" centralized systems. Can someone please explain to me in very simple terms how blockchain is going to "change the world"?
I'm trying to figure out how this was possible. I'll post more when I learn a bit more. Till then this will make you smile (devops199 chat) https://lh3.googleusercontent....
Smart contracts are actually a programming language. What is put into the block chain is actually code. For a transaction to be valid you run the program and check the output. Bitcoin is very restrictive about what programs are allowed to run. Etherium is less restrictive. The code for Etherium should have said to spend this coin a transaction requires some number of signatures from this list. It appears that devops199 was able to change that list to a list of only one signer. He then killed that signer. The transactions to do both those things are now buried in the block chain. To take them out a fork has to be made before devops199's transactions.
Still trying to figure out if the bug was in the smart contract or in the "mining" code that allowed devops199's transactions into the block chain.
These arrogant jerks refuse to pay for proper software testing. This will continue to happen until the community demands it.
https://paritytech.io/bug-bounty.html
$100 per bug is not sufficient to secure millions of dollars...
To leech off those who do actual work, by devaluing their earnings and hence work.
By funneling off money between paying those who do actual work for their money, and selling the goods back to them.
You're deliberately using the straw man of a "deflationary system".
When in reality, the point is that one unit of money should be worth precisely and exactly one unit of work. Full stop.
Because you're implying that "growth" is not only "good" but "necessary".
When in actual unamerican reality, in this universe, a surviving process, by its very definition, is a perfectly balanced one. Aka what you call "stagnation".
EVERYTHING that isn't, dies. This is fundamental to the laws of physics.
And the things we have on this planet, that do this, are called either pathogens or explosions.
Humanity is both, by the way. An explosive planetary pathogen.
It is literally physically impossible to keep it up, and keep existing as a species. Especially at 7% annually, aka nearly +100% a decade, nearly +300% in 20 years, and +2846% (!!) in 50 years. (That means your ~$3000 would be worth $1, and/or, there would be >209 *billion* people on this planet. Good luck not starving or dying of thirst.)
Apparently, I don't even give enough of a shit about this subject to stick around long enough to figure what 'locked away' actually means.
ET{H|C} is a fucking joke, apparently. only an idiot would put any money in it now., maybe 200 for immediate spending on a bag of hexen or some shit
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If you don't know, why pretend that you do?
There is no such thing as a 99 year lease in China.
If you can't even get that basic fact right, you lose all credibility for your other unsubstantiated claims.